"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
I just finished reading my first ebook on my new NookColor: Nick Bilton‘s I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works. It was an interesting experience, done primarily on the Nook, but thanks to the B&N apps, I also could read it on my PC and on my Droid phone, which I did. … Read more The School of Me
At a meeting this week, my colleague Mary Secret was discussing her online classes. Mary has been an active member of our Online Advisory Committee and teaches both online and face-to-face in our Masters of Social Work program. She had done research in assessing online classes, and she suggested that it would be good if… Read more Voices of the Students
Last Friday, I facilitated a brown bag lunch session on “World Class Quality in University Coursework.” If interested in listening to the conversation, I am linking to an Echo360 recording of this session. Government officials, employers, accrediting agencies, university administrators, institutional researchers, faculty, faculty development specialists, and even students all have something to share concerning… Read more What Does Quality Mean in the Classroom?
Over the past five weeks, the graduate students in my Educational Technology and School Leaders class embarked on a journey into cyberspace – a first for many of them and one for many of them as mystical as the illustration here. Five weeks ago, my students were self-described technophobes. They were worried not only about… Read more Our Class Technology Journey
I mentioned in my last post that I was shifting my online instruction this semester from one based on Blackboard discussions to one based on blog posts. Over the weekend, my graduate students posted their first blog posts in response to an assignment. I am teaching a graduate class called Educational Technology for School Leaders. … Read more New Bloggers
My Fall 2010 online course kicked off this past weekend, and unlike face-to-face classes, the process of getting to know my students is slow but interesting. Three-quarters have now logged in, but by the nature of the design, it will be a week before many of them begin interacting with each other. My students are… Read more Blogging Into the New Academic Year
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… Read more Off to Elon U Tomorrow
A few years back, the online comic XKCD put out a Map Of Online Communities. I used it as an icebreaker in more than one presentation or online class. Now, Ethan Bloch has updated this view of the social media landscape with a new map: . I love the fact that even the lolcats got… Read more An Updated Social Networking Map
Wired Magazine in the August issue has a cute article discussing the future that never happened. When I was growing up, I watched the Jetsons and Johnny Quest every week, but the cold reality is that my flying car and jet packs just have not materialized. But while that is true, the world has changed… Read more Learning Swarms?
Over the weekend, I finished reading Bill Kist’s book The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. Of course, given my past posts, this book really resonated with me. But I think it is a good resource for any faculty exploring the use of social media in instruction. One of the things I… Read more Bill Kist Book