- I'm able to see the resources for the "Introduction to Online Teaching Strategies using Prometheus" course. The first assignment was to introduce oneself and propose an icebreaker one might use in an online course. I said
An ice-breaker... Hmm. I guess I would ask students to do a websearch about themselves and pick a particular hit as either, something they would like us to visit to learn about them, or something they can explain and provide more context about. I'll do that for myself.
The third link when I BAD URL -- remove all of <, >, ", is
page about me at the Esperanto Wikipedia. (As I'm trying to load it right now, it's down, but I assume it will be back up soon). I contributed to the page, but it was actually initially drafted by other people who were describing me as the author of humorous Esperanto-language haiku.I've drafted this paragraph in HTML, but someone else could just copy and paste links amongst the text, like they were writing email.
I guess some people might not show up in any webpages. If that happened, I guess I would suggest picking a webpage that did show up when they searched and relate it to something about them.
We're using the discussion forum in Prometheus for the discussion. It seems like a particularly bad tool, to me. Each line lists the subject of the posting, the date, the author, and a hideously rendered graphic that says, "New!" if you haven't read it yet, but it isn't laid out in a table, so you can't easily scan for authors or dates (or newness). The lines are indented to show threading, but once you're half-way down the page, its hard to tell what something is a reply to -- you can't collapse threads. The most discouraging feature is that there is no preview feature, so you can't preview a posting before submitting it. And the edit field is so narrow that there's no way to see long lines (like if you've posted links) without scrolling from side to side.
Of course, the web isn't the "right" way to do threaded discussions to begin with -- usenet is the "right" way. But there are many superior threaded discussion packages to the dogfood that Prometheus provides. Several years ago, I contributed an Esperanto localization for phorum which is a really excellent threaded discussion system. I was looking at PHPbb this morning, which looks like that the discussion forums in tikiwiki are based on.
In general, I haven't found threaded discussions to be very successful. My experience has been that most students won't check them or post in them unless compelled or threatened. Building community is really hard. We've had more success with mailing lists that get archived in threaded form on the web, but even there we've had mixed results. I'm more excited about wikis because they're a lot more useful for building stuff.
I had asked the instructor about using other PDF viewers (other than Acrobat Reader, which is horrible), but when I looked at the first PDF, found that it has hyperlinks and embedded media, which means that you pretty much have to use Acrobat Reader. Ugh. PDF is great as a cross-platform way of exchanging paper documents, but it's a terrible format for browsing on screen: it artificially imposes limitations of the print world onto you.
Another thing to hate about Prometheus is that it uses frames. I don't always agree with Jacob Nielsen, but I have to agree when he says, Frames Suck (Most Of The Time). With a modern browser that can do tabbed browsing, its not too bad -- you can just direct most of the links to separate tabs and see them without the framing.
You are the nanoaudience
below the water line are the literally millions of blogs that are rarely pointed to by others, since they are only of interest to the family, friends, fellow students and co-workers of their teenage and 20-something bloggers. Think of them as blogs for nanoaudiences.