I came to the ETEC 565 wiki late in game so I didn’t get to experience its metamorphosis. I have had many other wiki experiences and I find them very useful for organizing events (e.g. who is going to bring the potato salad?) My experience using them for collaborative work is that it is a decent brainstorming platform, or an easily editted info / Q&A  repository  but it is not so great at creating final cohesive documents.  What works for wikipedia does not always work in an institution where the contributors all need to play in the same sandbox. It often boils down to a problem of too many cooks and johnny-come-lately editors who make sweeping changes at the 11th hour. There are ways of making it work using colored font etc. within the wiki space but I prefer a web based Google docs or Sharepoint approaches for document collaboration.

Some students think the Periodic Table is dull stuff…it even has Boron as an element. There are ways Boris can leverage his Moodle site with additional content and quizzes with guiding questions to provide needed review. He should also check out MERLOT  to see if there are some learning objects he can incorporate into his Moodle site. Why recreate Kreb’s cycle or the wheel? If he was feeling adventurous he could devise create interactive video in Captivate or Camtasia that could help focus on the gaps in knowledge in an engaging way.

I am trying to bling up my Vista site with some customized images. I managed to create a gradient image in Photoshop of the UBC dental clinic chair layout to use as a background image. It actually loaded and the page is still readable. The gradient to me symbolizes the transition from preclinical simulation to clinical patient care so it makes for a nice metaphor. Once I got going in Photoshop I thought I would try and make some custom logos based on the chair design. The chairs are numbered 1 through 8 and my Introductory course is 8 weeks long so I thought each week’s module could be incorporate a colour coded chair logo. Sweet idea. Well after a few hours of playing around I flattened the images and  imported to Vista.  When I swapped the icon over I found out that instead of saving a nice rondelle I had the whole darn canvas…ugly. Back to the virtual drawing board….

Technoinfuriated after spending many hours entering references into RefWorks in the hopes of test driving Write n Cite only to hit a wall when trying to link to RefWorks from WnC. Finally figured out how to use the EZ proxy and voila …instant APA formatting after only twice as much time as it would have taken to do it manually in Word. Oh well, I am all ready for next time!

I am a full time Clinical Associate Professor at UBC Faculty of Dentistry. This is my 8th MET course and I am looking forward to the applied use of learning technologies and working with a new cohort of fellow MET heads.

The other MET courses I have taken have provided me a solid grounding in the theory and affordances of educational technology while tempering my techno-utopic tendencies.  Consequently, my flight path involves immersing myself more in the ‘hands on-how to’ and less with the ‘in the head-why do’ aspects of learning technology.

This course should help prepare me for many tech approaches I want to incorporate in my teaching this fall. I plan on incorporating a Vista course in my Introduction to Integrated Clinical Care to improved preparation with pretests to supplement the in class clicker questions. The e-portfolio development fits incredibly well with our research project and as we are leaning towards WordPress so gaining a more sophisticated exposure to the back end will be extremely valuable. I am also looking forward to using html coding more as well. For faculty development, I plan to set up a digital study club for the ~100 part-time instructors who teach in our clinic. I plan on using Ning for this to add some social networking options.

Suffering through the learning curve and inevitable glitches will give me a better understanding of the student experience and make me a better troubleshooter for them as they struggle with the IT. I will need to develop a much better design framework for organizing the layout of my CMS. I am concerned about cognitive load in my teaching and I am interested in incorporating the work of Richard Mayer to help optimize my application of learning technology. I look forward to growing my skills thoughout ETEC 565A…and the luxury of chatting over coffee with John at Boulevard!

So far so good in setting up the ETEC 565A blog.  Now on to creating several pages…That was easy!