For the past semester I have been a member of the CSUF E-Learning Consortium, a campus wide instructional technology initiative. It is a varied group, with representative from various colleges and departments across campus. We’ve been meeting once a week to share online instruction technologies that we’ve been using.  Over the course of the semester we all learned a great deal about how online instruction is being delivered. 

On May 1st the consortium held an event called TARP, the Technology Awareness Resource Program.  This was an all day event geared toward letting interested faculty members know what has been going on in the online instruction world.  For my part, I did two presentations, one on widgets, and the other on the Pollak Library 10 Things program.

The Pollak Library 10 Things program is an online, self-paced tutorial on web 2.0 that  was created by Will Breitbach, Heather Tunender, and I as a way of introducing the read-write web to our colleagues.  I was the first presenter of the day, so I thought it best to start the day off on a light note.  I opened the presentation by showing a video called the Machine is Using Us, which is an excellent overview of what web 2.0 is and why it matters.  I then showed off some of the exceptional content that has been created by our colleagues.

The afternoon presentation was on creating library widgets for Blackboard.  I built a sub-site that explains what widgets are and shows users how to create research widgets on their own.  I tried to keep the site text-light, so I used Camtasia to create video tutorials.  Attendees were shown how to embed both journal and book searches, and they are walked through how to create Google Custom Search Engines and Xerxes Widgets.  

Both presentations went well, and I think that the faculty members in attendance walked away with some idea of what library research widgets are and why they might be of use to their students.  At least I hope they did….

e-learning consortium, google gadgets, presentations, Widgets, xerxes Hide