Jason Rhode :: Blog

I just came across this new service, Page2RSS, that makes it easy to create an RSS feed for any webpage. It helps you monitor web sites that do not publish feeds. Page2RSS will check any web page for updates and deliver them to your favorite RSS aggregator.

Has anyone else already been using this service?  If so, what are your thoughts regarding it and how you might leverage this kind of technology?

CommonCraft has released yet another wonderful video explaining a technology in plain english.  In their latest video, they explain Twitter in Plain English.

This video by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, creatively and powerfully looks at today’s students and how they are changing the world of learning and education.

Biographies of the 5 fallen NIU students are now available on the NIU memorial site at http://www.niu.edu/tragedy/memorial/biographies.html

Apparently, the young man who died, Daniel Parmenter, was actually shielding his girlfriend from the attack. Click here to read the complete story.

As some of you are aware, I have been putting in a lot of hours over the past few days as my department has been helping prepare resources for NIU faculty and assist with various logistics involved in dealing with the tragic events of the past week. For example, my office has created a handout for faculty on “Teaching in Times of Crisis” as well as compiled numerous resources for teaching after crisis. His office has also setup a new blog that they’ll be using as yet another way to communicate with NIU faculty and provide support resources moving forward.

You may or may not have heard on the news of the incredible efforts that are going on at the campus to respond to this tragedy and help faculty and students deal with the issues. A few of these efforts include:

• NIU administrators have been in close communications with Virginia Tech and University of Arkansas officials, among others.
• Many NIU offices, including Student Affairs and Counseling and Student Development Center, have been working night and day since the shootings
• 300 counselors will be on campus for the first day of classes [Mon., 2/25] with the goal of having 1 counselor in each class for the first day. The recent memo from the Provost provides more details.
• All NIU faculty as well as staff who work directly with students will be involved a 2 hour counseling session in preparations for welcoming students back to class. The complete schedule of sessions is here.

There are many other efforts going on behind-the-scenes that you may not ever hear about in the news but are further examples of why NIU is such a great university. After witnessing first-hand the response, I couldn’t be more impressed with the level of student support and safety on the campus. I’d have absolutely no reservations with someday sending my child to school at NIU.

The outpouring of support from other institutions as well as colleagues and friends has been overwhelming. Thank you to everyone who has expressed your support and been praying for the students, families, faculty and staff of NIU.

For those who have blogs or other sites and would like to help honor those who have lost their lives in this tragedy, NIU has made a memorial graphic available that can be posted on any site. The image is available here. When posting the image on your site, please make it a link to the NIU memorial page at http://www.niu.edu/tragedy/memorial.html

In response to the recent tragedy at NIU, my department is compiling information and resources for faculty at http://www.niu.edu/facdev/resources/crisis as the campus community begins the healing process. This page will be frequently updated in the days ahead to provide links to resources and details on special programs to be offered for NIU faculty.

In addition, our center has just launched a new blog that will also be using to help communicate information and updates to faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants in the days ahead. The new NIU Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center Blog is at http://facdev3.niu.edu/blog

As I posted earlier, the NIU campus is reeling from the recent shooting on campus. For those who are interested and weren’t able to watch it live, here’s a video of the press conference featuring comments from NIU President John Peters and NIU Police Chief Donald Grady responding to the tragic events.

As you most likely have heard by now, yesterday afternoon (2/14) there was a tragic shooting at NIU. If you’ve been watching the news, you likely know as many details at this point as I do. At the time of the shooting, I was in my office which was about 2 blocks away from Cole Hall, the building where the shooting took place.

Thanks to everyone who has called or emailed to check and make sure that I was ok. It was a chaotic scene on campus yesterday with media and emergency personnel flooding the scene. The news of what was happening on campus initially spread faster by word of mouth and cell phone text messages than any other means. It was a surreal experience to be watching events happening live on CNN while also watching it happen through an office window. Waking up the day after, it still is hard to believe that such a horrendous event could take place in DeKalb.

Here’s a video with a few photos from the past day at NIU:

In this episode of Teaching with Blackboard, Ishak Shaik, Olga Urban, and I discuss Scholar, the new social bookmarking tool integrated with Blackboard at Northern Illinois University | mp3 Audio | Podcast RSS | iTunes | Scholar Documentation | Scholar Wiki | SafeAssign Documentation