More training (what am I missing?)

This internet thing can be evil, or good, or just a time suck. I do my best to listen to my better angels. And I love the ease of finding useful information.

Case in point: I know that content management systems (CMS) are important. For every college web page, there's a CMS behind it, and in fact, building digital history exhibits requires a CMS. And I gravitate towards open-source software. A buddy of mine at the University of Minnesota told me about Drupal Camp, which is a meeting of people working on a CMS called Drupal. So I check the Drupal Camp website and see that there's a free (FREE) training for Drupal this Thursday. I can only go to the morning part as I've Normandale meetings in the afternoon. But there is no chance I'm going to find some non-profit running a training session without the beauty of the web.

And then there's the evil side of the web. I tried to take a MOOC once - just once. It was world history, which I teach. I lasted three weeks. The lectures (by a name in the field) were two hours long and had the content density of a light broth. Even sped up to double time, they were soporific. The discussions veered from mildly on topic to blatant trolling. I fled screaming from the discussion boards.

And now comes an OOPS - an online open participatory survey from the University of Minnesota titled "Mutlicultural/Inclusive Learning and Teaching: when Multicultural Learning and Teaching meet Universal Design for Learning." It runs about 12 weeks and thus far appears peopled with advanced graduate students and faculty eager to explore the topic, and it's not huge. And it also is free. It can be taken for credit, by I don't need more credentials. I'm hoping to learn much, and bring it back to both the classroom and to my faculty colleagues. Already I'm mining the course bibliographies. If it let's me talk about race to my white students just bit more smartly, I'll count it a win.

Safe home.

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