F.R. “Fritz” Nordengren (beta)

Learning partners,

I hope by now you have subscribed to the Learning Partner Update (this email) by RSS feed; it keeps your inbox lighter and lets you review the content on your terms and schedule.

This month, I’ve added posts about RSS and some left over notes from the presentation on finding images for presentations and using Flickr™.

In the hopes of encouraging interest and engagement in both our 12:10 tools and the upcoming College of Health Sciences Research Day, I want to share a feature within Fickr™ that can turn a static image into a great working discussion tool . Flickr™ has built it tools that lets viewers draw a box around part of an image, and the type a comment. Keep in mind, as we shared in the presentation Flickr images can be public to the world, or controlled access to limited people.

So, build your poster for presentation, take a photo, post it to Flickr™ (or if you build it within a software tool like PhotoShop®, Illustrator®, or PowerPoint®, you can output it as an image to upload to Flickr, and colleagues can review and add comments. This Fickr™ image is one example of how this is done.

Nervous, want to try it before you use it? You can follow the link to a sample poster I upoaded from PowerPoint® (thanks Carla) by saving it as a .jpg file and then posting it to my Flickr™ account. You can see both the poster and comments. While you are there, make a note or comment (they are two different things).

This week’s drawing will be from all the folks who
put comments or notes on the image.

As a final note, I found this entry in a blog by C. Wess Daniels, a doctoral student at Fuller Theological Seminary. He discusses his work on a Education Technology committee for the school after it received a grant to put technology in the classrooms.

Even deeper is the issue of whether technology aids or harms learning. People will take their sides quickly on this issue. Should we allow computers in the classroom? Should we make all the professors learn powerpoint? Should all classrooms be wired for the web? One thing to keep in mind is that technology has ordering power. A majority of fundamental questions now revolve around whether technology is useful or not, it orders a majority question and decision we make as educators in the Western world.

One thing we discovered in this discussion about pedagogy and technology was: Technology often times controls the pedagogy, rather than the pedagogy controlling the way technology is used. (emphasis his)