"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
We wrap up our Center for Teaching Excellence annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute tomorrow, and it has been a wonderful week of discovery for ourselves and our 18 participants. It is always fun to immerse yourself with colleagues in explorations of teaching practices built around the web and networked learning. From delicious to… Read more A Nice Touch
I was in an interesting exchange today across multiple levels of the web on which I would like to reflect further. It started when my friend Eduardo Peirano tweeted a link to me and two others about an article in the May 29th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “I’ll Never Do It… Read more The Only Thing to Fear
The delivery of courses online is nearly as old as the web itself, but as with any innovation, some faculty members have been early adopters while others have watched the development with both interest and skepticism. As publishing and managing content on the web has become easier, and as the delivery of online courses has… Read more CTE White Paper on Online Teaching and Learning
End of the semester, and a good time for reflection. For their final assignment, we asked our graduate class that Jon Becker and I taught on Educational Technology and School Leadership to reflect on their 15-week journey. Their reflections are captured in the Wordle above. We had twenty-five K-12 teachers who immersed themselves in the… Read more Personal Reflections
As I checked my Facebook account last night, a chat box popped up from a colleague from a former institution, Gwinnett Technical College, where I worked in Georgia. We chatted for a few minutes, and she relayed a nice complement. She had stopped by our old college to visit with friends and discussion turned to… Read more I’ll Find Out, Sir!
After two 3+ hour flights and one flight delay, I have crossed the country to attend Innovations 2009 in Reno NV. Innovations is an annual conference of the League for Innovation in Community Colleges, and this is my fifth or sixth. While I am no longer associated with two-year colleges, I still stay in touch… Read more At Innovations 2009
Over the last four weeks, Jon Becker and I have facilitated a journey for our online students into the heretofore unknown world (for them) of Web 2.0. Our students are all K-12 teachers from three different states in our Education Technology and School Leadership course. After two weeks of typical “schoolroom” topical exploration and discussion,… Read more It Is the Journey, Not the Destination … Nor the Goat
It is the last day of 2008, and as with many others, it is a time for reflection. 2008 was certainly a very different year from my 57 previous ones. Even though I had worked with computers for years and had engaged in online learning for the past dozen years, in many ways I was… Read more A Year in the Spiral
I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). For those who have not yet read it, it is a terrific book. Rather than focusing on intelligence and ambition as cause agents for success, Gladwell instead argues that success is more complex, linked to chance events and accidents of birth. Gladwell… Read more Am I An Outlier?
Yesterday, Jeff Nugent and I had the opportunity to present at the 2008 Virginia School Board Association annual convention. We had around 40 people attend our session entitled “Email Is For Old People.” Two were school administrators and the rest were all school board members from around the state. These were our presentations slides: Vsba2008… Read more Email is For Old People