"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
I loved the second chapter of Tom Friedman’s new book, Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations. The chapter title is “What the Hell Happened in 2007?” Good question. It has only been a decade since 2007, and given that I joined the VCU Center for Teaching… Read more Only Been One Decade
The Pause Button… If you have used technology as long as I have, you really do not think about the symbology associated with certain actions. We all have grown accustomed to the two vertical bars that indicate PAUSE: I have started reading Tom Friedman’s new book Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to… Read more The Pause Button
Back in 2014, one of my colleagues, Enoch Hale, posted the following blogging challenge: “I want to pose an open challenge: Post an out-of-the-box question about teaching and learning each day for 30 days.” What followed was an amazing six weeks (we decided to do 30 work days) of out-of-the-box brainstorming. Our collective questions… Read more The Metaphor of Sloths
In that short period between end of Spring semester, our Online Course Development Initiative, and the start of my summer teaching, I dove into some books: The first was assigned reading. The VCU Center for Teaching Excellence in which I have been a member for the past 8 years is merging with our Online@VCU staff… Read more Two Weeks, Three Books, and A New Role
Mary Meeker, a venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, recently presented at Stanford University on web trends. Her presentation contains eighty-eight slides full of interesting and thought-provoking information. Her message is that the evolving web forces us to re-imagine everything. For those of us in faculty development, it is suggestive of changes that… Read more Re-Imagination of Everything
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
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?
An advertisement…but an interesting one: So how are we in higher education adapting to this revolution? Is the status quo even possible? (…and thanks to Jill Baedke for passing this to me…)
Michael Bugeja’s opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job,” struck a nerve today. He started by noting that for “most of this decade, professors embraced the pedagogy of engagement, wooing students via technology and ignoring the costs because traditional methods, from textbooks to lectures, purportedly bored students who… Read more What Walls Need Tearing Down?
I just finished reading Curtis J. Bonk’s new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that Wiley, the publisher, emailed me after I reviewed Dan Willingham’s book in a previous post and asked if they could send me Bonk’s book for… Read more Faculty Development in An Open World