Welcome to the new DDL blog! Because of AECT’s move towards new servers and Wordpress blogs, this will be the new home for announcements and information about the Division of Distance Learning of AECT. If you have information pertinent to the division that you would like posted, contact the current Communications Officer, Rick West.

DDL members,

A while back I tested a possible SuprGlu page that would aggregate all of the RSS feeds from blogs belonging to DDL members into our RSS source. The benefit is that you can subscribe to one feed and hear all the chatter from DDL members.

That was a test. It was only a test.

But now I’m ready to do it for real (since nobody raised any objections…)

So this is the official DDL SuprGlu site:

http://aectddl.suprglu.com/
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Hello and welcome back everyone from your Christmas holidays.

Remember that the time is NOW to apply for office in the DL division. So far, the numbers of those applying for position are very (critically) low. So if you are interested in serving in the division, please email Vance Durrington (vance.durrington@msstate.edu) with the division office you wish to run for and your bio information.

Division officer elections to be held in January:

President-elect
Communications Officer
Representative on the AECT Board

AECT Elections for the Distance Learning Division have concluded.

Please extend your congratulations and best wishes to the new officers.

President-Elect:
  Tony Pina (read bio)
Distance Learning Board:
  Bosede Aworuwa (read bio)
  Michael Barbour (read bio)
Communications Officer:
  Rick West (read bio)

Voting is NOW OPEN!
AECT Elections for the
Distance Learning Division

On Friday night the ECT board met with the AECT board and spoke a bit about what we really do. The ECT board is mostly responsible for fundraising and presenting awards funded by bequests of money given for specific purposes under specfic guidelines.

I, for one, found this information very informative since I really never knew what the ECT board was doing in all of those marathon meetings, as you might be curious what goes on behind the curtains at the board meetings. BTW- the notes to the board meetings are all posted and not too hard to get to from the AECT.ORG main page. Throughout the conference there was contention about the usability of the AECT.ORG site. It may be fine to have things somewhere on there, but if you can’t find them it’s not much help. Someone suggested that we have a usability committee and get it right.
This seems like a wonderful idea since personally I always feel that I’m being dismissed when I need some information and the only answer I can get is that it can be found on the website.
This is even more true if I’ve already spend a good 45 minutes looking for it.

Saturday Morning was where the conference should have started. The strategic planning committee gave their interim report with Dick Cornell doing most of the speaking. I was very pleased to hear the quality of work and thought they put into the report and they seem to be on exactly the same wavelength as myself, so I volunteered to serve on the committee. Here are some highlights gleaned from the online survey that 17% of our members answered specific order:

We don’t sell ourselves, we need to find and keep grad students, publicizing and bringing in people. We need to create an interdisciplinary summit.

We need to broaden professional membership base and identify strategic markets to get new members.

Capture the excitement, passion and creativity that we seem to have lost.

Renew advocacy for the field of ed tech to our many publics

Use new and emerging technologies to facilitate communication

Act on member interest in new professional development, e.g. online e-academy, seminars by subscription etc.

Increase recognition of current research, expertise and professional community.

Look at convention planning, marketing, programming

Determine satisfaction or lack thereof with current publications

Re-assess role of Headquarters staff, strategic analysis of work , and association budget.

Reconstitute and expand strategic task force

Assign accountability

Present implementation plans to the board and timelines.

Addie Kinslinger, Don Littlle, Nate Lowell and Dick Cornell gained my highest praise and gratituted for getting this massive ball rolling.

There were a lot of questions and answers. One question I asked (I don’t keep quiet too much), was: What differentiates us from other similar organizations? Everyone on the committee answered in the same fashion. What differentiates us is that everyone involved in AECT considers ourself family. That is what I believe and the answer I was hoping to hear. It IS what makes us different.

A FEW NOTES ON CONVENTION ITEMS AND SUCH

The year after Orlando, we will be in Dallas, but thankfully not in hotel world where we, as in Atlanta, were been cut off from everything. We will be right downtown across from the convention center and be scheduled in conjunction with Educause (I believe, but it might be another similar conference) which will provide the trade show that some members fell important

Next time around there will be only one round of proposals. It sounded liike a good idea, but it just didn’t work out.

This is getting way too long, but after a shaky start, we wound up with quite a productive bunch of meetings. I only wish it were done in the reverse order. After all, if we don’t understand that you start with the task and then worry about how to get there, in the words of Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

David Winograd
DDL Board Rep

Authored by Mary Herring and Sharon Smaldino
ISBN 0-89240-112-5

This is the new, second edition

This handbook is designed to enhance distance education practice. It presents distance educators with a variety of innovative uses for distance education. The information provided is intended to bridge the ideas of many about the multifacets of distance education and their practical application in the distance classroom. It supports both students and teachers as they learn to effectively use distance-learning environments by combining the nuances of instructional method with technological tools.

Price includes $3.00 shipping and handling.

Regular Price: $33.00
Member Price: $23.00

Ordering information: Log in to the AECT website (your last name and membership number), then click on Store. Book prices reflect member discounts only if you’re logged in to the AECT website.

http://www.aect.org/store/prodetails.asp?noframe=&prodid=343&start=1

Due to a still-unexplained web server problem, the 2005 Call for Proposals was offline for most of the day Sunday, March 20. The problem has been corrected and the deadline extended till midnight EDT tonight (Monday, March 21).

Multiple themes make up this first issue of TechTrends for 2005. First, the International Division tapped R.W. “Buddy” Burniske to serve as guest editor for a series of articles addressing technology use for education in underserved island communities. He did a great job soliciting and editing these manuscripts which are sure to interest our readers, and he was a real trouper who finished the issue in the face of serious illness. Thank you, Buddy!
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OJR article: News That Comes to You

The explosion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a problem for any info-warrior: Who the heck has time to read all this stuff?

Well, here’s one possible solution: news readers — a new crop of software programs that fetch updated dispatches from your favorite online writers, bloggers or news outfits.

Instead of the hunt and peck of Web surfing, you can download or buy a small program that turns your computer into a voracious media hub, letting you snag headlines and news updates as if you were commanding the anchor desk at CNN.

The programs, which are just now moving out of the techie world into the mainstream, come in a variety of shapes and flavors: NewzCrawler (PC), AmphetaDesk (cross-platform), Radio Userland (PC or Mac), NetNewsWire (Mac), and others. Look beneath the hood and they’re all powered by XML, a souped-up form of HTML. The programs check each site to see if they contain RSS (Rich Site Summary) tags, a set of HTML-like instructions for sharing news.

“Aggregators, because of their instantaneous nature, are addictive. It is hard to start the day without checking what’s new.”

Here’s how it works. You fire up one of the news readers (also called news aggregators), subscribe to certain sites from a directory of thousands of choices — say, BBC Online, ESPN, Salon, the Chippewa (Wis.) Herald and Bangkok News — and bingo, you’re in business. Whenever you sign on, a directory pane lets you see the most recent updates for each channel you’ve subscribed to. Within each channel you’ll typically see a half dozen headlines and perhaps a summary, the entire item, and occasionally an accompanying photo. Want to dive in further? Click on a link and you’re transported directly to the source’s Web site. Some programs run through a Web browser, others through a standalone program. Most are free.

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