Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Food for thought...and chocolate

Okay, I'm succumbing to pressure and beginning to blog...

A busy day today, beginning with an 8:00am Elluminate session about Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs)...

Feedback from the group - not everyone has headsets with mics (not necessary to participate in Elluminate, but nice), and there's a need for facilitator training for potential FLC facilitators.



A 9:00 meeting to discuss trends in higher education, the changing needs of students and how me will meet those needs...

How are we preparing our faculty for teaching an increasingly diverse student population, incorporating ever-changing instructional and social networking technology, and when (if ever) do faculty have time to reflect upon and assess their own instructional effectiveness in order to continual excel as facilitator's of learning?



The 9:00 led into an 11:00 meeting ...immediately followed by a noon walk-and-talk with a colleague on the way to the coffee kiosk and back, which carried over into a hallway discussion about developmental education...

Sent some information to a few colleagues about Rebecca Cory and Sheryl Burgstahler's book, Universal Design in Higher Education.



A few minutes to eat lunch at my desk before the 2:00 meeting (again in Elluminate) including a demo of the Angel Learning Object Repository (LOR)...

Angel's LOR seems so do-it-yourself compared to Merlot's already richly (some might say overly) populated LOR, but it may be simpler for the faculty who are already setting up courses in Angel to use the Angel LOR. Our ad-hoc committee will continue looking at LORs - with demos of Connexions and Merlot in September - before making recommendations to the rest of our statewide assessment, teaching and learning community.

3:00 and I'm going in search of chocolate....

Ah, sweet success! A kind colleague has set a box of nice chocolate-covered toffees out to share with everyone in the office. Happy day.


Sugared up now and ready to listen to the FLC recording to be sure I didn't say anything too off-the-wall before I post the recording to our Assessment, Teaching and Learning web pages.



Taking some reading home tonight to prepare for tomorrow...

Redefining College Readiness
http://epiconline.org/files/pdf/RedefiningCR_Vol3.pdf

Aligned Expectations? A Closer Look at College Admissions and Placement Tests
http://www.achieve.org/files/Admissions_and_Placement_FINAL2.pdf