Changes are underfoot! We are in the process of revamping this blog to be easier to navigate, and to include a more robust group of contributors. Incorporating feedback from COE faculty, as well as implementing blogging best practices, we believe the new site will become an invaluable tool for both teaching and learning with educational technology.

See you soon!

In my culminating post for CET, I’m excited to present to you a short feature documentary we just finished this week featuring the brilliant muralist, Jeff Zimmermann.

As a self-taught painter with only a Painting 101 course to his credit, Jeff’s murals are an indelible part of the landscape in the Pilsen community, among others.  His hyper-realistic paintings make the average everyday subjects he chooses literally larger than life.  His work spans the various regions of our city and can been seen in Grand Rapids, Charleston, Memphis, and even as far out of the country as South America. Incidentally, Jeff’s teaching experience started in Peru, where he worked for three years in poverty-stricken areas as an art educator.  He sought to make meaningful artistic connections with children that didn’t have much chance, and truly encapsulates the type of work we seek to do with SITE.

I’m proud to call him a friend, and was excited to be able to interview the man himself in his soon-to-be-relocated studio in Humboldt Park.  The following film is a short version of our forthcoming final feature.  It was directed, edited and mixed by the AV dynamic duo of Reid Garrison Miller and George Joseph Miller IV, who are both students/Alumni of DePaul’s CDM as well as former/current staff of CET, respectively. Jared Krenzler and Sally Lawton (also CDM students) operated additional cameras. The sound was captured and produced by James Steyskal.

When we conceptualized SITE over three years ago, it was a wholly different animal than what it is now.  What initially started as an idea for a simple print magazine on education grew and evolved through our work into a robust and tightly designed online platform for educators.  Seeing a lack of support for teachers in the school system, we developed this project as a conduit for teachers’ ideas to be turned into free-to-use, easily reproducible curriculum ‘zines that would speak to and help out teachers across the globe.

As it stands, SITE has over 80 users from six different countries that have discussed over a hundred topics important to them since we launched on January 2^nd.  In the grand scheme of things, we’re just a small group of people who feel that the school system is broken.  However, we’re not so jaded that we think it can’t be fixed.  As Art programs are cut, teachers’ hours get longer without compensation and privatized education takes a larger and larger chunk out of the public schools, one thing remains constant: genuine inspiration and creativity cannot be stifled, and has the ability to transcend even a crippled educational system. Jeff Zimmermann’s work is case in point.

SITE is governed by the three basic tenets of Art, Activism and Technology—Art meaning creating something out of nothing, Activism meaning the act of doing something to better yourself and your community, and Technology meaning using the tools at your disposal to create.  These tenets are undeniable in the work of the strongest educators, and truly ring out in Zimmermann’s highly political public works of art.

It’s been a real pleasure working with the truly dedicated educators here at DePaul, the ever-supportive Chris Worthman of CET and webmaster-extraordinaire, Beth Wiedner, who was an invaluable collaborator in the creation, design, organization and implementation of SITE.  Have a great summer and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Best regards,

Faiz Razi

Authentic E-Learning: I began developing this course with a deep-seated desire to do something different than I had done in my previous courses. Knowing it would be a hybrid courses, and resisting the idea of doing online what is often done in face-to-face courses, I sought to do something different. Not that what I did in face-to-face courses wasn’t authentic or project-based; in many instances, it was. It was only that I had come to realize that, whether project-based, authentic, or more traditional, I was usually the conveyor of content and the arbitrator of what was valued. Creating a hybrid course gave me the opportunity to move away from that role and do something different. After the first two weeks, where we met face-to-face and I set up the class by providing an overview of the history of teaching reading, writing, and language in American education and where I introduced students to different technological tools, I set the students loose to identify their own areas of interest and create a multi-modal learning module that they could envision teaching. Everything in the modules originated from their efforts after those first two weeks.

In the end, the students made it clear to me that 10 weeks was hardly enough time to do what I had asked them to do.  The work was authentic in the sense that they, as teacher candidates, were fully responsible for all aspects of what they were doing, and many of them found that to be overwhelming. They succeeded, however, in finding a variety of content related to their topics, drawing on a lot of different media, and creatively bringing that content together into a final product. I was surprised by the amount of content they found, and by their abilities to synthesize that it into a module. A number of them noted in their self-assessments that they better understood what it meant to be a teacher who has to weigh the value of different content and make decisions as to what is worthwhile.

Still, I felt that the modules lacked a key component of what an effective teacher does: how they would teach the content was missing. Whether because of time, my lack of clear guidance, or students misunderstanding their new role as teachers, all the modules failed to set out clear learning objectives and provide ongoing means of engagement and assessment. That is, the modules are rich in content but lack the pedagogical moves that demonstrate how the students as teachers would teach it. We talked some about this on Monday, and I noted that in TCH 471 in the Fall, we would continue thinking about this.

My initial thinking is that the shift from student to teacher that the project called for was too big of a shift to be made in ten weeks and without continuous, explicit support by me. Repeatedly, the teacher candidates fell back into what I see as a student identity role. They sounded like students in what they said, deferring to the expertise of others and fore fronting the content, not their thoughts about that content. Yes, they were creative in what they did, in putting together timelines, Prezis, interviews, and summaries of content, but the connections across content were not as evident as I had wanted, and how the content would be taught failed to materialize even as I said to them that these things needed to happen.

I asked students to take on a role for which they weren’t familiar and probably didn’t provide enough explicit examples or coaching as to what that meant for fear of my being too prescriptive. In the end, I got from the students what had probably worked well for them in all their previous classes; after all, they all are successful students on the verge of graduating with bachelor’s degrees. How to move students from their student roles to forming a teacher identity is something I need to consider as I move forward.

Eventalization: A while back I wrote:

Linda Harasim, in her recently published book, Learning Theories and Online Technologies, wrote that “active learning as it is defined and practiced falls short in addressing social issues and real problems” (p. 81). She suggested that, unless pushed to think beyond the context in which what they already know exists, student learning will settle somewhere within that context or along the continuum of what is already accepted knowledge. Although the students may learn something during this process, what they learn does not challenge or push existing knowledge in any new directions.

I pointed out in earlier blogs where I saw students beginning to push beyond “the context in which what they already know exists,” or to breach what is self-evident. Evidence of this pushing continued to the end of the course, and became most evident when students began viewing one another’s modules and making claims across the content. Although they did not make their way into the students’ modules in the ways I have wanted, these claims were part of students final self-assessments and final SITE entries where they wrote about all the modules.

I know with future classes, and possibly future research, I want to look at the relationship between taking up the type of teacher role I was encouraging students to take and the ability to breach what is self-evident. In other words, does the role of student as it normally plays out preclude thinking beyond what already exists because (1) students are seldom asked to do it, and thus it is not part of what they understand as their role, and (2) doing it can be risky if it serves to challenge instructor expertise?

So what were students saying in the end? First, they were identifying the nature of particular power relationships, relationships that I had not pointed out or defined but that they had arrived at through their own work and through looking at one another’s work. And in doing this, they began to test out particular claims that they were arriving at on their own. Thus, although it wasn’t evident in their modules, students did make claims about the content that reflected concerns about what is worthwhile and why and who benefits from different practices. For example, in speaking about censorship and its relationship to young adult literature, one student defined the differences between censoring and selecting literature, complicating the purpose of both terms and suggesting that “selection is just a form of making individuals believe that they have the freedom to select books of their choosing…a biased selection is a censored selection.” This gets at the heart of the choices that not only teachers and administrators make about what to read but also what publishers decide should go into textbooks and what the common core standards are saying students should read. Seldom is “selection” questioned because it is usually believed that the selectors have the best intentions for the students in mind, but put the way this student puts it, those intentions are not so self-evident.

Another student summarized the ESL module, writing on SITE:

We come to see [in the module] that it is very clear who is being well-served by [dual language, immersion, and transitional] programs, and what is valued. In many parts of the country, the push for English Only education has become intrinsically tied to an anti-immigration sentiment, and issues of power and agency cannot escape the consideration of who has the power to make decisions concerning ELL students. One question we also asked the class to consider was how fear and the threat of deportation harms the levels of engagement between parents and schools.

There is a lot here to unpack, including how best to address English learners needs and whether or not those who support English Only are sincere when they suggest that it is in students’ best interest to learn English as quickly as possible. The suggested connections between English Only and anti-immigration, and the disconnect such policies create between non-native English-speaking families and schools raise a number of questions that all teachers should be asking. Who is being served by such policies, especially when many English-native speaking and middle class families are advocating for dual language programs for their children?

In writing about the young adult literature module, a student who was not part of that group said that

here we have this awesome resource [young adult literature] for kids that gets them into reading, and into issues of race, power, identity, etc., and for these reasons, the books are banned. The very things we need them to learn more about, that will have lifelong and lasting effects on their lives, and the first inclination is to ban them, so they’re not exposed to these themes. Clever like a fox, I tells ya.

The humor here only adds to the insight, and again, is the desire to protect and do what is best for students or to protect particular ways of thinking. Each of these quotations raises its own questions about who benefits from such practices outlined here, practices such as book selection and English learning that we too often take for granted. As these students suggest, these issues are more complicated and dangerous (to someone) than we let on.

There is much in these three quotations and in a lot of other things students said that could be explored more deeply and ultimately lead to other possibilities or ways of doing things differently. It would have been too much to expect these other possibilities to be revealed and formed as real alternative in such a short time. But that effort has to come next if these students are going to serve the students that are implicitly lurking within these quotations.

I want to leave you then with a lengthy quotation from one student that by his own admission is a digression that pulls from different experiences and content that he, in a stream of consciousness, connects. It captures the type of thinking that if done long enough and often enough will take this student and all students to new possibilities.

This is just a small digression: but I just took the content area exam for English/Language Arts on Saturday, and I found one of the questions particularly intriguing. It discussed authors that would be appropriate in a High School English classroom, and asked me to answer which would work best. Walter Dean Myers name was in one of the possible answers, and Toni Morrison’s name was also listed, along side several names I have never seen or read or heard about ever. I was also dismayed due to the fact that this question had little to do with testing my knowledge of content, was simply quizzing my prior reading (which given the scope of authors out there…is next to impossible), and completely alienating [to] people of diverse backgrounds and ethnicities taking this test. It reminded me of a non-Western literature professor who was hired at a former school I had attended in the past. She was heavily criticized for not having read “THE CLASSICS” by many in the lit department, despite the fact that she was a non-Western literature professor. Favoring certain books over others is always problematic, because someone is always left out, of course one has to pick and choose for curriculum, but… How this relates to ESL, upon watching (almost crying…I am not ashamed to admit it) the short film the ESL group included in the “Arguments against Immersion” Prezi entitled: “Immersion” I thought (this is not new) a lot about the fact that even if this student was to learn the language through this exhausting and discouraging process, he would eventually lose an important and just as dignified part of his own culture in the process. As discussed in the Prezi, ESL students in immersion programs are “losing their mother tongue before they develop their second language,” due to many factors, but one of them is the somewhat forced assimilation into a new culture, at the loss of their own. This also relates back to the students themselves in that the literature they are reading in class is not only challenging in content at times, but also in context. Having little to no background in “American society” can take a lot to understand the importance of a society’s literature. For instance: even classes on British/Irish literature has posed a challenge for me, largely due to the fact that I am not familiar with British/Irish history in the same way I am familiar with American history. Compound this with the fact that literature studied in the classroom can be difficult for students if there is a language barrier, I cannot even imagine how difficult this must be.

And that gets at the crux of the matter: admitting what we cannot imagine and then listening to those who can.

And here are the links to the students’ Digication sites:

ESL

Young Adult Literature (note: you must be logged in to Digication to view this portfolio)

The Writing Process

Last week, you should have received an email explaining these changes.

Here are the highlights:

• On June 30, “Bb Import” courses will be removed from D2L.
• Archiving of courses will start on June 11 and will be completed by June 22.
• All courses that are a year old will be moved to the “Archive” area and will be made inactive.

The most important thing you need to do is to make sure you have everything out of the “Bb Imports” courses that you need. Since we’ve had D2L for just shy of two years now, you’ve likely taught any courses that were still lingering in “Bb Imports,” which means you’ve copied material from those courses into live D2L courses.

If you do have some lingering courses there whose material you want to save, you need to export that material. This video will show you how. Be sure that you re-title the zipped file with all of your course material so that it matches the title of the course you exported.

Next, you need to be mindful of what will happen to your year-old courses at the start of each new quarter. As the email explained, when the Autumn 2012-13 courses are loaded, the Autumn 2011-12 courses will be moved to Archive and deactivated. Students won’t see them anymore, so you may get some requests from students who didn’t get some materials out of the course in time. If that happens, you can either make the archived course active again or go into the course yourself, retrieve what the student asked for (like a reading or a graded copy of a paper) and email it to them.

This is good news for you. It’ll help clean up some of the clutter on your “My Courses” widget, and it’ll automate some of the tidying you might have already been doing.

The reason I mentioned that CET works with many other departments at DePaul because where I am going to tell you where to direct your students won’t all be within the “walls” of CET.

Q: How do I get an e-Portfolio account? Do I have to be part of a class that is using it?

A: If you are a current student at DePaul, go to Digication-Teaching Commons, scroll to the bottom of the page and fill out the Word doc form.  Once you have that filled out, attach the form to an email and send it to digicationsecurity@depaul.edu.

Q: What is the e-Portfolio website called?

A: DePaul’s e-Portfolio platform is Digication.  You can access it at depaul.digication.com and you will use you Campus Connect username and password to log-in.

Q: How do I get help for my e-Portfolio?

A1: For one-on-one, in-person help, go to the Writing Center’s website (scroll down the page to see instructions on how to make an appointment) to make an appointment with a tutor.  If you have a specific question regarding Digication or your content, please let your tutor know ahead of time, so they can be prepared.

A2: If you would like design, layout or coding help, go to the Writing Center’s Get Help e-Portfolio.

A3: You can find instructions on how to ______ in the documentation on the IKE Resources Page.

Q: Where do I find the permission forms for parents, so I can have pictures of my students or their work?

A: You can find Policy and Procedures for the Instructional Use of Audio- and Video-Recording form on the IKE Resources Page.

Q: I can’t log-in to my Digication account.

A: You can call DePaul’s Technology Support Center at 773-362-8765, but remember -  they will only be able to help you log-in.  Other questions can be answered by the Writing Center.

Q: Will my e-Portfolios go away once I graduate?

A: No, you will have access to your Digication account and e-Portfolios as an Alumni.  If you have problems with your Campus Connect username and password, all you need to do is call the Technology Support Center at 773-362-8765.

I think I’ve covered them all but you can always email CET@depaul.edu if your students pose any other questions.

After first running across WeVideo many months ago, I didn’t quite appreciate the potential of this free online editing program as a unique teaching tool.  I recently had the wonderful opportunity to witness WeVideo in classroom-action.  And I was incredibly impressed with the results!

Watching students learn, struggle with, and even enjoy their first video editing session was edifying for me, especially with the ways students formulated ideas and used the software to see those ideas come to life.  Because of this, I wanted to help alleviate some key issues some students were having that eventually made the editing process that much more enjoyable and effective in their storytelling.

The WeVideo editing interface:

Rotating a video image

If you’ve shot video on a Flip Video Camera or your iPhone, it’s possible that you framed your shot “portrait” style instead of “landscape” style.  This means that when you upload that media into WeVideo the video plays back sideways, which is a little disorienting.

To remedy this, you need to bring the video file into the “Graphics” timeline instead of the “Video” timeline, which I realize seems a little counter-intuitive.  With the video in the Graphics timeline, you can double-click on the video image in the preview window in the top right corner of the screen.

The image below shows the editing timeline in WeVideo.  To crop or rotate an image, drag the new media clip into the “Graphics” timeline, as opposed to the “Video/Image” timeline.

This next image shows the cropping and rotation markers that pop up once you double-click on the clip in your Graphics timeline (as shown above).  To rotate, click and hold the green dot. This allows you to rotate the image and even adjust the size of the image in the frame so you can cut down on the surrounding “negative” black space.

Saving, refreshing

This one is pretty simple: save, save, save, and save.  Always make sure that after you make an adjustment you get into the habit of saving your progress.  Also, because you are editing on the Internet with this program, you occasionally need to refresh the page after making major adjustments or if you’ve had the page open for a while.  But before you do… remember to save!  Then refresh.

Also, when you are sharing a project with a partner or group, you may need to refresh the page after uploading new media.  If you don’t, the new media you uploaded might not appear in your group members’ project.  Once you save and refresh, the new media should pop up in everyone’s projects.

Keeping an eye out for these two crucial snags in WeVideo will improve your editing efficiency (hopefully saving you a few gray hairs in the process) and give you a final product you can be proud of!

Frustration has set in with final projects due on Friday and students presenting during the last class session on Monday. The frustration is most evident in students’ posts on SITE, but I see it as a sign of learning because how they are framing it. Here is some of the interaction that has taken place:

Student A

As we get closer to the end, I find myself wishing we had more time. Not because I think I could make a perfect module, or even parts of a perfect module, but more because I wish I had the time to process what we’ve done more before trying to explain it. It’s even harder in relation to what we’re learning in our capstone. I feel like the more information I find out, the more I don’t know because there’s so much of the story that isn’t being told. For every Lau v. Nichols (a major Supreme Court case regarding ESL), there’s a thousand, tens of thousands even, of stories of kids who went through similar scenarios, but their stories go untold. So in explaining and trying to capture the picture, we fall into the Robert Coles trap of choosing to exclude everything outside of the picture. We become similar, if not the same as the different systems of power which have decided what knowledge has value and what does not. It’s a lot of pressure to get right.

Me

You’re absolutely right,… The difficulty of all this comes from many places: new content, a lot of responsibility, going public, and taking on a new role (all things I would ask of my students to do when I was teaching middle and secondary schools). Like being thrown in the deep in when you don’t know how to swim and then being asked to describe how the water feels. I suggest you won’t forget any of this and that even if you proceed more gently as a teacher you will be a better teacher because of it. You’re not really drowning; it only feels that way. I know this because I have seen your work and, more importantly, know the type of questions you are asking.

Student B

In general, it just seems that it is frustrating… I’m not really sure how to take this knowledge that I’ve been gathering. In some ways, it feels like an overwhelming amount of information and yet at the same time, I feel like I know next to nothing about my subject.

Me

Near the end of Witch Baby by Franscesca Lia Block, the character Witch Baby searches for her mother, who has left her on the doorstep of her biological father and Weetzie Bat, his wife. Metaphorically, Witch Baby is in search of her own identity. After finding her mother, Witch Baby realizes that the women who fashions her life after Jane Mansfield’s is not the answer to her search for meaning in the world. “What do I do with all this?” Witch Baby says near the end when confronted with the reality that her mother presents to her.

She has been bombarded with so much to think about and is no closer to knowing what all it means than when she began her search. Her mother, in the magical realism that is Francesca Lia Block, tells Witch Baby that she “must forget. Forget everything.” Of course, Witch Baby chooses not to forget but instead makes of it what she can at that moment. She returns home determined not to forget and to keep thinking about it and everything else. She keeps asking, “What do I do with all this?”

Student C

I have thought at length about what I have been studying over this quarter, and at first I was apathetic, but after “reflecting” some more, I have realized that what we are studying will not necessarily impact students directly so much as it will impact us as teachers (aka how we teach and the way we teach it). My (and hopefully our) vision of the significance of teaching English is already, and will continue to be impacted by what we are studying, and the fear and unending reflection will never go away, we can only discover better means to deal with it.

I don’t know how much their projects will reflect the thinking some of the students have done, but I do know that they have begun to see teaching in ways different than they had experienced it. Frustration, doubt, a breaching of the self-evident, I can sense that it is happening. Next week, my last post, will look at how this learn thinking informs students’ work after only 10 weeks.

When done well or creatively (as Rich Whitney recently shared with us), PowerPoint presentations can be a thing of beauty. When poorly organized or over-stuffed with content, they can be dangerous. But, as a ubiquitous medium, we’re all going to use this tool when we’re creating presentations, especially since there are several people in COE are thinking about incorporating flipped learning into their courses.

From a technical standpoint, the PowerPoint tool makes moving presentations to a digital format difficult. This year, after fighting with many a PowerPoint presentation, FITS actually put together a task force to come up with a better solution for moving type of presentation into D2L.

The biggest problem with PowerPoint is recording audio within it. These are the two main stumbling blocks (if you’re not interested in the technical explanation, skip to the next paragraph):

1. Audio file size: On the PC version of PowerPoint, if you create large audio files, you can’t just upload the PowerPoint to your D2L site, and the large files break when you’re trying to convert them to a usable form.

2. Audio file connection: On the Mac version of PowerPoint, if you record audio within the PowerPoint and choose to save the audio files separately, you can’t re-connect them. Hence, the only way to share it in your course is as a zipped file, rather than a simple PowerPoint.

And then, when you bring your PowerPoint to Jan or me, this is how we feel:

There are two ways to avoid these problems:

1. If you have a Mac, Keynote will let you record audio and then export your presentation as a Quicktime video easily. Keynote will also allow you to open a PowerPoint and save back to PowerPoint later, if needed.

You click Play>Record Slideshow to record your audio, and when you’re finished, click File>Export to make your presentation into a Quicktime movie.

2. If you have a PC, a screencasting tool is the best option. Screencasting lets you record audio over whatever is showing on your computer screen. FITS found a great tool called Screencast-o-Matic to use, and there are several other free options available. When I do screencasts for the blog, I use Camtasia, which is $99 on Mac and $299 on PC but has lots of editing options.

PowerPoint isn’t bad – it just isn’t built for presenting content online. And, if you have a PowerPoint with audio built in, there are workarounds that we can do for you (though, see faces above again, please). If you’re thinking about presentations you might want to put online for next year (because that’s exactly what you’re thinking about, right?), these are your best options.

As suggested last week, however, I find myself in a holding pattern, waiting now for projects to materialize on the Digication sites all the groups have established. And after our class meeting during Week 8—last week—I am as anxious as the students to see everything come together. As one student wrote in a Discussion post:

Finding a clear focus for our project and research has been difficult because, both politically and socially, ESL education in the US today is a very controversial topic.  There are seemingly unlimited amounts of information and materials available, and I have found it often to be interwoven with other dialogues on immigration, non-mainstream students, public education, and budgeting.

I agree that the abundance of materials and the controversy around the topic can make it difficult to find a focus. I also agree that ESL education is immersed within larger discussions of education and political and social issues. My response to this prompt was to say that I agreed but that most issues in education come with similar levels of controversy and complexity (although ESL may be at the top of the list). I also noted that the controversy and complexity suggest why, as the student goes on to say later, that what others put forth as ideal or as truth never plays out as expected in the classroom, that real life never follows an ideological path or structure, but that our ideologies tell us a lot about ourselves.

I am glad that this student and others are seeing how controversial and complex their topics are, and how this controversy and complexity makes their efforts at meaning-making difficult in terms of putting together their projects and in figuring out how to teach the content they are finding. The latter hasn’t been expressed as explicitly as the former, but I am hoping that as they think about how they will teach their content it becomes more visible. If not, the students’ English methods course in the Fall will have to make it explicit.

Here is a screenshot from one student’s SITE post:

This student is part of the Young Adult Literature group but was commenting on and providing content to the ESL group. The first part of what I captured in the screenshot is his reporting on his work in his group. He quotes from a book he is reading, and then notes his interest in pursuing a particular line of thinking even further. He then goes on to comment on the work of the other two groups, connecting some of the same issues (power and whose voice and language are valued) he is grappling within his group with what he and others are experiencing in their field experiences.

Without overstating it, I want to suggest that the connections being made in this post are profound. They demonstrate not so much a place or understanding at which the student has arrived but a process of moving toward particular understandings that are arrived at through the student’s ongoing work with the content and collaboration and engagement with others. I see this as a type of meaning-making that has more significant to the student’s development as a teacher than anything I could have done by presenting the same content myself over multiple class periods.

Not all students are making these types of connections, at least not explicitly and in writing. I do hope that they are taking notice of when others make them, however, and I have tried to point them out when I see them (hence, the student’s reference to me in the post).

At the end of this week, the groups are to make available to everyone in the class their project modules in Digication. They then have a week to finalize their work, and then during week 11 will present. If the students are as anxious about all of this as I am, I know they can hardly wait, although their motivations are more likely different than mine.

What I was really fishing for this week, though, was a blog post. I started the year with a list of D2L tidbits to share through the blog, and with the system updates and fantastic ideas/questions from our faculty, I’ve had plenty of material. Until today, when the well finally ran dry.

Here’s the stretch I made: I’ve been following all of the Facebook IPO news pretty closely this week, which made me think, “Gee, I wonder what D2L’s Facebook presence is like.” So here it is.

I haven’t “Liked” them yet, but I was interested to see what types of content they share through this venue. It certainly seems to be something worth checking here and there, as they’re linking to innovative ways that people are using their platform. There’s some self-promotion, of course (Look! Here’s someone who thinks a feature in D2L v10 is super duper!), but that’s par for the course on corporate Facebook pages.

D2L was also doing a typical “Hey, send us your blog post about D2L, and if we feature you, you’ll get stuff!” promotion recently. In the couple of seconds it took me to get excited (cause I have all kinds of D2L blog posts!), I read the next line: “[Y]ou’ll receive a $50 credit to our online swag store.” I immediately Googled “D2L online swag store,” but alas, found nothing. They must keep it in some secret, password-protected spot just for the winners of these contests. Perhaps it’s just better that I never know what treasures await in the swag store.

Anywho, those are the highlights of the D2L Facebook page. If you’re as big a fan as I am of swag, “Like” them for updates on your next chance to win. And if you do, please please please tell me what’s in the online swag store.