gathering in light

This year I will be assisting Ryan Bolger (his new website) in his classes again, for the fall quarter we’re doing Church in Mission. Over the last three years I’ve TA’d a number of different classes with him and he’s always doing some really great things with technology and the classroom. Our typical approach has been to utilize blogs for class discussions, reading reviews and student comments, but in years past we’ve also used delicious.com for web research, and wiki’s for group projects. This year we’re returning to the wiki idea and I’m pretty excited about how it’s turning out (we borrowed lots of great ideas from Michael Wesch). We set up a Church in Mission wiki, using the free service from Wetpaint.com (for educational wiki’s they’ll even turn off the ads), and are structuring the whole course around the website. The class of 70+ students are separated into various groups around various ethnic traditions, each group then spends the whole quarter working on a group wiki around post-colonial issues and their particular traditions. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s been really nice to return to Woodbrooke Quaker Study Center this past week. I’ve been here now for about a week and a half and have just about that much time left in the UK before I make a return trip to Ohio for a little vacation with the family. The familiarity of returning here, having friends I looked forward to seeing, and having actual conferences, as well as studying to do has made it even more fun to be in Birmingham than last year, albeit also very busy. I’ve been spending my mornings getting up around 8am, eating breakfast, going to morning worship and then studying until about 4 or 5pm, doing dinner and then meeting up with friends. » Read the rest of this entry «

A couple weeks back I stumbled upon what seems like a small culture of people who have backed away from the “pure paperless ideology.” They are using small notebooks (Moleskines) to manage the tasks and projects in their lives. I’ve researched a bunch of various methods and learned a little about the “Getting Things Done (GTD)” method so that I could come up with a hack of my own and one that would work well for the life of a student doing research.

I am not uber organized so this is not natural for me. It took me some time reading and brainstorming how I could make system that would be work for my needs. But I am beginning to think that I work best with paper and pencil as my primary mode of keeping track of things.

» Read the rest of this entry «

A couple weeks back I had the great privilege to meet with some of the faculty and staff at the school where I attend, to discuss updating the classrooms on campus for better learning. The school was recently awarded a grant with this specific task in mind.

One question raised was “What are the best ways in which we can spend this grant money on technology for learning?” » Read the rest of this entry «

One of my favorite free, online tools is the social bookmarking website known as delicious (see my del.icio.us). Because I read a lot of blogs, and visit websites all the time I need a way to remember which ones were really good, which ones offer great critiques about such and such, and which sites I’d like to go back and study more closely later.

» Read the rest of this entry «