"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
As a final assignment in the online course I team-taught with Lynda Gillespie, we had our students reflect on the journey they took over the 14 weeks of class. Our course is Educational Technology for School Leaders, a graduate course in the Ed Leadership masters at VCU. We were fortunate in this class to have… Read more End of Semester Reflections
Michael Bugeja’s opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job,” struck a nerve today. He started by noting that for “most of this decade, professors embraced the pedagogy of engagement, wooing students via technology and ignoring the costs because traditional methods, from textbooks to lectures, purportedly bored students who… Read more What Walls Need Tearing Down?
This week, we launched a project that has been in development for the past five months. The past few years have seen significant growth in the development of online learning in both K-12 and higher education settings. With an estimated four million college students taking at least one online course this year, and forty-four states… Read more Faculty Resource Guide for Online Teaching
I just finished reading Curtis J. Bonk’s new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that Wiley, the publisher, emailed me after I reviewed Dan Willingham’s book in a previous post and asked if they could send me Bonk’s book for… Read more Faculty Development in An Open World
Apparently not me. When I started blogging two years ago, I was averaging three posts a week. Now I am down to one a month for the past few months. Luckily, there are those who do blog, as my Google Reader affirms daily! I still enjoy reading blogs, but I have fallen out of the… Read more Who Blogs Anymore?
I have not posted for quite a while, with the primary reason being an upgrade of my old body. My colleague Jeff Nugent termed my pending knee replacement as an upgrade to Knee 2.0, which seemed very appropriate. So a little over two weeks ago, the good team at West End Orthopaedic retooled me with… Read more Knee 2.0
I just finished reading Dan Willingham’s (2009) book, Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. It is an excellent book full of practical suggestions to improve teaching, both online and in the classroom. Dan Willingham is currently Professor of Psychology… Read more Why Don’t Students Like School?
Yesterday was the final day of Blackboard World 2009. It was an enjoyable conference. I met some interesting colleagues who are all grappling with best ways to teach online. It was great seeing old friends from Georgia Virtual Technical College. Twitter as a backchannel was going strong, and I added quite a few new contacts… Read more Final Day of BbWorld09
I thoroughly enjoyed this second day at Blackboard World 2009. Bud Deihl and I presented this morning on weaving the social web into learning while still using the Blackboard learning management system for the things for which it was good. We used the class that Jon Becker and I taught last spring as an example. … Read more BbWorld09 Day Two
Just completed the first day at BbWorld 2009 in Washington DC. The setting has been wonderful – the new Gaylord Resort in National Harbor. Bud Deihl and I are attending together and it has been fun hearing his perspective on the various sessions. There has been an active Twitter backchannel linked here, so check that… Read more Unicorns in a Balloon Factory