"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Retirement has brought with it the luxury of time devoted to reading. While I enjoy both science fiction and mysteries, I also read history and non-fiction books as well. I am currently reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yural Noah Harari (2014). Although it has been out a decade, I still find it… Read more Impactful Books
Over the years, I have returned several times to the concept of “truth”. In 2008, I blogged about “Truth 2.0,” where I explored the challenges of determining truth and reliability of information in the age of Web 2.0, prompted by Monica Hesse’s Washington Post article entitled “Truth: Can You Handle It?”. I discussed how students… Read more Truth 4.0
Like many of you, I have been reading blog posts that summarized last year and looked forward to the new year. “New Year Resolutions” are always kind of interesting, particularly since so few are kept! So I found Laura Blankenship’s post interesting, as she looked at the word “resolutions” itself – which flows from the… Read more Verbs
Janus was an ancient Roman god of beginnings, transitions, time, passages, and endings. He has two faces, as he always looks both at the past and the future. The past year has certainly been a passage, with the global pandemic and the recent American elections…and as the year draws to a close, looking back and… Read more A Janus 2020 Look
Over the past six months, I have been teaching courses on social media and education technology against the backdrop of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the social unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd on May 25th. In both tweets and posts, students have woven these two forces of change into our weekly topical… Read more My Own White Bias
My #EDU6333 Social Media in Education course is winding down after a very engaging 12 weeks, so as the students reflect this week, a good time for me to do the same. What a twelve weeks! While lockdowns and jumps online happened during my Winter EDU6323 course, I really did not see many impacts because… Read more My Coronavirus Spring
I have resisted the “20-20” meme that seems prevalent…though I did like Seth Godin’s take in “Seeing Clearly in 2020“: For most of us, 2020 is going to be a turning point. Because it’s another chance to live tomorrow over again. A chance to reset, to decide what’s important and what’s worth working for. Not… Read more Who Am I?
Yesterday, Goldie Blumenstyk of the Chronicle of Higher Education shared a link in her weekly newsletter to The Future of Work in America, a report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). The future of work has been a topic of interest to me for the past decade, particularly in reference to the doctoral courses in… Read more Opportunities in The Future of Work
This past week in EDU6323, we explored blogging as an educational process. My students shared their favorite blogs from Teach 100 and reflected on the fit of blogging in this hyperactive Snapchat world. For many, they had previously seen blogs as entertaining, but had not considered them as educational. Some were impressed that niche concerns… Read more The Next Ten Years
Someone who always gets me thinking is danah boyd. Her post “Toward Accountability: Data, Fairness, Algorithms, Consequences” is the latest to prod my brain! Her post raises the issue of how data collection and data manipulation are not neutral activities…that the decision to collect or not collect and the thought process behind the analysis of… Read more Value Added versus Liability Sponge