My colleagues and I with the NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center received the 2011 SLATE Star Award in recognition of outstanding contributions and dedicated service to SLATE – Supporting Learning And Technology in Education. We were recognized and presented with the award at the 2011 SLATE Conference at the University of Chicago.

SLATE – Supporting Learning And Technology in Education, the Midwest Blackboard Users Group, was created from the concept that all institutions that are deploying and/or currently using Web-based components to enhance their teaching and learning activities, have the same questions, the same challenges, and the need for the same solutions. By drawing together the expertise of the people involved in the entire academic experience and those designing, supporting, and using these applications; faculty, support staff, systems administrators, instructional designers, librarians, and students – a broader and more accessible and dynamic support system could be established. The current membership of SLATE encompasses over 80 institutions including K-12, Higher Education, and the Corporate sector.

The SLATE mission is: To support learning and technology in education through communication, collaboration, and innovation while developing a community of practice.

The SLATE Star Award was established in 2004 as a way to recognize an individual who has shown leadership, demonstrated initiatives, presented new ideas, improved procedures, established effective relationships or provided substantial resources that have effected the success and promotion of SLATE, the educational experience, and/or the general Blackboard Community of Practice. For more information about SLATE, visit slategroup.uchicago.edu

In case you’ve missed the official announcement, the University of Illinois Springfield‘s Center for Online Learning, Research and Service is organizing a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Online Learning Today…and Tomorrow!

It is free. It is non-commercial. It is an open opportunity to collaborate. Here are a few more of the details:

When: Registration is Free and Open now! The course runs 6/27 – 8/20, 2011

Resource site is now open…you can see where we are going, the course will evolve
Live Webinar panel discussions every Thursday 2p EDT, 1p CDT, Noon MDT, 11a PDT beginning with the first session on June 30

Where: http://sites.google.com/site/edumooc is the home/resource site. Discussions for those who register will be hosted by Google Group eduMOOC

Twitter hashtag is #edumooc

Diigo tag is edumooc to share additional resources

Why: To learn, collaborate and network with interesting and knowledgeable colleagues

Join us in building resources; discussing today and the future of online learning. Sign up today. It’s totally free – do as much or as little as you choose – no advertising – just collaboration, communication and networking with colleagues in online learning. Simply register with an email address at the site below and join in this worldwide collaborative event!

http://sites.google.com/site/edumooc

We have an opening at the Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center at NIU for an Instructional Technology Coordinator. Below I’ve included the ad and link to download the complete position description. Come join our team or spread the word to others who might be qualified and interested!

Continue Reading

I spent June 13-20th with my brother-in-law Justin and father-in-law Terry riding across Colorado on our motorcycles. We loaded the motorcycles on my trailer and left Friday evening, June 13th after work and towed them 18 hours to Colorado Springs where we spent the night at Justin’s cousin, Travis & Britta’s house. From there, we drove on the bikes to Pagosa Springs to spend a couple of days with Justin’s family and in-laws before hitting the road and spending 3 more days on the road en route back to Colorado Springs and then finally home. In total, we put on 1,027 miles on the motorcycles and another nearly 2,000 miles in the Explorer towing the motorcycles to Colorado and back. All in all, we had a great trip and many fond memories that will no double be talking about for years to come.

All the photos from our trip are available here. For the slideshow, click here.

Anyone interested in the route we took, here are the maps for our routes that Justin planned out using Google Maps:

• Day 1 (Sun, June 15): Colorado Springs to Pagosa Springs
• Day 2 (Tue, June 17): Pagosa Springs to Hotchkiss
• Day 3 (Wed, June 18): Hotchkiss to Fairplay
• Day 4 (Thu, June 19): Fairplay to Colorado Springs

I’ve put together a new, non-institutionally branded professional site using the free Google Pages tool at drjasonrhode.googlepages.com. I’m planning to maintain this new site along with my personal NIU site with my professional endeavors while keeping jasonrhode.com more personal.

Stop by and say hello!

My wife and I are forward to heading to Atlanta this next week for my commencement ceremony on March 1st. We’ll be flying into Altanta Thu. afternoon, 2/28, with my in-laws and my dad. My brother who is currently stationed at Barksdale AFB in Shrevoport, LA is going to try to make it over as well if his schedule permits.

We’re going to try and get a bunch of sight-seeing in before the ceremony on Saturday afternoon. It should be a lot of fun! For those who are interested and want to try and sneek a peek at the commencement ceremony, it will be webcast live on Saturday, 3/1 at 2PM CDT. More details are at http://www.capella.edu/commencement

Biographies of the 5 fallen NIU students are now available on the NIU memorial site at http://www.niu.edu/tragedy/memorial/biographies.html

Apparently, the young man who died, Daniel Parmenter, was actually shielding his girlfriend from the attack. Click here to read the complete story.

As I posted earlier, the NIU campus is reeling from the recent shooting on campus. For those who are interested and weren’t able to watch it live, here’s a video of the press conference featuring comments from NIU President John Peters and NIU Police Chief Donald Grady responding to the tragic events.

In the press conference, Chief Grady discussed the rapid response of the NIU campus police force in response to first reports of the shooting. I can attest personally to the responsiveness of NIU police…they certainly are a highly trained and VERY responsive unit. There’s no doubt that police were on the scene within 29 seconds as Chief Grady noted.

Please continuing praying for the entire NIU community.

As you most likely have heard by now, yesterday afternoon (2/14) there was a tragic shooting at NIU where I work. If you’ve been watching the news, you likely know as many details at this point as I do. At the time of the shooting, I was in my office which was about 2 blocks away from Cole Hall, the building where the shooting took place.

Thanks to everyone who has called or emailed to check and make sure that I was ok. It was a chaotic scene on campus yesterday with media and emergency personnel flooding the scene. The news of what was happening on campus initially spread faster by word of mouth and cell phone text messages than any other means. It was a surreal experience to be watching events happening live on CNN while also watching it happen through an office window. Waking up the day after, it still is hard to believe that such a horrendous event could take place in DeKalb.

Here’s a video with a few photos from the past day at NIU:

For more details on the healing process on campus in the days ahead as well as any further news, you can check the NIU website at www.niu.edu. Please keep the campus administration, faculty, students, and most importantly the students and families of those directly affected by the shooting in your thoughts and prayers. The university community has a long road of healing ahead…

My department at NIU has been working on a new endeavor we are calling “Quick Tips for Effective Instruction” in which we are putting together short multimedia presentations (5-8 minutes) to introduce faculty to different resources and methods for teaching and learning.  The presentations are made available in a variety for formats, for viewing either online, as a podcast, or even via YouTube.  

Here’s an example of the low-res version of one of the presentations available on YouTube:

For links to other formats of the presentation, such as hi-res online and the text transcript, click here.

The Northern Today, NIU’s weekly online newsletter, recently did a feature article on the project. To read the full story, click here.

One of what I consider to be the “perks” of my job is that I get to meet once a month with some great people who also are involved in supporting learning and technology in education. This great group of people from across the Midwest comprise SLATE, the Midwest Blackboard User’s Group.

SLATE, the Midwest Blackboard Users Group, was created from the concept that all institutions that are deploying and/or currently using Web-based components to enhance their teaching and learning activities, have the same questions, the same challenges, and the need for the same solutions. By drawing together the expertise of the people involved in the entire academic experience and those designing, supporting, and using these applications; faculty, support staff, systems administrators, instructional designers, librarians, and students – a broader and more accessable and dynamic support system could be established. Our current membership comes from K-12, Higher Education, and the Corporate sector and isn’t limited to just Blackboard usage.

I’m happy to report that in addition to the SLATE website and discussion community, there is now a SLATE blog over at http://slategroup.blogspot.com.

While the blog is very much still a work in progress, it certainly will be a great mode for continued communication and networking efforts concerning various aspects of educational technology implementation, support, and best practices.

I don’t often post much regarding my dissertation here as I have an entirely separate blog devoted to all the “exciting” details regarding my terminal academic degree project. But, I thought it is worth noting here that I have reached another significant milestone as I rapidly approach finishing and that is drafting the preliminary findings as well as a few charts of the quantitative data. I’ll refrain from going into details.  For those who do happen to be interested, you can find more here.

As part of the long overdue process of rebuilding my personal website, the collection of children’s ministry resources that I’ve compiled, formerly located at jasonrhode.com/resources has been moved and is now available at www.childrensministryarchive.com.

Being rebuilt using the WordPress blogging platform, the archive is now searchable and features RSS feeds allowing for subscription to both new posts and comments.  Feel free to spread the word about the free resources I have posted.  If you’ve found them to be of benefit, I’d love to hear from you.