"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Wow! It has been almost 5 months since I last posted. It is not for lack of content, but the past 5 months have been busy. My wife and I moved to Virginia, I taught 4 courses online, and we traveled to New England to see the grandkids twice. So blogging dropped in priority…who knew… Read more Another Tools Post
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
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
I am still buzzing from all the ideas percolating from SLOAN International Conference on Online Learning, but today my buzz was from two totally unrelated (and yet totally related) blog posts from my PLN. At the conference, there were many of us who cautioned people to not fixate on the latest digital tools, because the… Read more Call Me Hammerhand
For six years now, Jane Hart has annually compiled the Top 100 Tools for Learning. She does this by crowdsourcing the list and having learning professionals in the field provide their top ten tools. One can submit their top ten tools via Twitter or Facebook or a survey. The 2011 list has had over 160,000 views on her… Read more Top Tools for Learning (at the present moment)
A week from tomorrow, I am scheduled to lead a Brown Bag lunch session on “Building Community and Connections Through the Web.” Bud Deihl and I were brainstorming this session (and he earlier also blogged about it). As we talked, we realized that “community” is very nuanced. The following slide emerged from our white board… Read more Communities and Tools
Stephen Downes is one of my heroes – a pioneer in online learning. However, I think he missed the mark with his post yesterday entitled “My Take on the Top 25“. Stephen took Jane Hart’s Slideshow of the Day list of the top 25 technologies – and commented on where they fit (or did not… Read more Living In the Real World
Image via Wikipedia Academics go by a different timeline than the rest of the world. Our year does not start on January 1, but rather on the first day of the Fall semester. There is a different feel to Virginia Commonwealth University today with smiling students jossling between buildings and classrooms. I threw the switch… Read more Happy New Year (and Zemanta)
Hello again from the Instructional Technology Council’s eLearning 2008 Conference. It was a full day today and I have already blogged about Myk Garn’s keynote this morning…which set the pace for an instructive day. The first presentation I attended was “fun” but fell flat for reasons I will discuss below. The other three were insightful… Read more Three Stellar Presentations and One Dud
Ken Rockwell, talking about photography, said, “Maybe because it’s entirely an artist’s eye, patience and skill that makes an image and not his tools.” An artist’s eye, patience, and skill… There have been some interesting blog posts this past week on tools. I was reading Geeky Mom last night and she noted: “Most of the… Read more An Instructional Technologist’s Eye…