"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Darren Draper had an interesting and thought provoking post Monday, which is no surprise from Darren. In “No Teacher Left Behind?,” Darren began by noting that he believed the positive message David Truss had posted in “Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?“, but then asked if: In spending so much time to create (shallow?)… Read more No Teacher Left Behind
On Friday, I attended the ECVA Conference at Virginia Tech along with Jeff Nugent and Bud Deihl. Two delightful companions with whom to do a road trip – we left Richmond at 5:30am and got back at supper time. At the conference, we had the opportunity to hear two excellent keynoters. Michael Wesch talked first… Read more How Much Hand Holding?
I know this is not really true, but all kids grow up thinking that their father taught them to swim by throwing them into the pool/lake/river/bay. And most of us did learn to swim! I was thinking about this as I watched (in a virtual sense) my graduate students swim for the first time in… Read more Using My Father’s Method
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
I spent most of today mapping out the first four weeks of my Fall graduate course, Instructional Strategies Using the Internet – a totally online course with students scattered over three states. As this is now an Ed Leadership course, Jon Becker and I are taking it from a strictly Web 1.0 classroom focused course… Read more Backwards Translation
I blogged yesterday about the role we early adopters need to play in bringing social media to the masses. Got some very thoughtful comments back from a lot of folks. In particular, Colin Warren of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, made a follow-on post at his blog, in which he referenced Geoffrey Moore’s book Cross… Read more Bridging the Education Chasm
I did not attend NECC 2008 but I have found some of the blogs and tweets fascinating. It seems there is a bit of angst in the edublogger world by some of the people I follow and find insightful. Quite a few people were disappointed and at odds on next steps. I am probably taking… Read more Not New To You Does Not Make It Not New
Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I were brainstorming about workshops to offer next fall to the VCU faculty, and we began to take apart our normal offerings of the various “tools” associated with instructional technology. Jeff began to draw on the whiteboard (yes…we still go low tech at times….) and laid out the following visualization… Read more Moving Beyond Access and Convenience to Learning
I should be working on my annual report – it is due in a week…but I am reflecting instead on the bigger picture. Last year, I reported on the number of faculty served, the number of consultations conducted, the number of workshops presented, the number of conference presentations conducted…all good stuff and all typical in… Read more Annual Report Reflections
Michele Martin had a wonderful post today that mirrored some reflections of my own. In “If You Behave Like a Disease, People Develop an Immune System“, she talks about how the “viral” model we use for thinking about spreading information on the web may not be the best way of thinking about how to reproduce… Read more Metaphors for Web 2.0