New Title, New Purpose

You may notice the change in my blog title to Bright Ideas. I did this because the purpose of my blog has changed a bit now. Originally I created a blog as a requirement for my course, technology in the classroom, but that portion of our class is over now so my blog can be more personal and geared toward friends and family. As my first post in this new era I'd like to give an update on my travel and graduation plans

1. I decided not to sell my house and am instead renting it out this Fall. I have hired a property manager who will hopefully do a good job taking care of things while I am away. No tenets yet though...

2. I'm still on track to graduate in August. I have a meeting with my major professors tomorrow to discuss graduation and dissertation plans, hopefully all will go well in that meeting.

3. I am still planning on moving to Australia right after graduation. In fact, I purchased my plane ticket earlier this week and applied for a tourist visa. Australia here I come!

This is a picture I pulled offline of Melbourne, Australia. I hope to have plenty of my own to post soon enough!

NEEDED: Infant participants

Do you know of an infant close in age to 12,18, or 24 months - or will be in the next 6 months? If so, I am currently recruiting participants for an ongoing study and would love to hear from them. Participation is limited to one time and takes place in the family home. In this study I am examining the development of the cortisol awakening response; cortisol is a hormone found in the body and is related to a number of biological processes. Recently our work received some news coverage, which you can read about here or scroll below.  If you know someone who may be interested, please give them my email address: mbright@uga.edu or lab phone (706) 542-5258, I'd love to hear from them!

Copyright and Fair Use

During our discussion on copyright and fair use in class today I started to think about when/how I might encounter difficulties using materials in my class. I realized that I have lived my entire life (almost) in the education world and almost everything I've done has fallen within the Educational Fair Use. In that sense, I've never really questioned what I've copied or how I've used it - I've always been a student and it always seemed OK. Was I right? In my almost 20 years as a student how many things have I copied or used that I probably shouldn't have? I'm certainly not regretful but it is something I thought about and probably will continue to think about as I prepare class materials and continue pulling things from the web...

College in 10 years...

In thinking about what the college classroom will look like in 10 years I think about mass increases in technology with everyone owning some ipad-like device and computers being so ubiquitous that students will go through several during their college career. Although the advances in technology will have clear advantages, I still appreciate the classrooms that are not based on technology at all. My discipline, psychology, stems from philosophy and our academic "ancestors" set the stage for us but just spending time engaging in critical thought. Our greatest learning, sometimes, comes from talking about ideas and considering why and how things happen. The nature lover in me also appreciates the classes I had in undergrad where we sat outside to listen to our professor talk. Being in Florida helped as the weather was always great! Will there still be places for these types of learning in the future technology-advanced classrooms?

Clickers? What about something else...

I'm a little late on my posting but a fellow student's blog reminded me about our lectures on clickers last week. Although a helpful classroom response system, I can't help thinking of another one I saw demonstrated one time. While attending a keynote address on undergraduate research, the keynote speaker brought up a website on the projector and asked audience members to text their area of research to a number he provided. Instantly all of the responses appeared on the projector for everyone to see. It was so cool! I believe the responses were anonymous with just phone numbers appearing (which may not be completely anonymous in a class with friends). A similar system can be found here. With this system students can use their cell phones (don't even need a smart phone) and can easily type in a full sentence (very similar to texting a friend!). I'm sure there are drawbacks but I just wanted to mention this as a way to get at similar processes as clickers.  

                                                         

Big day!

Today was a big day for the Bright house. First, I made the news in a UGA Columns article about a recent study I completed. The adorable mom-baby duo in front is my boyfriend's sister-in-law and nephew, Shirin and Kai.

Also, my dog Tank was selected as a volunteer for the reading program at the UGA Vet School Open house. On the day of open house he will sit and have children read to him. Tank and I both love kids so this was the perfect opportunity. Very excited!

My personal learning environment

When learning about personal learning environments (PLNs) this week I started to reflect on my own. When seeing the visuals posted from others I realized my learning environment is much less social networking focused than others. Many of the examples I saw included Twitter, Facebook, and a whole host of things I'd never heard of as ways for learning and finding new information. I think (based on my understanding of the concept) that my PLN consists of a lot of journal articles (pulled mostly from GoogleScholar), collaborating through Dropbox (maybe that is my social networking piece), and meeting face-to-face with colleagues to learn new stats methods or work through problems. Perhaps I'm wrong, it may be that my academic learning is less social-network based but other learning does lend itself better to such sites. As I look for places to live in Australia, for example, I am highly dependent on people's reviews and suggestions. Speaking of, anyone been to Australia and have recommendations for things to do/see?