ILC eNewsletter

This Fall at the ILC

Friday, October 21st, 2011 by Rob

Permalink for this paragraph 0 We’ve had a very busy fall at the Innovation in Learning Center, and it’s barely half over.  We’ve had a steady stream of Sakai trainings, to the point that we were going to call our event schedule for Fall 2011 the Sakai Blitz, and then the Sakai Ecesis, but as with the erstwhile PowerPETAL, we ended up not really calling it anything at all (in the interest of full disclosure, however, we did use “Ecesis” for another article in this edition of our eNewsletter).  Nevertheless, we’ve been very busy, offering some kind of workshop or seminar almost every day, and sometimes more than one per day.  On average, we have 6-7 events per week, with 3 or 4 of those Sakai related.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Indeed, some of you are probably starting to wonder if a strange Sakai fetishism has taken over the ILC.  Our official position is that it only seems that way.  We still do the same kinds of things that PETAL and the OLL have always done:  We’re just doing more of it all around.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 We are offering a significant number of non-Sakai Technology Workshops on things like Camtasia Studio and Relay, Blogs, Audio/Video Chat, Interactive Whiteboards, and Clickers.  We are also offering at least two Teaching Seminars per week on too many topics to list here. And many of these have nothing to do with technology.  Just recently we had an excellent session led by Doug Marshall (Sociology) that made a compelling case for the preservation of face-to-face instruction, and we hope to have an article on just that in an upcoming issue of the ILC eNewsletter.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 We have also added a series of two-hour Teaching Workshops on topics like Collaborative Learning, Alternative Assessment, Instructional Strategies, and Critical Thinking.  These, like our Teaching Seminars, will be led by experienced faculty.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 To view our entire Fall Schedule and register for events, please visit http://usailc.org/events/

Permalink for this paragraph 0 We are starting to plan our Spring Schedule and the 2nd Annual South Alabama Conference on Teaching and Learning, so if you have any suggestions for topics, please let us know.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Finally, our Fall schedule got off to a great start with that day-long series of teaching seminars  that we, for lack of a better name, playfully called the “Event Formerly Known as PowerPETAL.”  It was, once again, a tremendous success.  There were 64 attendees over the course of the day, with each attendee averaging about 4 events each.  We are already starting to look ahead to January when we’ll do it again, but we have to come up with a new name.  We’d love to hear what you think we should call it.

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