"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Yesterday, Jeff Nugent and I had the opportunity to present at the 2008 Virginia School Board Association annual convention. We had around 40 people attend our session entitled “Email Is For Old People.” Two were school administrators and the rest were all school board members from around the state. These were our presentations slides: Vsba2008… Read more Email is For Old People
Laptops to many university students today are the equivalent of the spiral notebooks of my generation – a necessary part of attending college. Yet, students find mixed reactions when they fire up their laptop in a classroom. Friday, I had the opportunity to facilitate a brown bag discussion with a group of faculty from diverse… Read more Students and Laptops in the Classroom
(…or “It’s All Fracking Online!!!”) I was looking over the session schedule for the SLOAN-C Conference on Online Learning and was a bit disappointed in what I saw. Here, as in elsewhere throughout the blogosphere and more importantly the mainstream education journals, one sees the term “online learning” continually bantered around. Yet, it is a… Read more What is Online Learning?
As you know from my last post, I spent Friday with Jeff Nugent co-facilitating a full-day workshop at the INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium. It was rather exciting to spend a full day with a room full of mathematicians! I am still reflecting on what transpired, but wanted to share some thoughts on one aspect, triggered… Read more The Digital Divide – Students versus Faculty
Every now and then, you are reading a book or article, and a phrase jumps out and grabs you. It happened last night on page 198 of David Weinberger‘s delightful Everything is Miscellaneous. “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” Wow! David’s book is… Read more Swimming in the Complex
I think I am in trouble! In 9 days, Jeff Nugent and I are doing a full day training session at INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium in Washington DC. Jeff is starting off with a session on How People Learn. I then spend some time exploring the Net Generation. Then we tie it together with Teaching,… Read more Not Net Gen – Oh No!
Darren Draper had an interesting and thought provoking post Monday, which is no surprise from Darren. In “No Teacher Left Behind?,” Darren began by noting that he believed the positive message David Truss had posted in “Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?“, but then asked if: In spending so much time to create (shallow?)… Read more No Teacher Left Behind
One way to boost readership is to assign your own blog as a reading for your grad students! All kidding aside, I blogged last week about two speakers at the ECVA Conference. In “How Much Hand Holding?“, I discussed what Michael Wesch had said about the new literacies required for teaching in the 21st Century,… Read more Grad Students Reflection on My Blog Post
On Friday, I attended the ECVA Conference at Virginia Tech along with Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl. Two delightful companions with whom to do a road trip – we left Richmond at 5:30am and got back at supper time. At the conference, we had the opportunity to hear two excellent keynoters. Michael Wesch talked first… Read more How Much Hand Holding?
I know this is not really true, but all kids grow up thinking that their father taught them to swim by throwing them into the pool/lake/river/bay. And most of us did learn to swim! I was thinking about this as I watched (in a virtual sense) my graduate students swim for the first time in… Read more Using My Father’s Method