Jason Rhode, Ph.D.

I’m currently preparing to teach my first course with the Illinois Online Network’s “Making the Virtual Classroom a Reality” (MVCR) series entitled, “Web Design Principles for Online Educators” that begins June 2nd. The MVCR series of online faculty development courses is designed to help faculty members acquire skills and knowledge needed to teach online.

Registration closes for this course May 30th, but in the meantime, details are available for anyone interested in registering for the course or just find out more about this course.

I recently received an email invitation to Nfomedia, a new free social networking utility designed especially for faculty and their courses. I’ve setup a free account and poked around a bit, but since NIU isn’t yet listed as one of the home institutions, I’ve not dabbled any further. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time until many more institutions are listed and I look forward to eventually giving this a try.This certainly does look intriguing…if you have already tried this new tool, please post a comment with your experience.

I’m at Faculty Summer Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign preparing for several sessions I will be leading over the next few days.  As I posted earlier, I’m going to attempt to stream 4 sessions I’m leading live online via Ustream as well as record the audio to post to my podcast. This will be an interesting experiment and I look forward to seeing how the quality of the live streams and recordings turn out.

Here are the days/times for these upcoming sessions for anyone who might be interested in taking a peek at any of the sessions online:

• Getting Started Creating Web Pages with Google Page Creator: Tue., May 13, 2008, 8:30am-9:45am (CDT)
• Introduction to Social Bookmarking: Tue., May 13, 2008, 1:30pm-2:45pm (CDT)
• Media Mashups Using Kaltura: Wed., May 14, 2008, 8:30am-9:45am (CDT)
• Getting Started Creating Web Pages with Google Page Creator: Wed., May 14, 2008, 10:15am-11:30am (CDT)

No guarantees,  but if all goes well, I’ll be streaming these sessions at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/fsi08

I’m experimenting with quite a few new social networking technologies during this week at FSI but will refrain from posting much more about them here.  If interested in keeping posted on these adventures, you can follow me on Twitter.

As the fly home from the Sloan-C International Symposium, I’m preparing to attend the 2008 Faculty Summer Institute on Teaching with Technology at UIUC.  Although I’m not leading a Learning Team this year, I look forward to giving the following presentations:

• Introduction to Social Bookmarking
• Mastering Microblogging
• Getting Started Creating Web Pages with Google Page Creator
• Media Mashups

I’m giving a presentation at the 2008 Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning on the topic of socially constructed self-paced learning environments. In particular, I discuss the implementation of CMUOnet, an instance of the Elgg open source social application engine, for fostering organic, informal interaction among participants in an online self-paced professional development certificate program.The slides for the presentation are available here along with the links I reference.

If I am successful in recording the audio for my presentation, I’ll eventually add there here as well as on my edtech podcast.

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