hi everybody, both Beth McCoy and Gary Bates came to talk to us about
software/hardware support for online instructors developing content for
their courses - Beth is in the process right now of drawing up a plan
and a budget for that so those of you who were not at the meeting,
please get in touch with her about any important needs that you have to
see if they could be addressed in a kind of self-service staffed lab
setting that the College MAY be able to set up. 

this is really exciting stuff: some of the items discussed were a
highspeed scanner with OCR software for digitizing printed matter, a
slide sheet adapter for the scanner, a "narration station" for
converting/creating audio and for adding audio to Powerpoint
presentations, a video editing station that would help us to compile
existing video clips and create DVDs, and access to a range of
Macromedia software (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks) for creating digital
content (Beth, if I misstated any of that, let me know - and I probably
left some things out...).

I did a brief presentation on the grading system that I have been using
with a lot of success for my online courses. all the information about
my grading system is available online if you are curious:
http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/ , and I am sure grading is
something that we will come back to again in this group. grading is of
enormous importance to students, and it is possible to build grading
systems that are really optimized for the online delivery environment.

we also looked briefly at the EZBoard discussion board, and at some
future point I would suggest we devote a session to discussion boards -
the technology AND the pedagogy. we should probably wait on that until
we have a demo version of the new Blackboard 6 platform. I saw a demo
last year and my impression was that the Discussion Board was identical
from 5.5 to 6, but I could be wrong (I hope I'm wrong!).

for next week, I would like to propose: STUDENT WEB PUBLISHING AND
BLOGGING. is that a topic that people would be interested in? student
web publishing is a more high-end solution requiring a lot of instructor
support at the beginning of the semester... blogging is a great low-end
alternative that requires very little technical support. I'll be glad to
do a demonstration of both of these next week - I've used student web
publishing extensively for years now, and I'm now crazy about blogging
(as most of you have figured out by now!)

thanks again to Gary and Beth for coming by to talk with us!!! and have
a nice weekend everybody,

Laura