Thursday, April 27, 2006
Day 4 - April 27
Athens - Georgia. A beautiful city, where the University seems to completely dominate the environment. Apparently the campus occupies something like 33,000 acres - that's an acre per student. Haven't had a chance to snap the camera yet, but I don't think any pictures I could take would do justice to the size of the place.
Spent yesterday (Wednesday I think) in Atlanta, visiting with the head office of the USA part of Concord, talking about the content management system we are about to implement. A very worthwhile day, giving me lots of ideas about what we are getting ourselves into. A complex package that will require lots of planning and support to get best value from.
Driving to their office in Duluth was pretty daunting - right through the middle of downtown Atlanta, but luckily I had very good directions, and managed to stay on the right freeway all the way through. Then headed over to Athens later in the day. Met with Tom in an 'Outback Steakhouse' - a restaurant chain with an 'authentic' Aussie theme. Well, authentic enough to make the chain very successful in America.
I am now at the University of Georgia, in the Education Department with Tom, and about to go over and meet with his colleagues at the Centre for Teaching and Learning. I am due to give a presentation to a lunchtime meeting on my Fllinnz project - so I hope that is well received and generates some discussion.
Evening -
The morning at UGA was another very worthwhile session. Firstly Tom walked me around a bit of the campus, which is huge. The football stadium seats 94,000, and there is also a huge basketball stadium, tennis arena, baseball, etc etc. And that's not starting on the academic facilities. Apparently the campus is 33,000 acres!!! - a large part of the town.
Then a presentation by one of the Education faculty on a portfolio product they call EMMA (which is an acronym for something). It looks like a great tool for marking-up text - I was shown examples from some Shakespeare studies. Allows comments and revisions on the document, and keeps an archive of all versions as they are created. This has had the effect, not originally a motivation, of making plagiarism very difiicult to pass off undetected. For them the major aspect they focus on is the process of writing, not so much the final product. They've built this using mostly standard features of Open Office. I'd like to follow this idea up further.
The session at midday was with Tom and about 8 - 10 of his PhD students. Many of them are interested in the use of ePortfolios in various ways. Some good discussion - they seemed genuinely interested, and many asked for my card for further communication. We'll see whether there is any.
Have now driven down to Statesboro with a slight detour through the rather lovely old town of Madison. Am staying the night in a Howard Johnstone's, which has free broadband Internat access, so that's a bonus. Tomorrow I meet with Ludy Goodson at Georgia Southern University.
Athens - Georgia. A beautiful city, where the University seems to completely dominate the environment. Apparently the campus occupies something like 33,000 acres - that's an acre per student. Haven't had a chance to snap the camera yet, but I don't think any pictures I could take would do justice to the size of the place.
Spent yesterday (Wednesday I think) in Atlanta, visiting with the head office of the USA part of Concord, talking about the content management system we are about to implement. A very worthwhile day, giving me lots of ideas about what we are getting ourselves into. A complex package that will require lots of planning and support to get best value from.
Driving to their office in Duluth was pretty daunting - right through the middle of downtown Atlanta, but luckily I had very good directions, and managed to stay on the right freeway all the way through. Then headed over to Athens later in the day. Met with Tom in an 'Outback Steakhouse' - a restaurant chain with an 'authentic' Aussie theme. Well, authentic enough to make the chain very successful in America.
I am now at the University of Georgia, in the Education Department with Tom, and about to go over and meet with his colleagues at the Centre for Teaching and Learning. I am due to give a presentation to a lunchtime meeting on my Fllinnz project - so I hope that is well received and generates some discussion.
Evening -
The morning at UGA was another very worthwhile session. Firstly Tom walked me around a bit of the campus, which is huge. The football stadium seats 94,000, and there is also a huge basketball stadium, tennis arena, baseball, etc etc. And that's not starting on the academic facilities. Apparently the campus is 33,000 acres!!! - a large part of the town.
Then a presentation by one of the Education faculty on a portfolio product they call EMMA (which is an acronym for something). It looks like a great tool for marking-up text - I was shown examples from some Shakespeare studies. Allows comments and revisions on the document, and keeps an archive of all versions as they are created. This has had the effect, not originally a motivation, of making plagiarism very difiicult to pass off undetected. For them the major aspect they focus on is the process of writing, not so much the final product. They've built this using mostly standard features of Open Office. I'd like to follow this idea up further.
The session at midday was with Tom and about 8 - 10 of his PhD students. Many of them are interested in the use of ePortfolios in various ways. Some good discussion - they seemed genuinely interested, and many asked for my card for further communication. We'll see whether there is any.
Have now driven down to Statesboro with a slight detour through the rather lovely old town of Madison. Am staying the night in a Howard Johnstone's, which has free broadband Internat access, so that's a bonus. Tomorrow I meet with Ludy Goodson at Georgia Southern University.
// posted by Mark Northover @ 7:18 AM 
