Greetings Educators,

When I first started in the field of educational technology some 17 years ago, I was amazed at the rate of change that occurred in the field in such a short amount of time. My first experience on a computer was writing a short tutorial and quiz program on a Radio Shack TRS 80 and I quickly moved on to a portable Compaq computer that was about the size of a sewing machine with dual floppy drives. Now looking back I see that, compared to the current pace of change, we were moving rather slowly. Back in “my day” we used Web 1.0 which was quite static. Users did not interact with the content; they only were able to read it. Now with the advent of Web 2.0, users have the ability to interact with the content with blogs, wikis, and podcasts. And this allows the average computer user to create and post content with minimal computer skills.

In keeping with the changing times we have decided to move our EduTech Today newsletter to a Wordpress blog so that our readers can take advantage of RSS feeds and include our articles in their RSS readers. If you have already subscribed to our program you will continue to receive our quarterly newsletter via email and have the added benefit of the RSS feeds. If you have not subscribed, you may do so by going to the Subscribe page.

We will still be sending excerpts of our articles out via email to accommodate our readers that currently do not have an RSS aggregator set up. To learn more about RSS aggregators you can view this short video at http://commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english. In our first course in the Certificate program we have students set up a Netvibes page that allows them to have a collection of RSS feeds all on one page. We provided a tutorial in one of our previous issues. You can access it by going to http://edutech.msu.edu/newsletter/netvibes/netvibes.html to learn how to take advantage of our new format.

As part of this new format we are looking forward to hearing more from our readers via the Commenting portion of the Wordpress blog. We currently have it set up so that anyone can place a comment. Unfortunately spam isn’t limited to email. Therefore, using good blogging practices, we do moderate all of the comments we receive. This means that your comment will not show up immediately. It is held in a queue until one of our team members can verify that it is coming from a valid source and that it isn’t spam.

So, with the new advances in Web technology we look forward to having more interaction with our readers and, in the end, providing an even more robust and informative newsletter. Please send us your comments and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you!

Best Regards,

Joe Codde
Professor and Director
Educational Technology Certificate Program

Contact us at: 517-432-9259
http://edutech.msu.edu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Directors' Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.