Learning In a Flat World

Stephen Downes is one of my heroes – a pioneer in online learning.  However, I think he missed the mark with his post yesterday entitled “My Take on the Top 25“. Stephen took Jane Hart’s Slideshow of the Day list of the top 25 technologies – and commented on where they fit (or did not [...]

This Saturday, I will be doing some guest lecturing in our Fast Track Executive MBA “mini-camp” here at VCU.  They have asked me to demonstrate “collaborative software.”  I am looking forward to this session, but the language they have used demonstrates how the world is evolving.  We really do not use “software” anymore for collaboration [...]

My wife and I are down in Augusta GA to celebrate my parent’s 60th anniversary.  Here is a picture from August, 1948, when my parents wed in Atlanta GA.  I came along 2 years later, followed by my two brothers.  They were typical of the Greatest Generation – hard working, dedicated, and committed to making [...]

Image via Wikipedia Academics go by a different timeline than the rest of the world.  Our year does not start on January 1, but rather on the first day of the Fall semester.  There is a different feel to Virginia Commonwealth University today with smiling students jossling between buildings and classrooms.  I threw the switch [...]

Following up on my post earlier this week on The Meaning of Free, I joined my colleagues Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl for some coffee and conversation – triggered by the announcement that Jott was out of beta and would now cost for service.  This is a service that we have grown to depend on, [...]

I have fallen in love with Pandora, a web based “radio station.” If you have not tried it, you register for free, and then put in a song you like, and Pandora takes that song and develops a playlist of similar songs. I have found that it has a vast repository of songs and have [...]

In getting set to start the Fall Semester teaching an online class, I have been totally revamping the previous course I taught (as you know from previous posts) and have been neck-deep in Blackboard. This week, I had a BFO – Navy lingo for a Blinding Flash of the Obvious! My BFO – Blackboard may [...]

I was checking out a cool visualization application that Jeff Nugent alerted me to in Twitter this morning – Twitter StreamGraph. I entered “elearning” and got the following graph: Since Twitter Streamgraph grabs the last 200 tweets that used the word “elearning”, it makes me wonder what happened on August 6th that jumped its usage [...]

I spent most of today mapping out the first four weeks of my Fall graduate course, Instructional Strategies Using the Internet – a totally online course with students scattered over three states. As this is now an Ed Leadership course, Jon Becker and I are taking it from a strictly Web 1.0 classroom focused course [...]

I love Twitter, because little nuggets continue to flow through my stream that stretch my thinking. One of those came from Scott Meech yesterday: Great question, Scott! I would be interested in knowing more about the workshop Scott was attending. How did they define “literacy”? It seems the word is popping up all over the [...]