If horses were wishes… 

I would have taken the horse

on trial, for two weeks before I left for Iowa City. 

Would he stay sound?

He has four off-white hooves and they have tender frogs

in the spring grass.  I’ve never had a horse with so much chrome. 

He was very fancy. 

How would I win the hack? 

This horse would tell me how to ride him, not why.  His mouth was soft,

but his head was hard.

Was he too much horse for me?

Sometimes, I would have to be closing my fingers on the curb chain,

hoping to hold him back, back him off, half halt.  I must make contact from

my hands to his head.  I was afraid of failing. 

This horse as he was?

I was afraid of falling from him.  I was afraid of falling for him. 

What do I know?

I am afraid of heights, though this horse, he has kind eyes.

How like a bridge is a horse truly? 

A horse can carry a person across a bridge, closing up the distance.

Oh dear, difference is seductive.

Thinking Context is a recent post by John Warner on his Inside Higher Ed blog, "Just Visiting," where Warner considers and discusses the implications of the language educators use. Regardless of whether or not the particular terms he discusses - peer review vs. peer response, workshop vs. laboratory, research paper vs. researched essay, etc - are relevant to your field and your classroom, he raises important points about the necessity of deliberate language in the classroom. These standardized education terms, as he points out, are often communicating more than we intend, and can set an unintended tone for assignments and activities.

While Warner's article is focused on the traditional classroom, his argument has interesting implications for the world of blended education, where the terminology is less established, less conventional, and more flexible. As we are beginning to arrive at mutually agreed upon and communally understood language, it's important to think through the implications of the terminology which is gaining traction.

If you would like to create your own interactive materials, Moodle offers several advantages. In addition to being relatively easy to use, even without coding ability, Moodle's extensive wiki "MoodleDocs" is full of instructions, explanations, and best practice suggestions.

Related resources:
Creating Quizzes on Moodle
Creating Flashcards on Moodle
Moodle Scheduler

WebWriting is a born-digital, open-access "book-in-progress" sponsored by the Trinity College Center for Teaching and Learning. It deals with issues concerning when, how, and why the web can be used for teaching writing by incorporating essay concerning basic but difficult questions about the risks and benefits of using the web, reconfiguring pedagogy to use online resources, and finding the right tools. The book also deals with specific issues like "How to organize simultaneous peer review with Google Doc" and "Balancing Public Writing and Student Privacy". The site is powered by WordPress's CommentPress Corp plugin, which allows users to interact with the text by leaving comments on sections, pages, or the entire document. The book also includes an annotated "Bibliography-in-progress," complete with links to the cited sources, which creates a small but concise resource library for users interested in the topics WebWriting approaches.

I was struck by two themes running through the conference presentations this year:

First, the importance of "closing the loop," or bringing the online components of a blended course back into the classroom in some way. Kristine Rabberman, for example, talked about the importance of opening class discussions with insightful observations, questions, or debates from her course's online discussion boards and blogs, as part of her strategy for fostering a deeper, sustained intellectual conversation online and in the classroom. This resonated with feedback we received on student surveys of courses that were part of the NGLC blended learning study project. Rightly or wrongly, students perceived online work that was not recognized in some way as being unimportant or ancillary to the course. Making these activities "low-stakes" (i.e., giving some points or credit for completing them) rather than "no-stakes" was one common mechanism faculty used to signal that online materials were important, but student survey responses and experiences faculty shared suggest that discussing students' online work in class as Kristine did or explicitly communicating how you are using student's online work to diagnose and address problems -- for example, by going over a problem you noticed students were having trouble with in online homework, might be as, if not more, effective.