Historical Archives
I remember when blogs finally got on CNN’s radar. They had blog pundits. They dedicated a portion of a show to blogs, with a blog correspondent. They looked really stupid because none of them had actually read blogs much less written one, so they didn’t really get them. They’re slightly better about that now, but…
The above video was one of two videos we showed near the beginning of our presentation for Northern Voice. Nancy White started off by having everyone draw pictures together. The idea was to have them feel a little uncomfortable working together. I did get upset with Barbara for making a squiggle where I didn’t want…
For the last few days, I’ve been tweaking my class blog site in response to what my co-teacher and I see as the needs for the site, not just in terms of organization (though that’s important), but also to continue to foster a good online community there. I successfully implemented several cool features that left…
Yesterday, I got a request from our school district to fill out a survey about “21st Century Learning.” I did. They asked a lot of the right questions. Although they did ask about whether all children should have laptops, most of their questions were about whether web 2.0 tools should be used and how and…
The New York Times reports that PayPal has come out with a service for teens and parents, where teens can have an account, spend money and parents can monitor all of it. I think this is a great way for parents (*cough* like me *cough*) to have an easy way to pay allowance and for…
I was waiting for some comments to come in before I wrote about this article on online courses from IHE. Sure enough, the curmudgeons were first to the punch, noting that online courses vary in quality and gosh, what about cheating. Thankfully, reasonable people pointed out that F2F courses vary in quality and gosh, students…
Okay, I’m just going to throw this out there. I’m ambivalent about digital humanities. I know what you’re thinking–that as a technologist and a humanist, I’m the last person on earth who should be skeptical about such things. But the more I read in blogs and elsewhere, the more kind of creeped out I get.…
There’s been a fair amount of digital ink spilled already about this report from CDW about faculty, IT staff, and student perceptions of technology use in teaching. My response was, “Duh.” The biggest barrier to use: lack of knowledge on the part of faculty. The problem is, as I’ve said over and over, is that…
Laptops. I have seen this attitude of banning electronic devices in the classroom. I sympathize. It is somewhat disconcerting to stare out at a classroom full of screens and not know for sure if students are paying attention. Although I think professors being replaced by laptops is extreme, I do think that faculty aren’t thinking…
Over my vacation, I read Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. I picked this book up because Mr. Geeky and I got into an argument about driving in traffic. Specifically, he did not like the way I was driving in traffic on I95. This, as well as issues around map reading, is our main argument these days.…
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