"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Jane Hart has issued her call for voting for the top tools we as professionals use for learning. I have voted in the past, as I noted in 2014 (here) and 2o12 (here), and I have always enjoyed the resulting Top One Hundred Tools list that Jane curates from the votes. Her list from last… Read more My Evolving Top Tools
I have read about half of a recent book from George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee – Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation (2014). Their premise is that the innovations of the past decade have been nothing short of astonishing – yet they are just the warm up acts for what is to… Read more Digital Leadership
Monday, Lindsey Sudbury, a member of Academic Technology Services here at Northeastern University, and I did a 90-minute interactive presentation to our English department at their End of Term Retreat. It was a 30,000 f00t fly-over of a variety of digital tools that might add engagement in writing classes, including social media tools. Our slides… Read more A Look Back Six Years
Jane Hart tweeted that her 8th annual survey of learning professionals was out for her Top Tools for Learning 2014. I always find this list interesting and a great resource to share with my students. I regularly use quite a number, and have at least played with all but 18 of the top hundred. Last… Read more My Current Top Tools
Back on March 5th, my colleague Enoch Hale posted a challenge on his blog: “I want to pose an open challenge: Post an out-of-the-box question about teaching and learning each day for 30 days.” I took him up on his challenge…though I suggested “thirty work days”…to which he agreed. Over the past six weeks, we… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 30 – The Questions I Did Not Ask
I have been enamored with the concept of bricolage for some time now. French for “tinkering”, bricolage is the building of something from what is available. Sherry Turkle applied this to programming, suggesting less an exhaustive specification than a iterative growth process with re-evaluation loops. Turkle writes: “The bricoleur resembles the painter who stands back… Read more 30-Day Challenge – Day 24 – Bricolage and Course Design
My colleague here in our Center for Teaching Excellence – Enoch Hale – intellectually pushes me all the time…and that is a good thing. Enoch has become a valued addition to co-teaching GRAD-602 with Jeff Nugent this semester. If you have listened to some of our podcasts, you have heard him. Like many of our… Read more 30 Day Question Challenge – Day 1- Complicated or Complex
I am not at the Educause Learning Initiative 2014 conference this year, but I always look forward to the New Media Consortium‘s annual Horizon Report, in which a team of colleagues from around the world attempt to forecast six key trends, six significant challenges, and six emerging technologies that will impact teaching and learning in… Read more On the Horizon
This past weekend, I was in my old hometown of Atlanta for the first Teaching Professor Technology Conference. With only 650 people attending, the conference had an intimate feeling to it. This was one of the first conferences I have attended in which I knew very few people, but friends were quickly made…and I added… Read more Integrating Teaching and Technology
Muhammad Saleem sent this cool infographic based on the New Media Consortium’s 12 emerging technologies to watch.