January 2012
12 posts
“In the social learning space there is the potential for magic.”
– #canvascon Allison Weiss, talk “20 Tips for Collaborating in Canvas”
5 Colleges to Test Bulk-Purchasing of e-Textbooks →
We are on the cusp of a change in education: the move from printed to electronic textbooks. Today iris simply too difficult to locate electronic copies of the books being chosen by faculty. It isn’t worth the effort, given the slight saving in price. I speak from the perspective of a parent, buying textbooks for my son. I can’t find them all in electronic form. I don’t. Need...
“At this year’s meeting of GE’s top executives, presentation material...”
– “Some executives are scrambling to learn now to turn one on. It’s irresponsible not to use the tools of the day.”
Fast Company - February 2012 - Page 68
“The Brody rule: You can’t make decisions based on initial assumptions or...”
– Be willing to change paths without being hung up by an earlier decision or the time and effort expended on the current path. The Adrien Brody Rule
“Real learning, especially at the start of something new, often involves feeling...”
– Just because I say it doesn’t mean they learn it. - Crazy Teaching
It's Friday the 13th
Is your computer backed up?
“Change happens quickly; transitions happen gradually.”
– Our Information Technology department is in transition. At a recent meeting on vision, mission, goals and expectations, the issue of ambiguity came up. We don’t know what is going to happen if/when certain other things happen. What jobs will be redefined? Who will be reassigned? Will new...
Stop asking questions if you know the answer →
One way to quickly reduce plagiarism is to ask students to relate material to their personal experience. They cannot copy that from the Internet. Similarly, asking students questions in class that don’t have a “correct” answer gets them thinking at higher orders and learning material at a higher level. Want to get ideas of how to do this? Check out the article below.
Stop...
Reflexive Responses
Have you ever been asking for help and been interrupted part way through your question? Often the person interrupts you and gives you “the answer.” What triggers the answer that was given? I believe it is often a “reflexive response” to a word or phrase in you request. That word triggers a specific response, regardless of everything else in the request.
You may walk up...
Common Productivity Traps →
If you have trouble getting things done, maybe one or two of these ideas can help.
How to Manage Common Productivity Traps for Improved Productivity
December 2011
4 posts
“Two-thirds of our current students are taking at least one class online....”
– Great article on KnowU, a walled Facebook like platform that delivers online learning and much more. KnowU: Harrison College’s Social Learning Network May Just Be The Future Of Education | Edudemic
1. We need to understand what drives those students who are physically on campus to take online...
“Learning how to think … means being conscious and aware enough to choose what...”
– Technology Might Be Returning Us to Stone Age-Thinking
“We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning...”
– Libraries Make Room For High-Tech ‘Hackerspaces’ : NPR
“What grade would you give your teaching? What grade do you give your students?”
– Does it really make sense to give yourself a higher score than you give your students? Isn’t the purpose of teaching to support student learning? Isn’t the real measure of good teaching the student learning that comes from it? Has a teacher “covered” the material if the...
November 2011
2 posts
“Apple sell content as a reason to buy their hardware, Amazon sell hardware so...”
– Daniel Bentley: Amazon Faces The Cost Of Competing With Apple
“They also complained he did not know how to teach because he is blind.”
– Students gave bad reviews when a prof called on them “even when they didn’t raise their hands.” “They also complained he did not know how to teach because he is blind.” He was denied tenure based on the teaching evaluations.
Is it the students or the prof (or the...
October 2011
14 posts
“Encourage all your students, use the HELP button, play and let your students...”
– http://goo.gl/yBSNk
People get iPads for personal entertainment and then the iPad transforms how they do their jobs. This is a brief story of an engineer using it in place of his field notebook. I wish the article said what the app was. I am presently using Notes+ for note taking, when I need to...
“BbMHSupport: MHSupport is monitoring a client for latency issues with exams...”
– This is a tweet from Blackboard Managed Hosting Support (BbMHSupport). What an incredibly wonderful communication. They have gotten word that a problem MIGHT exist. They are monitoring it. They are sharing that fact with everyone else.
This problem might be unique to one client or might even be...
“The perverse and ironic issue with Blackboard is despite being a learning...”
– In this article he also says, “A learning space should be a space filled with life and be infused with an instructor’s spirit and passion.” I think he is definitely right in the second quote. I am not so sure about the first quote. But educational research supports the hypothesis that...
Waiting for my iPhone
My #iPhone4S will be delivered by 10:30 am. I thought about spending the night outside so I could have the real #Apple #fanboy experience and be first in line when #FedEx drives up.
“The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of...”
– Steve Jobs was a genius and all of the wonderful comments about him are well deserved. This New Yort Times article comes at from an entirely different perspective with a different conclusion.
Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia - NYTimes.com
“Visual Literacy for Managers - How Sketching enables Visual Problem Solving and...”
– There is a whole field of “Writing to Think” were writing is a tool that we use to better understand something. What about “Sketching to Think?”
Visual Literacy: An E-Learning Tutorial on Visualization for Communication, Engineering and Business
“College is an amazing safe space to fail. We are experimenting with new friends,...”
– Why Success Always Starts With Failure :: Tips :: The 99 Percent
Poor college kid? 'Library Pirate' wants to help... →
College textbooks cost too much. So how do students deal with this? They create an intriguing (and illegal?) system of removing protection from electronic versions of the texts and then share them on bittorrent. Students are like water: when stopped by an apparent barrier, all alternatives are attempted.
Think Different? Not in Higher Ed (Digital Badges) →
“What if higher ed lost its grip on the credential business? … Digital badges received a big boost last week, when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced a $2-million competition to create and develop badges and a badge system.”
This article from the Chronicle explains badges and how they could dramatically change higher education. Is this the first step...
The Big Pitfall of Online Education →
Reading the web this morning I came across two interesting statements. The first was that online learning is not as good as “an inspiring teacher” but it was available 24 hours a day while the teacher was only available a few hours a week and had to be shared with other students during most of that time. Then I came across this Mother Jones post that says motivation is the critical...
Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An HETL... →
What should we be teaching? How can we improve teaching? How can we evaluate teaching? In this brief interview L. Dee Finks brings together a number of his well-respected ideas about higher education teaching and learning. It is worth reading. It is worth implementing.
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
August 2011
7 posts
“Awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption = the steps toward change”
– Adoption of change is a multistep process. The steps are awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption, as mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/3wkc9fq. Another model lists awareness or attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction (http://tinyurl.com/6godgl) as the steps. Faculty have been...
“Be irrelevant. Be wrong. Be lazy.”
– http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=10766
Be irrelevant. Be wrong. Be lazy. That is David Labaree’s recommendations for new researchers in education.
Take a look at his blog post (http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=10766) and see what he means. Then compare it to your discipline and see if things are...
July 2011
2 posts
June 2011
3 posts
May 2011
3 posts
April 2011
4 posts
The Netflix Effect: When Software Suggests... →
What if finding courses in college was like picking a movie in Netflix or shopping on Amazon? This article from The Chronicle describes the system at Austin Peay. I started designing something like this for the University of Miami a couple years ago. Too many barriers to get it implemented here. Glad someone else is trying it.