If the fun from yesterday with the graphic communications majors at Clemson University wasn’t enough, today, I get to discuss cognitive load theory and web based instruction with graduate students and faculty in the Psychology department here at the university. I’m a little nervous about this talk, because I haven’t presented this before. This is a line of significant research [...]

Today, I get the great pleasure to present to my alma mater at Clemson University. I have been asked by my good friend Nancy Leininger to present to her graphic communications class about HTML, CSS, content management, and how these apply to printing technologies. We’ll be using Adobe Connect today, so I’m excited to see how it works as well. I’m hoping to get Connect for our campus and our Masters degree online. Below are the slides for this presentations, housed at Slideshare.

Very often, when I am discussing cognitivism, information processing theory, and automaticity, I mention a story I saw dramatized in Grey’s Anatomy and then reported on ABC’s 20/20. In the story, a toddler has a hemispherectomy—a literal removal of half of the brain. This story is from about 4 or 5 years ago. This amazing little girl demonstrates the power of the human brain and cognition in young children to find new paths to accomplish the tasks we need to live. Other older stories also exist, such as with Jessica.

On March 9, Memphis Mayor A C Wharton announced via Twitter that Memphis was filing an application for Google Fiber for Communities. This initial tweet was followed with a post on the mayor’s blog From the Mayor’s Desk. In his blog post, Wharton asks you to “Imagine a promising inner-city 7th-grader collaborating with classmates around the world while watching a live university lecture.” Wharton is asking his readers to imagine e-learning in our K-12 classrooms. This call to imagine e-learning in Memphis classrooms comes less than a week after the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology released a draft of their National Educational Technology Plan 2010 titled “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology“. This plan calls for readers to embrace the use of e-learning as the catalyst that will propel our schools through the 21st century. With this political focus being put on e-learning, let’s explore how this will look in the K-12 classroom. First we will define e-learning, next we will look at a few of its benefits, then we will note a few barriers to its implementation.

As I reminisce on my undergraduate Education Psychology course and graduate courses that promoted the need for incorporating constructivist practices in the classroom to “prove” you are a student-centered educator, I often contemplated the effectiveness of the constructivist teacher in the classroom. Before revealing my perspective, let’s identify some key points related to constructivism.

Today, I’m presenting a short slide deck on a panel with other higher ed faculty about assessment in online courses.  I’m supposed to offer an overview and suggest ways to create assessments for online courses.  Below are the slides from Slideshare.net.  Of course, if you have questions, or if you’d like to see any of my course materials, just let [...]

I am now in my third year as a Middle School teacher. Definitely still a novice with much to learn from my veteran teacher peers. However, some of the best lessons I have learned in my short career as a teacher have not come from other veteran teachers, but rather from my students. Perhaps two of the most important lessons I have learned are the immensity of student differences and the importance of flexibility.

Since I’ve been uploading quite a few presentations this semester from my Developing Interactive Learning Environments and project management course, I’ve also decided to upload a few others to Slideshare.net that I’ve given and created recently. This is a little slow going, because I am attempting to be critical and meticulous to copyrights, as well as respectful of ideas and images, giving credit where appropriate. I’m also systematically adding my Creative Commons licensing to each of the slide decks.

Today, I get to spend the day at Union University with Dr. Anna Clifford’s classes. Anna is always so generous and invites me to come visit with her students and share a little of my knowledge with them. For the past few times, we’ve been concentrating on Google Docs. But I think I’m going to throw in a little Wordle this time, too.

I just wanted to offer a quick, “Hello” to those of you who are in Dr. Clifford’s courses at Union University.  I know you guys will be dropping by, and I will be dropping  by to see you all tomorrow.  I hope you find the posts interesting and insightful.  Be sure to check out my bookmarks at the top of [...]