With a Q

So I recently finished up my most recent course "Issues & Developments in Educational Psychology: Learning and Classroom Management" and it kicked my ass. I was sort of waiting for this opportunity though as I had originally intended on going to get an M.Ed. in order to get more into the "educational" aspect of my career in eLearning. Previous courses had focused on introductions to using technology in curriculum, this was my first real immersion in theories of learning above what I had casually read in the past. My final project was a wiki page on the University of Illinois' web space: WikEd. More specifically it is a shortish theoretical analysis of the ed-psych and practical impacts of social networking technologies on teaching and learning. It is here if you are interested. Much props to George Seimens, Stephen Downes, and many other resources who had thoughtfully shared their thoughts and theories online for all of us newbies from which to remix and develop our own learning connections. These helped shape my thoughts on it...comments and criticisms welcome.

How sad and how web 2.0y of me to do this, but I thought it would be a nice experiment. Attending the Educause conference in Seattle right now and sitting in on a session about faculty training in learning management systems...most likely annoying the person sitting next to me with my tictacky typing. How many people are reading over my shoulder right now?

I am working on a class project that involves setting up a distributed networking project. We were given broad latitude in the topic of our project, and I have had a particularly recent, long, and painful RFP process in selecting a new LMS platform and hosting vendor for my "work" school. Everywhere I turned it was difficult to get a straight story between flourishing vendor demos and bits and pieces of hear-say at conferences.

We are talking about social networking and blogs/other environments that are prominent on the internet right now. At my own employ, I have long been pushing for the use of blogs in education. Teachers need to collaborate, but there's a wall that's encountered when we think about breaking it out to kids.

Woo-hoo! I got in to graduate school. I graduated college over ten years ago and I finally got off my butt to study something I am interested in. I am enrolled in the CTER Masters of Education program at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

There I will be studying Education and Technology and all that good stuff. I already work in developing online learning, so signing up for this program (which is completely online, by the way, so I stay in LA) was a no-brainer. I am still getting my orientation stuff in the mail, but from what I can tell it looks fun and also might shape up to be a huge chunk of my time. Oh well, bring it, right?

Go Fighting Illini!