Other Miscellanous Saturday MIC Tidbits

Saturday was a busy day at the MIC. Some highlights from sessions I attended:

• "Promoting MERLOT in Faculty Development Initiatives" -- despite some technical issues with the remote presenters, I got some ideas (and some contacts) that I hope to take advantage of as we roll out MERLOT to NMU faculty this year.
• "Let them Bring Their Laptops" -- Professor Perry Samson of the University of Michigan co-founded the wunderground.com site, is a tornado chaser, and in his spare time writes software, including the Lecture Tools suite that he demonstrated Saturday. It is a nice set of tools that includes a web-based response feature, and is "currently" free for faculty to use.
• "The Role of Social Networking in Education" -- The speaker, Steve Hargadon, wants to re-brand social networking as "Educational Networking" when it is used in education because he thinks focusing on the social aspects sells it short. He opened with a nice short summary of Web 2.0 tools, talked about some strengths and weaknesses of particular tools, and predicted that the next step is "the confluence of social networking and live collaboration."