Rantings

To be honest I was only half serious when I started this rant on Twitter yesterday. You see my Thursday’s are really long, my first class starts at 10:00am and my last class ends at 10:00pm, so I try to keep myself entertained and mentally active. Twitter I discovered is a perfect tool for this. …..

(A story of Twitter, academia, and old journalism trying to be new but failing.) Okay first read this article on CNN about the new whitehouse.gov website, okay you can actually just skim the article and skip to the last three paragraphs. Yes, that’s me being quoted in that article, and yes you are correct that …..

I have been thinking a lot lately about Howard Rheingold’s “Attention 101” and “Attention 102” videos, this is somewhat inspired by his recent reposting and discussion as he begins class, but also because I am also beginning a new semester. I think regardless of what discipline or subject matter we teach, we could do with …..

The cycle goes something like this: textbook companies make a lot of money selling books to college students, used bookstores cut in on profits by buying and selling these books to students, textbook companies raise prices to recoup profits and publish new editions every year attempting to muscle out the used book market. But, then …..

Sometimes you write a post thinking it is no big deal, just a reference to something, and all of a sudden gets more interest than you would think. So it went with the prior post about Boston College no longer offering campus email accounts to students. In my mind I thought this was a no-brainer. …..

File this under bad pedagogy and irony, a bit like teaching a statistics class but not letting the students use any numbers.

And the word for obvious conclusion of the week goes to John William Pope Center for Higher Education which concludes that sharing syllabi online is a good idea. Really? You’re kidding sharing knowledge actually helps? Seriously is there a reason to not do this? Are you really going to suggest that education is fostered by …..

Updated Yesterday I decided to post the working syllabus for my grad class for the upcoming semester in an attempt to elicit feedback before I make some final choices. I then posted that I had done this twitter. Not surprisingly I received some useful feedback. What I hadn’t anticipated was interest in taking this class …..

For those who requested it, here is the information and links to the talk I recently gave to the Texas Community College Teacher’s Association. Approaching Digital Literacy: Creating a Networked Culture on Campus (Texas Community College Teachers Association 2008). (You can download the high quality Quicktime Movie or the lower quality mp4.) Below are the …..

Lately I have been spending more time than usual thinking about the future of education, not just in terms of how to use Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, but more broadly how the ubiquitous nature of knowledge and information is going to transform the institution of higher education. Now granted this is a large …..