MERLOT 2009

I’m at the MERLOT International Conference in San Jose, California this week, catching up on the latest technology related to online college teaching and giving a presentation about digital identity.

MERLOT, which stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, is one of the premier higher education organizations related to online teaching and technically enhanced traditional classes at the college level. Its annual conferences bring together academics, information technology specialists and software/hardware company representatives to share knowledge and information in a fast growing field in higher education.

My presentation, Creating Productive Digital Identities in the Online Class, deals with how faculty and students show themselves in online courses through profiles, social networking sites, blogs, videos and more. How do these identities shape perceptions? How can they foster knowledge acquisition? How should students and faculty present themselves in a digital sense?

The answers to these questions are not settled, and, as new technologies emerge, the questions will change or even become obsolete. But most everyone’s online identity—not just students and faculty—has become an important social and cultural issue.

Click on the YouTube video to watch a slide show that goes along with a recording of me reading some lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I’m using this to introduce the presentation. Whitman, the great American poet, had something important to say about identity in his classic American poem.

Here are some other MERLOT presentations scheduled for Friday that seem promising to me:

Strengthen the Link with Blended Videos: Enhance the Connection between Teaching, Learning, and Technology

This presentation deals with using graphic organizers to make better use of YouTube videos in the classroom.

Podcasting for Educators

This presentation deals with how to use podcasting in classrooms.

Have Digital Library Will Collaborate

This presentation is an overview of the digital version of the Library of Congress.

MERLOT in Second Life

This presentation shows a demo of MERLOT’s Second Life Campus. Some universities now conduct classes in Second Life, a virtual world that has tremendous teaching and learning potential in all academic disciplines.

This is just a small sampling of the presentations offered on Friday at MERLOT and they reflect my interest. Here’s the complete program. Here’s MERLOT’s main site.