"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
If one is looking for evidence that parallel universes exist, one need only look at this past week in my life. I had the opportunity to participate in two separate faculty development activities – one on our own campus and one at the University of Mary Washington. The two activities provide an interesting continuum of… Read more Parallel Universes
There was a very interesting article by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post this past Sunday entitled “Truth: Can You Handle It?” The article starts with a well-known witty saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “How many legs does a dog have, if you call a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t… Read more Truth 2.0?
David Warlick was live blogging in David Gratton’s session, where he drew an interesting picture from Gene Smith of the features of social networks. David said: “The Internet has been about community all along, Usenet, forums, chat rooms, geocities Home page and webring and e-mail. To say that things have changed is wrong. What’s changed… Read more The Facets of Social Networks
Workshops and articles about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) or Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are showing up frequently at conferences and blog postings. Wikipedia dates the first use of the term to November 4, 2004 – an eternity in computer years! I am working up a Lunch and Learn session in two weeks on PLEs, so… Read more “Personal” and Yet Not
Tom Peters has stated many times in his presentations that we should not “benchmark” our performance – base our performance off good past practices, but rather we should “futuremark” – be the future others will wish to benchmark. I was thinking about that this week as I conceptualized this coming summer’s faculty institute. Our Center… Read more Futuremark
A post this week by Wes Fryer caught my eye. He said: “I tire of dealing with folks who continue to not only cling to, but vigorously defend the anachronistic, 19th century teaching model of “asynchronous, non-interactive” face-to-face learning.” He had a draft matrix of teaching processes that specified activities as synchronous versus asynchronous and… Read more Blended Opportunities
Hello again from the Instructional Technology Council’s eLearning 2008 Conference. It was a full day today and I have already blogged about Myk Garn’s keynote this morning…which set the pace for an instructive day. The first presentation I attended was “fun” but fell flat for reasons I will discuss below. The other three were insightful… Read more Three Stellar Presentations and One Dud
One of my graduate students, Heather Buffkin, a kindergarten teacher at Mechanicsville Elementary School, found a 2006 blog post from Nellie Lide that I think captures the heart of what Web 2.0 is all about – from a very unique perspective. It is worth repeating: I was in the library yesterday just looking around and… Read more All I Really Need to Know About Web 2.0
In the business world, firms are always attempting to develop a competitive advantage over their competitors. A competitive advantage suggests that a firm is doing something that is distinctive and cannot be duplicated by others. With that as background, I observed two events in the last 24 hours that have me thinking about competitive advantage…and… Read more The Competitive Spirit
Jeff Nugent blogged a fascinating piece today on knowledge representations through tag clouds. It is a subject we had brainstormed before, but in this post, he shared his reactions to a presentation at ELI by George Siemens and Cyprien Lomas on their use of ManyEyes…a web application from IBM that looked exciting and that I… Read more Visualizations & Fine Print