Last week, exactly a week ago in fact, a faculty member from the education department and I led a workshop on Blackboard. Only, we tried not to talk about Blackboard very much. What we tried to talk about was teaching. Actually, we tried to get the faculty in the room to talk about teaching. And,…

I’m not sure how I feel about this announcement by the Chronicle. I mean, really, is technology so overwhelming that people need therapy to deal with it? I need therapy sometimes to deal with people’s lack of knowledge about technology. I have a more thoughtful post about some things I’ve been thinking about along these…

One of the things that drives me crazy when people talk about teaching and technology, is that they focus too much on the technology, on the nuts and bolts of how a particular tool works, without thinking about pedagogical goals. I always start from the goals and then look around at the tools I have…

So, I’m back in my hotel room after spending the last two days at the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy. It was crazy for me to come here. I worked all day as judge of elections on Tuesday, from 6:30 a.m to 9 p.m. I left as soon as the votes were counted and…

Up until this academic year, I used to hold workshops every week. The topics ranged from the practical (burning dvds and cds) to the esoteric (the philosophy of open source software). At first, the sessions were well attended. At their peak, I had as many as 25 people attending. Most of the people coming to…