Activity Structures for Online Collaboration

The past three days have been a whirlwind of teaching and learning. Sunday was our school's open house, at which I highlighted our global ed program World Village, but also our approach to technology in general. Monday was the annual AIMS Conference, for which I am on the planning committee. Ross Wehner was there with the World Leadership School, the organization we work with to send our students to Belize to study Climate Change.

I hosted three speakers, two of whom garnered among the highest attendances for any of the workshops, and another who has become an informal mentor for me: Dr. Judi Harris. After learning about her on the NECC's online materials section, I contacted her (and blogged about it last year) about presenting not only at AIMS about Diffusion of Innovations theory, but also at my school for a professional development workshop. Today, Tuesday, she helped our faculty learn a framework through which they could examine possible online tools and activities for relevance and efficiency. She helped us categorize various kinds of online activities and taught us how to evaluate them. You can read about her categories and see sample activities for each category here: http://txtipd.wm.edu/ Our faculty members are absolutely raving about her common-sense, and can-do approach. I'm trying to get the AIMS Technology Committee to invite her to speak at the retreat. We'll see how it goes :)