LMS Bingo

I realized yesterday that in my long and storied career in academia, I’ve taught with a pretty fair cross-section of learning management systems. And then, because I’m just that compulsive, I started to try to count them. So for your edification… or maybe for my own amusement… here’s that list. WebCT: I cut my teeth on this LMS, way back as a doctoral student at Syracuse University. I used it.. Read More

On advising Masters papers remotely

Part of my agreement with my Dean, that allows me to be remote for this academic year, is that I will document the effects of being remote on doing the job. So, now that the deadline has passed for our Masters students to submit their Masters papers (basically a thesis, only without a committee, just a single advisor), I wanted to write a bit about how it went to advise.. Read More

Thoughts on group projects

I’m teaching the Library Assessment course for SILS this semester. The major assignment for that course is one large semester-long project: the students work with a client library on an actual evaluation project, usually one that otherwise might not get done at all. Thus, hopefully this project is a win-win: the students get experience working on a real project, and the library gets some free labor. But the point is,.. Read More

If you want something done right, do it yourself

We’ve had two issues come up in the MOOC in last few days that I think are worth discussing here, as they’re both related to the issue of relying — or not — on other people’s resources. First: For some of the Unit 2 homework questions, I had pointed to students to a metadata record from Europeana, and asked questions like “What’s the name of the property in such-and-such property-value.. Read More