I really liked what I saw on Christopher D. Sessums blog, where he examines the idea of Educational Consultants as Bumble Bees, in that “they go around from flower to flower picking up tiny bits of pollen and deposit them in each flower they visit.”

The elearnspace blog has a summary of an Educause article entitled The Myth about Online Course Development.

In an effort to increase the amount of ideas and information I post to this space, I’ve recently begun re-arranging and re-designing it. Here is a brief list of what I’ve started to do, and what still needs doing.

• Added a “Feeds” section, with various methods for syndication of content from here and elsewhere.
• Edited the “About” page to reflect more strongly on the content and the organization of the site, rather than just a blurb about me.
• Re-arranged the home page, and added a new category. Hopefully this will let the most important and most updated material be displayed up front.
• Begun a visual redesign, a saga that shall continue…

That’s the most of it. Here’s a brief To-Do list:

• move some of the older, static content onto my root /~jhenry/ page, such as often used uvm resources, a link to my calendar, the uvm blogroll, etc.
• Continue the visual design saga … I’d like to make the three sections on the home page be more well defined, visually. The banner also needs a little help.
• Update the about page to have a list of plugins and tools used, such as wordpress 2.0, the k2 theme, etc.
• Define a regular posting schedule, to keep the drafts from outnumbering the material on the home page

During this process, the realization set in that such a redesign will never cease, and I’m going to end up continuously reshuffling and tweaking, with the occasional rebuild. I think this is a Good Thing, as it forces me to think about how I present, store, and choose the information that I put here.

From MaisonBisson, a “view of how advancing internet use is affecting higher education”. Some great anecdotal depictions of today’s “generation” of students.

From the folks at the TLT group comes an introduction to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. They present “… a definition, and several ways in which a faculty member’s inquiry into his or her own course can also ultimately benefit the larger faculty community.”

Saw this on Waxy a while ago (I’m just now going through some of my flagged feeds in NNW). Fred Stutzman at UNC has an article on Facebook usage among UNC-Chapel Hill students. He also has a great post on how institutions should approach facebook, as well as a discussion of why the service is so popular, something he refers to as Situational Relevance. Fascinating stuff.

About a month ago, Tim Lauer came across a couple of interesting podcasts, including one on chemistry experiments and another describing digital photography tips. I just noticed that he also recently makes note of podcasts now available from the New York Times and The Onion.

Over at MaisonBisson, there is a great overview of a customer service “Manifesto”. While focused on Libraries and their online users, many if not all of these are applicable to other organizations (i.e. higher education).

Holly just sent me this article on how blogging evolved at IBM. It has some great points, which I think are worth considering as we move forward inside of UVM’s nascent blogosphere.

Some of the features listed on the iTunes U page are looking awfully close to those provided by some more traditional content management systems.