"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Jim Lang is out with his Second Edition to Small Teaching. Anyone who follows me knows that I have liked this series, blogging about the First Edition here and the companion book that Flower Darby and Jim wrote on Small Teaching Online here. I first met Jim Lang at a local brainstorming session in Boston… Read more Small Teaching Revisited
On Monday evening, I was in a Zoom conference with some Fall students and fellow doctoral teachers doing an overview of the fall class. Towards the end of the hour, one student began to vent about the fact that we were not lowering out standards during a time of high stress. He could not believe… Read more Empathy, Stress and Teaching Philosophies
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
I was out walking today listening to Pandora, and Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall came on. One of my favorites … and it reminded me of a recent blog post by Seth Godin on The Learning / Doing Gap. As Godin noted, “To quote the ancient rockers, ‘We don’t need no… education.’ But… Read more Are You Another Brick?
An interesting conversation developed today in my class hashtag on Twitter. One student shared Mary Ludden’s post “How to connect in a connectionless environment…”, which suggested that three key areas of focus were: Be present. Be connected. Be real. For some reason, the old book Fish! and the Fish Philosophy jumped to my mind. I… Read more On Being There
…and I obviously mean the song…not the firearm (or arming of teachers!)! I have always been a fan of 38 Special…and this song played today on my Pandora stream as I was driving across town. (…and yes, I pulled over to take this picture so as to not violate the law!) Cool lyrics that have… Read more 38 Special Pedagogy
This past week, we started the Winter term of Northeastern’s EDU-6323 – Technology as a Medium for Learning. I have twenty-some students from a mix of K12, higher ed, health education, and corporate training in this Masters level course. In addition to work in our course LMS, we also are tweeting to the hashtag #EDU6323.… Read more Working the Future in EdTech
Last week, my Merrimack students were each exploring a different digital tool and reporting on it in their blogs. You can find their blogs here. Some I was familiar with, like Trell0, Flipboard, Slack and Canvas. Others were new to me, including Genially, Adobe Spark, and Google Keep. Between the posts and the comments, we… Read more Interesting Week on Digital Tools
This coming Friday, I will be in Boston to attend the Northeastern College of Professional Studies 2018 Faculty Development Conference. I have been teaching at Northeastern for 3 years, and enjoy both the classes and the progressive approach to education that is Northeastern. Given that I live 560 miles south of the campus, I usually… Read more Upcoming Conference
My last post noted that I had started Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. A former professional journalist, he has published five previous books… Read more Social Media Resistance is Futile