North Pole Cats

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Website:
http://tclabserv.tusculum.edu/userfile/theresaswann/web/northpolecats.html

This website requires a password. If you are with the Educause Leadership Institute, please email Theresa Swann for login information.
tswann@tusculum.edu

Executive Summary:

The F.L.I.R.T project (Foreign Language Instructional Resource Toolkit) was conceived as a model project for helping to develop a set of faculty resources for a model blended learning course in Swahili that is taught by two institutions, ABE U. and Xena U. The goal is to then take the model and implement it across other foreign language blended learning environments

Goals of Project
design and develop a faculty development program to help faculty redesign their foreign language courses for the blended format
create a model with the Swahili course
bring more faculty through the faculty development program to develop their own blended courses
Instructional Design and Technology
Abe University will provide the lead instructional design support for faculty and course development and technical resources for digital media and multimedia resources. Xena U will also provide instructional design support.
Project Management

This project is being headed by the project director for the FIPSE grant. She has assembled a team including instructional designers from each instituion, a faculty expert and the department chair of foreign languages at Abe U.

Financial Matters
The project has been awarded a FIPSE grant. Abe U and Xena U need to accept this grant and commit to support for the implementation.

Assessment and Evaluation
FIPSE requires stringent assessment and evaluation. Their guidelines and recommendations will be used throughout the development and implementation of this project.

Faculty Issues
pedagogical implications
ownership of product
Political Issues
faculty participation
cultural differences between institutions
Institutional Perspectives
Xena U has potential opportunity to build alliance with Abe U and promote themselves favorably through the alliance
Abe U will gain faculty expertise in Swahili to support its new international programs

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

We are on 2nd for our presentation.

Have just spent 20 minutes trying to get on dial up. Will now work on exec summary and hopefully will be able to post sometime before 11pm. Worst case - I will come to Penn Stater at 7:15 am and post from there before our 7:30am meeting.

Monday, July 11, 2005

Ok North Pole Cats, our wiki is here:

http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/north_pole_cats/north_pole_cats.cfm

Start firing away! - Jo

Our group "Making the Case" project: #12 Design and develop a plan to design and implement a set of faculty development resources for delivering blended courses between two institutions. Provide an outline of how the plan can be implemented.

Potential outline:

1. Write a very specific description of the intended outcomes.
2. Define faculty development resources.
3. Define blended courses.
4. Describe the two institutions.
5. Decide what kinds of faculty development resources we want to create.
6. Intended audience


Reasons to go blended - Jo and Linda will do

Abe - big state land grant University - goal is outreach, service mission, Center for Blah Blah

Xena - small lib arts, particular expertise in some subject or domain, focused on student experience

"Foreign Language Instructional Resource Toolkit" is our title (FLIRT)


I'm learning this new blog tool - pretty cool and intuitve.

I just added my card (which I captured with my handy dany Olympus C765) I have no time at work to learn the tools I buy for faculty... including this frustrating tablet PC which keeps jumping the text.

Theresa

Jo's Furl site:

http://www.furl.net/members/jomeyertons

Try CiteULike. It actually made me cry with happiness at one point.

Perhaps other Blog fanatics can appreciate this: I am doubly blogging this conference! Here's my other blog:

http://blog.willamette.edu/people/jmeyerto/journal/

- Jo

Jim's blog (where he puts up notes on stuff he's working on) is at:

http://blogs.uiuc-atlas.net/jwitte/

First for Me

This is my first attempt at both creating a blog and posting to a blog. Not too bad - but will need to go through this again on my own at my own pace. Thanks for the patience.....

We chose the name North Pole Cats because we are all cat owners and we all have Northern tendencies on the medicine wheel. We are all hard charging competitive winners (or is that whiners?)!

What we hope to get out of the conference is lots of new ideas for ways to promote and use educational technology effectively. All of us come from very different institutions, but we have much in common.