I've been working on the assessment section of the Prompt Feedback chapter this week. After reading 100s (and I literally mean that) of articles, I've come to the conclusion that faculty do NOT agree on the term "authentic assessment." I had not heard of WIDS Performance Assessment Task Library before and when I visited their website, I was NOT impressed - BUT, I judged too quickly. The website might be bad, but the product, well, I get it now. In effect it has over 50 model assessment tasks that can be customized to meed the needs of a varied disciplines and outcomes. The examples that I saw (after some researching) were related to the medical industry. So what they do is take standards from disciplines, chunk them into tasks and set activities to them with accompanying assessment. AT least that's my perception. Again, I worked with a mapping concept map software from Mindjet. I've decided, I don't learn that way well. I get systems with document symbols, but this is stretch for me. I'll probably try the 21 day trial. One think, the founder of the Mindjet fought a battle with leukemia and won. The software came from that experience. I digress...

Just an added bonus - a story of hiss...
We have an above ground pool (tall). I turned off the pump so that I could clean the basket. I took the lid off and I hesitated because of all the cicadas floating and something that looked like a yellow and brown striped hose. Well the hose reared up and looked at me - you guessed it - it was a snake! Looking at me looking at him! After some screaming, my son and husband took the net and flipped him out of the pool. Now I really don't want to weed eat behind the pool!

Attended a graduation party for T.J. Coburn this afternoon. But time to update the blog for anyone that's reading on the progress of my book. I've been working with SharePoint. SharePoint is an add-in component to Microsoft Windows 2003 Server at no additional cost. It allows wonderful collaboration for teams, including supporting document version control. The templates would get any team off the ground running as my Dad used to say. I set up a trial version (30 days) of SharePoint service hosted at APPTIX and have showed some great screen shots of team functionality in my book.

I also worked Friday and Saturday on the concept of attaching discussions to Word documents that were saved as html. Now I'm sharing some of the annotating text online features, or at least examples of them. I love the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, and the Annotation Engine. I think other faculty will love them too.

I've worked on three different chapters in the last week. It just seems to work when I find something really relevant, to just go ahead and write about it at the time I find the good info. I have no idea where the time went (since really March) - I know I had trouble writing at first and now I wish I'd pushed myself a little more. I still want to have the book done by July 1. That way it can be bound and ready for faculty.

I just had to put up another post. I just got off the phone with Caroll Garriott, a January WED graduate from The Woods. She had sent me an email wanting a recommendation to Baker for her masters (SMWC doesn't have a masters in accounting). In our conversation, she mentioned her horrible experience with Phoenix Online. She started in a communication's class on a Thursday, and her instructor was not available until a week later because he had to attend an upexpected wedding. In her words, Who goes to an UNEXPECTED wedding? The syllabus showed that the coursework was to be done in teams. She was grouped with five other people - One from Russia, one from Mexico and three U.S. They had trouble getting together to even start their group project and when they did, one guy who had not read the assignment spent his time correcting grammar. Caroll finally had to take charge of the group (just like a Woodsie). What she discovered made her "livid." Two of the students were in the masters program because they were told that they could sit for the CPA exam. Get this - THEY HAD NO UNDERGRADUATE ACCOUNTING. Of course, after Carol provided them with the website that showed the requirements to even sit for the exam, they dropped out. Caroll could see the handwriting on the wall, and she dropped out too. One week with no instructor, and Phoenix still wanted to charge her $700. A normal class is about $2000. She was not impressed - in her words, "I'm not going to piggyback a team to get my good grade. I want a place like St. Mary's..." Even though the man from Russia called her at 11:30 p.m. her time and BEGGED her to stay in the group!

She of course then shared all the wonderful things about SMWC, and I couldn't agree more. It makes me so proud to work at SMWC and that just really gets me fired up to do a great job on a book that will support the faculty.

Well, I hear my fax grinding, so that means Caroll sent me the form I need. See you soon.

I wanted to write a short rambling on the book this morning. I did research almost all day on Thursday. I didn't realize how many folks are cynics. After research and highlighting about any article or criterion or testimony on assessment that has been published in the last year, I started writing on Friday. Much of Friday included some of the testimony of Dr. Carol Twigg and then I launched into creating questions and quizzes in WebCT. By Friday evening, I had 15 pages. On Saturday, I continued the assessment, prompt feedback, and even tied in a new term called FeedFORWARD.

The book is flowing faster than I can type it at this point. In some cases, I'm just typing in the headings in areas planning to come back to it because I'm hot on the trail of another section. I can't believe that way back in January, I wanted to organize the book around Chickering & Gamson's 7 principles of good teaching, because I see reference to those same concepts in almost every article I read.

Interesting points about online resources (specifically libraries). The science discipline is all amuck with the open access movement. But, I don't see how libraries can support $20,000 subscriptions to one journal either. Doesn't it seem that the movement toward electronic journals would make things cheaper? Well, apparently not. I still have a few more things to read on the Lure of Linking. Librarians seem to know exactly what this means, but I'm not sure - I think it is a management system of electronic holdings so that libraries can share, but I'm not sure and I won't put it into the book until I know exactly what I'm talking about.

I found it interesting that Thomson is doing a study on how often authors are cited by other authors. I know when I did some work in 1997, I was thrilled to run across a citation of my work in a recent article. I think I could really get into this writing thing if I didn't love teaching so much...!

Well, off to church. BTW, the time posted on the publishing of these blogs is off. I'll try to get that set later today. Don't forget to look at the archives to see what else I've talked about, although it is mostly book related....

Wednesday was not a day to work on the book. Instead, I did something for a friend of mine that took about 8 hours to get done. Have you head of Visual Communicator from Serious Magic? Well, it is a studio quality broadcast software that allows you to record and publish to a DVD or SVCD. I have written some about this software under the Active Learning chapter, but this was a labor of love.

Mary's daughter is married to a young man in Iraq. About six months ago, she brought tons of photos over of their wedding, their life in Germany, his re-enlistment into the military, etc. We scanned photos several different days, I converted them from tiff to jpg and then placed them in this software. Visual Communicator can create a web version, a hard drive version (that you can burn to DVD or SVCD), or an email version by different renderings. I had close to 200 pictures and the songs I had purchased from Napster would not work (I can't even listen to them now, I've got it so screwed up!). Anyway, I ended up creating a nice show and Mary will be over this weekend to revise - I probably got some of the pictures out of order. I'm kind of proud of the final product though and feel like it is my contribution to someone in the war, regardless of the media coverage of the prisoners.

I will get back to the book today. I just wanted to share this experience.

Nice Mother's day -
But back at it today. Finished an entire chapter since April 25th (April 25 to May 10), so not bad - even includes rough draft of cases, discussion questions and exercises. Lots of technology in this chapter too. Some great JavaScript. One was on random link + text description and the other one was on creating online quizzes that are more like self-tests. Listed some icebreakers in this chapter, but could have done a lot more of them. You know, you have to stop at some point and move on. Links to Javascript #1
The second Javascript was at Cool Web Effects

On a Sad Note...I can't believe that all of TechTV staff was fired on May 6. When new folks come in, it is like fire all, reshuffle and relocate. Not sure where it will end up

Moving along on the book - it seems to consume me - I wake up thinking about it, and I'm jotting down notes here and there - well, just everywhere! I really LIKE the format now - at first, I fought it with pages here and there always talking about putting it into the format. Why I did that, I don't know - it is almost like starting that section over. I should have just stuck to the format to begin with. I found some cool things this week. One is s rubric generator and lots of other good support tools at http://teach-nology.com/web_tools/ In the book this last week, I show how to set up "Team Space" in WebCT, connect to lots of sites that support creating content, including the W3C initiative - BTW, there is a 2.0 out now folks... I found a great resource - a complete book online called, "Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Deseign for Learning" at http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/ideas/tes/

Also used Bobby to test my website and 10 schools in Indiana. NONE of them passed! What is that about! Although, I had 2 violations, they were minor - I'm going to fix them this summer (when I get this book done...)

Lots more done, but too much to share. Talk to you soon.