"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
This week, Harold Jarche posted about his two decades of blogging and the four questions raised by Bryan Cantrill and Cynthia Dunlop: What blog entry was I most proud of? Which one was most difficult to write? What impact of blogging have I found surprising? What advice would I have for those getting started with… Read more Four Blogging Questions
Tomorrow, I once again will be teaching the Northeastern course EDU-6323 – Technology as a Medium for Learning. This course has gone through a number of changes since I first taught it in 2015. At it’s core is the GRAD-602 course that Jeff Nugent and I taught back at VCU in the last decade. I… Read more The Blogs I Read Now
Jeff Nugent, now Director of Learning and Applied Innovation at Colgate University, used to talk to Bud Deihl and I over coffee about synchronicity, noting that themes…particularly on the web…seemed to surface at the same time. The one for me this week was “little b blogging.” Cogdog started it off for me, noting that “…after… Read more A Little b Blogger
During the first week of ADLT 640 – The Theory and Practice of eLearning Integration into Adult Environments – we looked at the changing landscape of learning (with hat-tip to Jeff Nugent) and the Evolution of Elearning (with hat-tip to Ruben Puentedura) A term that came up in class when defining “e-learning” was organic…a natural… Read more Some Gems from Week 1 Blogging
At a meeting this week, my colleague Mary Secret was discussing her online classes. Mary has been an active member of our Online Advisory Committee and teaches both online and face-to-face in our Masters of Social Work program. She had done research in assessing online classes, and she suggested that it would be good if… Read more Voices of the Students
I mentioned in my last post that I was shifting my online instruction this semester from one based on Blackboard discussions to one based on blog posts. Over the weekend, my graduate students posted their first blog posts in response to an assignment. I am teaching a graduate class called Educational Technology for School Leaders. … Read more New Bloggers
My Fall 2010 online course kicked off this past weekend, and unlike face-to-face classes, the process of getting to know my students is slow but interesting. Three-quarters have now logged in, but by the nature of the design, it will be a week before many of them begin interacting with each other. My students are… Read more Blogging Into the New Academic Year
Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA. It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship. One of the highlights for… Read more Is the CMS Dead? (…and other UMW FA 2009 Fun)
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
A few weeks ago, Tom Peters used some recently deposited bear scat to illustrate his point about the current economic times: A little graphic but it got Tom’s point across. Sometimes crap is what crap is. I was thinking about this today when I found out that Edublogs has been adding advertisements in a stealth… Read more Bear Scat?