Hello Fellow Learners,
Greetings from south Texas – land of drought and wildfires. I’m Cynthia Franklin and I work at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas. I apologize for my late entry. I just spent 10 days in the cool mountains of Colorado. I did not work on my MOOC as I had planned. I hope I am not too late!
I teach government courses online for my college. This semester it’s Texas government – which should be interesting given Perry’s run for the presidency.
I also teach the online certification for our faculty (or others in our community college district). We focus on the pedagogy of online learning – which is why I was interested in this course, given the great title of PEDAGOGY FIRST! Our online courses and even the training is all locked up in an LMS – Blackboard Vista – so I am excited to be venturing out into blogs, bookmarking and other web tools.
I also teach my own two children at home. I have two girls – ages 10 and 12. So, over the course of any given day I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how and why we learn.
I loved school so much myself that I stayed in until they made me leave. I have a PhD in political science from the University of Pittsburgh. I spent a couple of years in Costa Rica researching my dissertation on how Costa Rica has maintained a stable democracy.
My experience with Diigo was, thankfully, free of problems. I was able to create an account with a couple of clicks. I could not download the tool bar because I am at work today and I don’t have administrative rights on my computer. Sigh. I did add it to favorites.
I went searching for a couple of my favorite recent articles on learning and was able to bookmark them.
This is my first blog. The window where I’m writing is a bit cramped, but it seems fairly simple. I’m excited about what we will be learning. I did find a copy of our textbook in our library for online teaching.
Cheers!
Cynthia
