Cool kinetic sculptures

I love this sort of thing. Theo Jansen, a Dutch sculpture, has created beach creatures out of electrical tubing and lemonade bottles. Check out this demonstration -- love the creativity...and the possibilities!

AECT presentations

I had the pleasure of attending the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) annual conference in Anaheim, CA, last week. I also had the pleasure of sharing two presentations. For any interested folks, here are links to the two presentations (as pdf files) and the corresponding handouts (as MS Word files):

Strategies for Creating Social Context in an Online Calculus-Based Physics Course
-- Presentation
-- Handout

No-Nonsense Discussion Guidelines for Enhancing Social Presence in Online Courses
-- Presentation
-- Handout
Note: For the digital story used in the presentation, please see a previous post in this blog -- Storytelling for presence, posted on May 17, 2007.

Tools for using film clips in the classroom

I really like to use film clips to illustrate various points. It's easy to do these days if you have Internet available in the classroom with so many film, tv, and advertising clips available via YouTube. This fall, I ended up in a room without Internet access. Luckily, there are tools that help you download clips to your computer. The two tools I've been using are Video Downloader and KEEPVID.

Here are a few of the clips I use in my courses:


To talk about classroom discussion facilitation --




To talk about the lecture format --




To talk about the future use of technology to support teaching and learning --





To talk about adult learning theory --








To talk about student engagement --





To talk about classroom management --