Outing Your Blackboard Syllabi

Ingenious programmers at UNC have found a way to make accessible on the web all those course materials tucked away securely in the Blackboard environment. That’s a welcome move.

When I began using BB this year, I stopped putting all my syllabi and course handouts on my website simply because it was another step in addition to putting all those materials into BB.  If bFree can do the job for me, I’m interested. I benefit tremendously from seeing and often adapting materials posted to the web by colleagues at other institutions. I’ve been posting mine for several years and have always made them available with only a thin Creative Commons string attached.

As MIT and others have demonstrated, we have a lot to gain by providing free access to our course materials.

bFree may solve one problem.  But we’re all still waiting for the innovation that will make the discussion area of Blackboard both easier to read and use.  Who’s working on that? Not BB, it seems.

Here’s a brief report on bFree from our friends over at Academic Commons.

Institute for the Future of the Book

While this website is becoming more and more visible to a general academic audience, it continues to develop in a number of interesting ways.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo have been working on the Media Commons project.  Here’s a brief “about”:

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.

“Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet”, an article on the IFB website, is a report on — and a nice example of — the work in progress by Fitzpatrick and her colleagues.  While it focuses on the problems and prospects for change in academic publishing and the traditional tenure review process, it places these issues in relation to those of the public sector, media, and communication.

University of Manitoba’s LTC Wiki

The University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre is hosting a wiki devoted to “New Technologies for Teaching and Learning.”  It has basic information for faculty on using blogs, wikis, audio, video, webconferencing, flickr, and social bookmarking. I’m adding to the list of resources on the right panel.