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sept 04, 2000 On campus at UNITEC... (more)

sept 03, 2000 Sites and Scenes in Auckland... (more)

august 30, 2000 Leaving .az for .nz ... (more)

august 24, 2000 Last Day in Flagstaff... (more)

august 22, 2000 Project update and Fay Canyon hike (more)

september 6, 2000
Being a clear, blue sky morning, I took a more leisurely walk through the middle of the UNITEC campus (see campus map). The grounds here are very lush, and the Landscape Arts area has several greenhouses and gardens, and a spot where they sell plants and vegetables to the public. Some of the oldest buildings are in this area, including an old stable and a pump house, dating from the 1800s.

A path leads along a water way associated with the spring Wairaka; as part of the grounds it is a lively wetlands region with many birds hopping around. It flows right underneath the modern designed Student Learning Complex.

today's photos

- all photos   o o o o

o o UNITEC campus (starting slide 19)

Part of the morning is sitting in on a meeting with staff from "Te Tari Awhina" or the Learning Support Center, who are creating online help for students using Blackboard courses hosted at the college. A few faculty members who are already using Blackboard provided input for what sorts of information students will need. Besides throughing my two cents in, I also showed the online support provided from a few of our colleges, including Rio Salado's support area for their distance learning students and Paradise Valley Community College's Online tutoring sites.

In the afternoon, Richard and I led a workshop covering "Quality for Online Courses", or subtitled with Richard's humor, "Guidelines, not Tramlines". We had an actively engaged group, eager to talk about issues of ensuring a high degree of quality for their online content. My part was to lead them through a part of our own MCLI What a Site! workshop, and they got a lot of discussion going on the "bad" sites in the warm-up activity.

In the other spots of the day, I spent some time working on one of my Multiuser projects from NAU, getting close to finished on the chemistry project to allow students to collaboratively work on balancing chemical equations.

In the evening I was treated to a home made dinner with Mark, one of the staff members in Richard's office. He makes some awesome pizzas!