Monday, July 17, 2006

Away, but mostly busy...

It has been a while since I posted, hasn't it?

Sorry about that, folks. I have been on vacation, but only the last two weeks, so that's not really an excuse. (This isn't a personal blog so I won't detail my vacation here.*)

What kept me away from blogging? Planning and thinking about online tutorials and tools, mostly. I'm currently involved in Second Life Library 2.0, which I blogged briefly about in May, but I'm also collaborating with a colleague on a library tutorial. The idea will be to have something within our WebCT courseware for students in online classes (though we'll also have it, or most of it, available on the open web as well). Many online students don't realize that they have library privileges or access, so a permanent page or set of pages within WebCT will give them at least a hint of what's available. I got inspired by John Shank and Steven Bell's article, A_FLIP to Courseware: A Strategic Alliance for Improving Student Learning Outcomes (free registration required--it's worth it) and Meredith Farkas's post on working in WebCT at her institution.

Why did this keep me away from blogging? I'm not sure, but I think that this type of planning uses the same parts of my brain that I use to blog: the reflective parts that think "What are the implications?", and the planning parts, "How can we make this work?" I just found that all my energy of this sort was going towards these projects, and I just wasn't finding, or looking for, topics for the blog. (I did see this post and marked it for later blogging: Cool Tools: Digital Library Cards.) I'd get to the end of a week and think, "Oh yeh, I meant to blog, didn't I?"

There is, of course, the time factor, too. I was trying to finish up several projects before going on vacation, and get ready for teaching some staff classes and in our campus' summer faculty workshop, SummerTech. (My presentation calendar is on my faculty website.)

I will do a "real" post this week, I promise.

Oh, and as I promised previously, here's a reminder: have you downloaded your free ebooks this month?


*Ok, ok. I've had lots of people ask me what I did on vacation. Here's the short version: 2 Rennaisance Faires, an anime/webcomics convention, a 70th birthday party, finding out my cat needs oral surgery, dealing with real bookworms (Ugh!), and Pirates of the Caribbean. And not checking my email compulsively, though I did check about twice a week. Thank goodness SCSU just installed a new spam filter on the campus servers!

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