Ruminations of an Online Instructor / MD

What are Your Favorite Online Educational Resources? / Day 14 Ruminations becomes the Readers’ Blog

May 14, 2008 at 5:42 pm | In 31 Day Comment Challenge, Adjunct Faculty, Blogging, Distance Education, Education 2.0, Resources, Teaching, comment08 | 2 Comments
Tags: 31 Day Comment Challenge, Blog Comments, comment08, Commentors, Education Blogging, Education Blogs

The Challenge for today, Day 14, is to turn the Ruminations Blog over to my readers, so I am opening the blog up to readers and fellow educators for comments on the following question:

What are your favorite online educational resources?

What I am looking for are the resources that you routinely share with colleagues that help make their teaching easier, using computers easier or more cheaply, like on an adjunct professors budget.

My Favorite Online Educational Resources

I created my own list of Online Educational Resources that I’ve posted on the site as a permanent page.

I am created a permanent page of my favorite Web 2.0 resources (which will be embellished based on answers to this question).

With a bit of luck, I might be able to compile a very useful list of online resources for other online educators.

Continue reading What are Your Favorite Online Educational Resources? / Day 14 Ruminations becomes the Readers’ Blog…

Necessity the Mother of Discovery – Sharing Online Resources

April 2, 2008 at 4:00 am | In Adjunct Faculty, Distance Education, Grief and Loss, Online Learning, Ruminations Blog, Web 2.0, WebCT | No Comments
Tags: favorite online resources, Journey of Hearts, necessity, online resources, self funding, sharing resources

Journey of Hearts – A Self Funded Venture

For more than 10 years now, the Journey of Heart website has been a self-funded venture. Grief is not a popular topic and is also not one that is readily recognized, funded nor has it been one that reimbursed for physicians.

To date, the entire operating costs of the website as well the estimated thousands of hours to write, design, host and maintain this web resource, have been donated by myself and my husband as our gift to the grieving Internet community.

Since we’ve been self-funded with the Journey of Hearts site, out of necessity to minimize costs I’ve scoured the Internet looking for freely-available or low-cost options to some of the proprietary programs and web tools.

Necessity the Mother of Discovery

Plato is credited as saying that

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I think for many of us who spend a lot of time online, without a lot of resource backing–early website owners, small business owners and the typical adjunct professor–that

Necessity is the Mother of Discovery.

or perhaps a corollary

Lack of funding is the Mother of Discovery.

Online Ed Resources I compiled some of my favorite online education resources in a permanent blog page on the Ruminations Blob the Online Ed Resources page.

This is an evolving list of resources from applications to list serves that I have found online to use when teaching online classes or taking online classes.

The page includes the list of resources that I’ve also recommended to colleagues.