I'm glad to report lots of progress on the book. I must admit, I'm getting more out of this book than you might expect - I'm learning new things every day! I'm adding discussion questions and exercises and cases now. The cases are for teams or groups to complete. I have a ton of editing to do and major revisions on some of the chapters, but it is coming together! I'd like to include one cartoon with each chapter and that may get changed - I've spent 3 hours on the second cartoon and I'm still not satisfied. I can't seem to get the message into one pane - if I move to a 3 pane cartoon - it might work, but not too sure if it is what I want to do.

I've checked out some of my competitors of this book and we really don't cover the same topics and my organization and emphasis is different. This book is organized around the seven undergraduate principles for good teaching by Chickering and Gamson. There are seven chapters, one for each principle and one chapter called "Timesavers" where I'm dumping things don't really fit into the other seven chapters in this one. I may go back and move them around to keep to seven chapters. By far, the active learning chapter is huge - could be a book itself. Maybe, it should be split.

Still working with McGraw-Hill, but my main concern is to get the book done for my institution and then the revisions, etc. will be for McGraw-Hill.

Worked on the server yesterday and today - with a new router and DSL, the server became so slow.... Mapping the drive solved the problem. I didn't think of it, of course - Daniel did. After reading MS forums for hours, too....!

More later...

I've worked quite a bit today with Voice technology. Thiings like voice e-mail, voice discussion boards, virtual office hours. Attended one seminar on e-packs until I saw that I knew what she was talking about (besides the phone was ringing...) I set up a chat client on my http://accounting.smwc.edu and have already used it 3 times with a student. I sent a voice email to Eric, Mike, DJ and Kim. Kim LOVED it. She said it made her day. I must say I'm pretty impressed with it myself.

I just keep plugging along on this book. I need to get back to McGraw-Hill, but I seem obsessed about finishing at this point. Perhaps it's the rain?

I did a little reading today - we have several American History mags and Traces (an Indiana Historical magazine). I had no idea that the Tibet connection was more from Shelton (a medical missionary) than the DL''s brother in Bloomington. Gee, what you don't know in your own backyard...
Then I started reading about the NCR giant. Pretty interesting stuff. He was a lister and liked the number 5. Some strage habits (like 4 baths/day and green felt underwear) - but a giant in sales reform among other things.

Well back to the grind...

I'm thrilled that Leo Laportte is back on "Call for Help" on TechTV. I just hope that the new folks (Comcast) decide to keep him and expand his services on "The Screen Savers" too!

Anyway, on to the book. Today, I ordered Camtasia because I really think that all the features are worth it. I've been using CamStudio (free), but Camtasia will allow you to work with flash, including flash hot spots.

After meeting with my WED student on Sunday, I decided that the best Learning Object that I could create to show as an example in my book, would be one on Statement of Cash Flows. Students have trouble with this, and I think I have a great way of explaining it (the old auditing days really paid off for SCFs!).

I've been exploring Wimba this week. Wimba is the brainchild of a company that just joined forces with HorizonLive. Wimba has expertise in any technology that works with your voice (voice email, voice boards, voice conferencing, etc). They have a partnership with WebCT, so that is a plus, at least for my institution (Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College).

I'm still working through all the nuggets of knowledge that I gained at the Purdue University T&L Conference. Can you believe it? I won something - a WebCT seat in a distance course of my choice. So even more fun on the way! I'd like to go the Annual Conference for WebCT, but I don't know if I can work it in and get this book done. At some point, you have to get the mighty pen to the paper - or in my case, clicking the keys.

All for now!

Well, a few days have passed since my last posting, but I've used those days wisely. I attended a T&L Conference at Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana and learned tons that can enhance this book. I can't understand why Purdue faculty didn't just flock to this conference, but I was thrilled that I went. I attended the "Creating Videos for the Web with Camtasia Studio," "Creating Interactive Instructional Materials with Lectora," "Tablet PCs in a Traditional Journalism Course," "Using Tegrity WebLearner to Capture Real Time Lectures," "Created Narrated PowerPoint Presentations with Impatica," Semiotics, Technology, and the Research Paper," and "WebCT Exemplary Course Project." I list them all so that I can remember this later (as much for me as anyone). Not only did I truly enjoy this conference, I even won a door prize.

I have already used a section from what I've learned in the book. I reviewed several of the exemplary courses and used them as examples in the book. Why I had not done that, I don't know - sometimes the simple solutions evade me, I guess...

Now, all I want to do is write - but here in Indiana, the weather is beautiful and I'm thinking alot about putting out a few flowers. Oh well, I'll work today and plant Monday. Sunday, I'm helping a WED student with Intermediate Accounting. I'm looking forward to meeting with her - believe it or not, I miss interacting with my students!

Well that's all for now.

Although somewhat busy with Easter services, I've been diligently working on the book. I'm still struggling with the RSS concept. I've learned a lot, but still not enough to really relate it well in the book. I still think blogging is a needed section in the book, but if I can't relate the RSS concept well, I may only touch on this and move on.

I found evidence that blogging is part of the college curriculum at several campuses, and a real way of conducting the profession (see Jon Udell's various blogs, etc). I'm off to look for Leo's blog (Leo Laporte is my hero at the ScreenSavers, with Patrick and Kevin fighting for second!).

Off to the book - more news will be posted soon!

Today, I backed up the technology book to CD including the bookmark.htm file, instead of backing up to the raid server. Why? Well yesterday, our business DSL was active. No more satellite glitches (when we have wind or rain, we often lose our internet connection). We have some more moving around to do, so not sure how much I can work on the book today, but I'm starting on it now and trying to shut my eyes to the stacks of things around me. Should be interesting!

Another thing about blogging. I kind of fumbled around to figure out the URL for updating the blog (posting). I finally realized that you need to go back to http://www.blogger.com, sign in and then you can post. In hindsight, I wished I'd chosen a different name for the blog. The Ramblings? Where did I get that idea?

Well, back to the book - we will see how much I get done today...!

Today, I found several good links that will help in the book. One particularly was right in my own backyard at http://thevid.org which is a partnership of ISU and Vincennes and some other instititutions. VID stands for Virtual Instructional Designer and it is full of tidbits, articles, and resources. What a nice find!

Also, I found "Sketches - Innovations in Education" journal from ISU that gave some insight to what they are doing in distance education. I will do this same approach with several other instititions in Indiana.

I added blogging to the first chapter right after the discussion web stuff.

Wrote about 2 hours, researched about two and still at it.