Learning In a Flat World

Our team from the CTE at Virginia Commonwealth University, Jeffrey Nugent, Bud Deihl, and myself, head down to North Carolina tomorrow to present at the 2010 Elon University Teaching and Learning Conference: Connectivity in Higher Education.  Jeff is leading a presentation with me on new opportunities afforded by networked learning, while I am teaming with [...]

I am currently reading Bill Kist’s new book, The Socially Networked Classroom. While written for all levels of education from elementary through postsecondary, he focuses on the use of social media in classes from middle school and above.  As I continue to work with K-12 teachers in my graduate course, this book addresses many of [...]

Over the weekend, I started a little project that will last a LOOOONNNNGGGG time.  My daughters have given me a scanner so that I might digitally scan some of the 2400+ 35mm slides that are sitting in storage up in the attic.  Works great, though it takes 8 minutes to do 4 slides.  (You do [...]

Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA.  It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship. One of the highlights for [...]

End of the semester, and a good time for reflection. For their final assignment, we asked our graduate class that Jon Becker and I taught on Educational Technology and School Leadership to reflect on their 15-week journey. Their reflections are captured in the Wordle above. We had twenty-five K-12 teachers who immersed themselves in the [...]

Like any major institution, there is sometimes overlap in training opportunities being offered around campus.  We noticed this morning that I have a workshop on blogging today and Technology Services has one next week.  Interestingly, mine is about web publishing and instructional opportunities (with 4 people signed up) while the other is about the mechanics [...]

Ada Lovelace (per Wikipedia) “is today appreciated as the ‘first programmer’ since she was writing programs-that is, manipulating symbols according to rules-for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.”  Wikipedia [...]

I should be working on my annual report – it is due in a week…but I am reflecting instead on the bigger picture. Last year, I reported on the number of faculty served, the number of consultations conducted, the number of workshops presented, the number of conference presentations conducted…all good stuff and all typical in [...]

Doing a Lunch and Learn session tomorrow on PLEs. At Jeff Nugent’s suggestion, I tailored it around my own journey this year in building my PLE. Having a little problem with SlideShare embed…so above is the presentation but click here to view. We will see which generates more conversation, my face-to-face session or this blog [...]

Emile Zola said, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” Yet work is not work when joy is evident. . These thoughts came to mind as I watched my Center for Teaching Excellence partner, Bud Deihl, developing his first draft VoiceThread. Each of us in the Center has [...]