"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
One of my favorite authors is David Poyer. Dave was a year ahead of me at Annapolis, and in my first (or Plebe) year, he was a third-class midshipman in the same company I was in – 8th Company. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1971, and later received a master’s degree from George… Read more Poyer AI Book
I just finished reading Ethan Mollick’s interesting book: Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (2024). I think that he makes a strong case for co-opting AI into our lives…but not turning our lives over to AI. In other words, he noted that we need to keep the human in the loop, as the image above… Read more The Human in the Loop
I have been a Khan fan ever since he founded Khan Academy in 2006 – the same year I moved to VCU as an online specialist in their Center for Teaching Excellence. I found Salman Khan’s latest book thoughtful and on point. Through nine parts and multiple short chapters, he lays out a vision of… Read more Khan’s Brave New Words
I ordered a couple of books on LXD this week as I develop a new mini-course for Northeastern tentatively titled Social Media Experience Design. This two-credit course will look at the intentional design of social media into learning experiences from a learning science perspective. The first book I read was Kiersten Yokum’s The Little Book… Read more A Quick Read for Corporate Instructional Designers
It has been over a month since I last blogged … a combination of finishing up a proposal development course with five doctoral students and updating my social media course. So Derek’s book came along at a good time. I just finished Intentional Tech: Principles to guide the use of educational technology in college teaching,… Read more Mindful and Intentional Tech
I learned an interesting turn of phrase today while reading Steve Wheeler’s new book Digital Learning in Organizations: Help Your Workforce Capitalize on Technology (2019). “Knowmad” I am about a third of the way through this book…and I am enjoying it. I have followed Steve Wheeler (a.k.a. @Timbuckteeth) for a decade now on both his… Read more Encouraging Knowmads
I have subscribed to MIT Technology Review for almost a decade…it remains one of my best sources for what is emerging in technology. In a recent article, Bill Gates noted his ten favorite books about technology…and first on the list was Max Tegmark’s (2017) Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Apparently… Read more AI, Life 3.0, and Our Collective Future
It is a few years old now, but I finally got around to reading Jim Lang’s excellent book Small Teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning (2016). Jim defines small teaching as “…an approach that seeks to spark positive change in higher education through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching… Read more The Small Teaching Approach
Thanks to Bryan Alexander’s lead, a bunch of us are reading Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s interesting and somewhat zany look at the future of technology – Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. After reading what I would consider to be thoughtful explorations of the future, such as Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable, Thomas… Read more Reading Soonish
After finishing Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe, that I discussed in my last post, I have moved to a book I have meant to read for years – The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer. Self confession time. I do read a lot, but not all my books… Read more Courage to Teach Online