When I confronted my course Presenting Content this semester with the basics of HTML and CSS, they and I had a couple of frustrating sessions. I’m doing this for some semesters now and never had quite such an experience. I was thinking: Am I this bad a teacher to not get the stuff across (it’s not that hard, after all) or did I hint at Weebly.com too early and most of the classes just switched off as early as this?

Read the whole post…

I’m not writing as much as I would like to write in this blog. This is mainly because of the work I do at the University of Marburg and the courses I teach there. So here is a post about exactly that: the courses that I teach in summer semester, New Media in Foreign Language Education and Presenting Content.

The first one is supported by a blog I keep especially for the course and an online course at the VCT. The second is also a blended learning course with its online component at the VCT. Both are starting next week and therefore I will be off in a moment to go on preparing them

The courses I will teach in winter semester 2008/2009 are now online and ready to be signed up for (if you have registered for them already via the online Vorlesungsverzeichnis of the uni). I will teach the following courses (class pages in the Virtual Center for Teacher Training):

• New Media in Foreign Language Education (Group 1 and Group 2, both together with my colleague Anna Maria Gallus)
• Presenting Content
• Web Technologies

Additionally, I will be part of a group of three to teach the course “Techniques of Scientific Work”, which will be an online course with four in class session throughout the semester.

The New Media in FLE course is also accompanied by another blog I will keep for this course only, which is hosted at WordPress.com.

If you’re one of my students: See you in the first session the week after the next one.

My colleague Tobias Unger and I are in Jena at the moment. At 3 p.m. we’ll be holding a presentation on “Web 2.0 im Klassenzimmer – Ideen und Ausblicke”.

If you are interested, you can have a look at the Powerpoint slides and the handout in the About section. Scroll down for Presentations and you will find them.

It’s time for a new edition of Interesting Links.

Nick La has gathered some very nice Single-Page Portfolio Sites at his Web Designer Wall. Some interesting concepts and a lot of high end use of web dev techniques. I personally love We Bleed Design for its fancy PNG effects and Fröjd for its simplicity.

Then, there is the Reverse Graffiti Project. If you don’t know what reverse graffiti is, go and have a look at the video. Incredible!

For those of you who haven’t heard this already: NASA has their photos online on a new website called NASA Images (you would have guessed) powered by Internet Archive. If you’re not into astronomy, you will still like the trippy images anyway…

And finally, especially for my students, there’s the Opera Web Standards Curriculum, “a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics.”

Well, isn’t there something here for everyone of you?

Ich werde bei der GML² Tagung in Berlin am 13. und 14. März zum Thema „Lerninhalte designen – Was Lehrende vom Web 2.0 lernen können“ ein Poster präsentieren. Weitere Infos gibt’s auf der Homepage der Tagung.

Das Poster wird dann auch noch mal als Blog-Eintrag auf ELearning-Blog.org zu finden sein. Pssst, wir planen den Launch entgültig zum 1. April (kein Scherz!).

Über Feedback zum Poster und zum Artikel würde ich mich sehr freuen.

As a designer working in an academic environment you are used to sit in presentations and get a badly designed PowerPoint presentation which at best distracts from the speech someone is giving. I know this is happening all the time and why bother? Well, I can tell you why.

Read the whole post…

… and you really, really, really don’t know what to do? Well, let’s see how many CSS properties you can name.

This is how I did in this quiz:

61

Where did that time come from???

Ist schon etwas her, seitdem ich zuletzt einen Eintrag im Blog hinterlassen habe, aber dafür lohnt es sich diesmal umso mehr…

Am 23. November findet in Marburg die Nacht der Geisteswissenschaften statt, die sogenannten GeisterStunden. Ich werden dabei sein… Unser Team von der Uni Marburg hat einen Stand im Hörsaalgebäude. Es gibt so viele Programmpunkte, dass ich gar nicht alles aufzählen kann, aber es lohnt sich allemal, vorbei zu schauen.

Das Programm der GeisterStunden

Der Virtual Linguistics Campus, das Virtual Center for Teacher Training und der LET-Vokabeltrainer.

Eine Wikipedia Academy wird diesen Freitag und Samstag in Mainz stattfinden unter dem Titel “W wie Wissen – Wikipedia und Geisteswissenschaften im Dialog”.

Hört sich interessant an, leider kann ich nicht hingehen.