"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
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… Read more The Meaning of Free
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… Read more My BFO of the Week
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… Read more What Happened August 6th?
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… Read more Backwards Translation
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… Read more What Makes Us Literate These Days?
A couple of tweets caught my eye today (and had Jeff Nugent and I in deep conversation!). followed by: In the first, Steve Rubel pointed all of us to a blog post by Leah Jones entitled Enabled Serendipity. Leah talked about how Twitter continually enables her to find and meet other people who are passing… Read more The Twitter Sphere – Two Uses
This fall, I will once again be teaching an online course for our School of Education on Instructional Strategies Using the Internet. The course I was given and taught last year was primarily a teaching-centered course that had little to do with the target audience, Masters students in Education Leadership. So, with the help and… Read more What Do Administrators Need to Know about Web 2.0?
Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died today. He was diagnosed just two years ago with pancreatic cancer and told he had months to live. I never met Randy, but I along with millions heard his “Last Lecture” that he gave to his faculty and students…and kids. It was a message of life,… Read more Rest in Peace, Randy
Where has the week gone? I posted a blog post on Sunday and now it is Thursday afternoon, and I have not felt compelled to blog since. Part of the reason is that I have been pretty busy at work laying out the schedule for our Center’s fall workshops (nearly a hundred to schedule). But… Read more Still Mentally on Vacation
I spent the last five days offline…going north to rescue my wife from 4 weeks of grandmothering in New England with our two daughters and (one each) grandchildren. She had a ball, but was also pretty tired and ready to come home. So arriving back home, I turned on the computer for the first time… Read more Offline for 5 Days