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