Interesting week!!!
Saturday-Sunday-Monday: I finished teaching my alternative instructional strategies class on Saturday. Did grading Sunday and Monday. I do not teach again until Sepetember. I hope to finish my WE-ALL-LEARN book in April and May. And write a book on online motivation and retenton during the summer.
Tuesday: Tuesday was packed with meetings. Had a guy from the information science dept at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to see me on Tuesday about the delivery of online learning. His name is Mesfin Getachew. Seems they are experimenting with Moodle. Was an interesting discusson. Friends from the University of Illinois sent him my way, He is now in DC and arranged to have him meet some folks there.
Wednesday-Thursday: The past two days I did a final proofing of my new book. It will be out the end of June or early July. Here is the title:
Bonk, C. J., & Zhang, K. (in press). Empowering Online Learning: 100+ Activities for Reading, Reflecting, Displaying, and Doing. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
This is the famous R2D2 book for my online learning model; Read, Reflect, Display, and Do or R2D2. The book has 25 activities for each of the four phases (explanation of each activity, advice, how-to's, skills and objectives addressed, etc.). The Web resources and references for this book are extensive. And the model--R2D2--is a way of thinking about learning and instruction. It is a problem solving wheel with many entry points. Preorders are now possible at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Empowering-Online-Learning-Activities-Reflecting/dp/0787988049/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204843496&sr=8-1
Friday-Saturday-Sunday and Beyond: The weeks is not done. Tomorrow morning (Friday) my son Alex and I are off to San Fran at 5 am. We meet Wikipedia people for lunch and see their new offices as they recently moved from Tampa to San Fran. I hope to talk about that in my book. For dinner on Friday, we meet with some friends of mine from grad school days at Wisconsin (both Koreans now professors--Miheon Lee and Kim Foreman--Miheon is on sabbatical and spending much of it I think with Kim at San Fran State) and 2 former students now at San Fran State (Brian Beatty and Wen Hao Chuang) as well as Paul Kim from Stanford. Great people. I look forward to this! Saturday we get to spend some time in Berkeley with the infamous Internettime e-learning guru, Jay Cross, and then we explore San Fran with doc student, YaTing Teng who I helped get an internship with Adobe out there right now. And Sunday we head to San Diego and stay with my other best friend from grad school, Tom Reynolds, of National University for the rest of the week. Good to have friends!
More on this adventure later. I gotta get some sleep.
