Kirkwood News Wordle

I happened across the Wordle site today. It allows you to create a collection of words artistically (computer generated) arranged. You can input your own text or plug in an RSS feed. I took the feed from Kirkwood's News page as of this morning and here is the result with little tweaking. Lots of choices to make it better. The more prominent the word in the image, the more often it appears in the text. Makes me wonder who Gilbertson is - perhaps I ought to know. Now I want to try some Shakespeare or Kafka.



Edit: Okay, I couldn't help myself. Here is Hamlet:

A New Search Engine

I'm rather fond of Google, but it's fun to try new alternatives. Cuil.com (pronounced: 'cool') claims to be the World's biggest, and they do have a slick layout. There are some strange mismatches with images at times, but not in this example when I searched for Kirkwood. We came up right at the top! Now that's cool.

Online Student Orientation Video

New to Summer 2008, we began sending all online students a link to an orientation video. It's a quick five/six minute video highlighting all the "must know" information about taking an online course at Kirkwood. The video is then followed by a quick acknowledgment quiz that help us help students. That's the idea anyway. We will know more about how well it is working once classes are done for the Summer. But one benefit I know it is having already - when we send out emails to students and they bounce back, we are able to fix much-needed contact information in the system. This is so crucial!

If you are taking an online class, be sure to have your correct email and phone number listed in EagleNet.