Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Site Profile: National Association of Comic Arts Educators, Learning Resources I tend to emphasize general learning repository sites rather than discipline-specific sites just because there are too many sites that are focused on a single subject area to begin to cover all of them. (There are scores of general learning repositories, but thousands of specific subject-focused repositories. Anyone looking for subject-specific repositories should start with the Scout Archives and then proceed to a Google and Scirus search; most introductory textbooks also provide helpful listings of online teaching resources related to the subject area covered in the text.) However, this site is literally fun to look at, since it's about comics, and it's also a fine example of how a learning repository can be organized and maintained by a professional organization, the National Association of Comic Arts Educators. It seems likely that in the future almost all professional organizations of educators will need to establish and maintain guideline web sites about online resources in their fields. The site includes Exercises and Lesson Plans, Articles and Study Guides, Teaching Reference Material, and Useful Links to other online locations, but you'll need to look elsewhere to find many cartoons. 9:38:04 AM    COMMENT []

Site Profile: Kate Britt's Annotated Compilation of Learning Objects, Repositories, Standards, and XML This site provides a useful compilation of resources for instructors and instructional designers. Anyone designing an online course today needs both expert knowledge of the subject and an awareness of a potpourri of technical areas: learning objects, standards, learning repositories, and XML. Kate Britt's brief comments on the links provide an orienting entryway to the sites. Kate Britt is located in New Westminister, British Columbia, her email address is teacher@telus.net. Kate's web site resembles Vicky York's site (http://www.lib.montana.edu/~alivy/dist.html); both are designed to assist instructors to find and use online instructional resources. Kate remarks, "I've been collecting URLs for sites about Learning Objects for a while: information for beginners, standards, repositories, etc." For even more information, look at Kate Britt's VERY detailed Resource Lists on Online Teaching, Learning, and Pedagogy. These listings span everything from Accessibility Issues to Webpage Creation and include resources for both K-12 and higher education instruction (http://www.ibritt.com/resources/). Kate describes her collection process this way, "Well, I'm a collector by nature. Four years ago I wondered what online teaching and learning was all about. I began my own process of self-training and self-education, and began saving helpful links in my browser's bookmarks. That soon became unwieldy, plus I could only use that list from home. I wanted to access it from work and also be able to share it. So I began this set of resource pages. Gradually there were so many I had to begin dividing the links into categories/topics." "My sources are various. I belong to several education based users groups, subscribe to several email newsletters and online journals, etc. Whenever something looks interesting enough to cause me to click and explore, that link goes into my resource pages. Go to the homepage and click 'Acknowledgements' near the top left for a summary list of some of the places I get my links." "I update my pages every time I find links. Average I'd say would be 2 or 3 times a week, except for the very busy weeks. If you look at the What's New page, you can see the dates I've updated in the past month. (I attach dates of link addition to each link; What's New hosts the last month's worth of links. I label the last week's links with a 'new' graphic.)" Kate calls her list of resources "Pink Flamingos"--the flock is large and colorful. 9:09:08 AM    COMMENT []