Do You Hold Your Breath While Writing Email?

Recently Huffington Post blogger Linda Stone wrote about what she calls "email apnea" (click on the link for the post) defined as holding one's breath while reading and responding to email.

She writes:

As the email spills onto my screen, as my mind races with thoughts of what I'll answer first, what can wait, who I should call, what should have been done two days ago; I've stopped the steady breathing I was doing only moments earlier in a morning meditation and now, I'm holding my breath.

And here's the deal. You're probably holding your breath, too.

Are you?

Get an Impartial Critique of Your Online Course! (Deadline Feb. 15)

If you teach online, the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course awards program invites you to submit your course for consideration. Whether you win or not, you'll receive a comprehensive evaluation by one or two anonymous judges from other colleges. Many instructors find the feedback to be invaluable in improving their courses.

All you have to do is fill out the self-evaluation form and submit it. Details are available here. You can also view previous winners here. Last year's exemplary courses include an online public speaking course and an allied health course.

The deadline for applications has been extended to Feb. 15, 2008.

Here's more about the program from director Adrian Alleyne:

When visiting user groups and talking with other groups in the Blackboard community, I meet a lot of faculty members. As we talk, often our conversation revolves around their online courses.

I'll ask, "How do you know if your online course is working?"

Often, if they don't say "Well, 'cause I can log in," they mention that, as faculty members, they receive little to no feedback on what's working and what needs improvement in their online courses.

That's one of the reasons we created the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course Program -- to provide faculty members with examples of exemplary courses and, more importantly, to give them detailed peer feedback on their courses.

We want more faculty members to be able to take advantage of this opportunity to receive detailed, expert reviews of their courses and the chance to have their courses showcased for thousands of peers.

To help facilitate increased participation in the program, we’ve extended the deadline for the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course Program to February 15, 2008.

A bit more about the program itself:

• The Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Course program is designed to help faculty members use e-Learning technology more effectively, by sharing best practices in effective online course design.
• Each course submitted to the program receives detailed peer review and feedback.
• The creators of courses deemed exemplary will be awarded a free trip to BbWorld '08 in Las Vegas (see official rules for details), so they can share their courses and best practices with the community and accept their ECP Award.

Punctuation & Grammar Tip Sheets Online!

The Butte College Center for Academic Success (CAS) has put almost a hundred one-page tip sheets online. The simple guides, filled with examples, deal with punctuation, the parts of speech, topic sentences, and much more.

If you teach online or use Blackboard to enhance a face-to-face course, you can point students to these helpful pages or give out the URL in class.

Since page contains frames, individual tip sheets don't have their own address. But they are numbered, and you might send students the URL and the particular numbered tip sheets you're assigning.

Click here for the tip sheets!