Natural Blogarithms

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when I checked in to my hotel, the Econo Lodge Central.  It’s lower end (2 star at most).  It’s not disgusting but there are no frills whatsoever.  I should say, no frills except one.  I have free wireless internet access which is something that the folks here, at the Marriott Rivercenter who are paying at least three times as much per night as I am, cannot say.  But of course, I am paying the 10 bucks a day so that while I am here I can check email and find out just how far behind I am on everything.

Remember the view from the Marriott hotel:

Here’s the view out my window:

Nice, eh? 

written by SplineGuy

I’ve said this to so many people here but I am "mentally saturated".  I have too many new ideas that I’m worried I won’t be able to take any one of them and start using it.  To alleviate this fear, I have documented as much as I can in several pages of scribbled notes.  Over time, I will try to dump many of them here.  Let me continue with an overview of what I’ve learned and what’s up and coming.

Continued from last post: (still from yesterday)

7.  I received a wealth ideas for student projects related to biological and life sciences in a Computer Minicourse on Biocalculus.  With my upcoming Math Models courses in the fall, I am always looking for new projects to try out.  I learned how to implement sliders in Excel and saw a confirmation of an idea I have been pondering for Excel.  I was wanting to develop an Excel spreadsheet to explore predator-prey models in Differential Equations.  The idea was to create an underlying calculation worksheet and then on the main spreadsheet have a series of graphs, sliders and parameter settings that allow the model to be "toyed" with.  The presenter pointed me to a project called ESTEEM where several such workbooks have been produced toward this end.  (more on this later)

8.  The evening was capped off with a wonderful outing with some fellow bloggers (and pre-bloggers).  We had lengthy discussions about what most disappointed us and most excited us about this conference.  We conspired a few blog storms to take down misdirected technologies.  I’ll rip off some pictures from their blogs as soon as they are posted so you can see just what a lively bunch we turned out to be.  (Thanks to Maria and Robert for helping to put the evening together)

On to Saturday:

1.  I took my time getting around this morning.  I was up all hours of the night trying to catch up and answer email.  I failed miserable at the "catching up" part.  I arrived to the conference center around 9:30 and wandered around the exhibitor’s booths.  The exhibits I spent the most time with included TechSmith and MapleSoft.  TechSmith produces SnagIt, Camtasia and Jing.  I used a freeware screen capture software for our online College Algebra course called CamStudio and I wanted to know what the "Gotta Have It" feature in Camtasia.  I needed more motivation to fork over the $180 for a license.  Nothing grabbed me, but there are few features that I need to look over more closely.  Flash quizzing, fully-featured editing suite, 8 different export formats, call out features - they all have potential but nothing I can’t accomplish with freeware.  Maybe the fact that it is all in one place is enough to sell me.  We’ll see.

2. I attended a panel discussion on Evaluation and Online Teaching.  Not much new for me here.  It might simply be a function of my innovation tank reaching capacity.  Although not directly related to the talks, I did learn about WizIQ for potential use in live office hours and pen technologies that record audio and can replay by clicking on a particular point in the hand written notes.  I’ve got over a dozen new software packages to test out and consider how they might fulfill a niche in my content delivery. 

Who wants to place bets on how much of the material I’ve collected this weekend will fade into oblivion as I return to the daily obligations of teaching and research?

Here’s the rest of today:

1. Blogging with Concept Maps
2. Tweaking online Calculus
3. 20th Celebration of ICTCM (Gala)
4. Bed and go home tomorrow !!! woohoooo!

written by SplineGuy

So here’s a quick overview of what I’ve done so far at ICTCM.

Friday:

1. First thing off the bat was the keynote address by  Frank Hughes, Vice President for Training Products at Tietronix Software.  We presented the idea of using immersive 3d environment to engage our students and deliver course content in a medium that matches the mindset of the newest generation of college students.  The only problem I had with this idea is that the immersive environments were no different than the contaminant dispersal models that I was involved in developing 10 years ago at Texas Tech under an army contract and there was no clear explanation of how we might use the environments created by Tietronix to, as he said, "just plug in our mathematics."

2. I attended Maria Anderson, of math blogging fame, where the primary topic of her talk was to demonstrate the use of WebAssign as a course management tool.  Poor Maria was faced with a room full of excited and interested math educators who she, several times, had to fend off with a stick because the questions kept flying and pulling her talk in several different directions simultaneously.  Nice job, though, Maria!  I’ve got some great ideas for building community among my online students.

3. I attended a talk by Robert Lopez on using Maple 11 to do "Clickable Calculus", syntax free computing in Maple.  There were many new features that I were new to me in Maple 11 and I think I just might have to run out and get a copy so I can convince myself and my colleagues its time to upgrade.

<lunch break - mmmmm, pepper steak and fried rice>

4.  Robert Talbert, another world renowned blogger, demonstrate his use of student developed wikis in a couple of his courses.  I was definitely intrigued on the use of wikis for keeping track of presented homework and especially the idea of an open-wiki exam at the end of the term.  Fantastic talk!

5. Next, Mario Triola presented a talk on Statistical Mythbusters.  Great fodder for a series of blog posts to come.

6.  I was introduced to OCTAVE, an freeware competitor (copy-cat?) of MATLAB.  The exorbitant cost of MATLAB makes this alternative a very interesting option to consider.  I was absolutely amazed by the fact that this software was so nearly equivalent to MATLAB when it comes to its basic functions.  It performs the numerical computations I need with the same syntax.  Very nice alternative for my students.

<more to come, off to my next talk>

written by SplineGuy