“Email listservs are the place on the internet for lively and active online communities…” well, it was something I might have said in 1989, 1992, or even 1995. Pondering where listservs are now, I quickly reached for a dinosaur metaphor, but felt that is rather cliche, so I dud around WikiPedia and found the story […]
I’ve got time on my hands in the Phoenix Airport. My short flight in the small commuter jet to Aspen is delayed because… ahem.. one of the crew has now shown up yet. Yikes. Beyond munching on over priced food that one does not really need, and not wanting to read your magazine not wanting […]
The recent T.H.E. Journal article 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have has already bounced around the blogs I scan, many with some strong opinions about the value or lack value in such a list. The Edtech Posse Podcast #3 gave it a thorough roundup, and I concur with their skepticism about such lists which are narrowly focused on tools rather than the craft.
I am not writing strictly about the list but cannot resist a few barks… When it first passed through my feed reader I passed up looking deeper– Come on, is it truly essential to know how to use a Zip disk? I have a whole drawer full of dusty zips. Much of the “skills” listed are going to have a shelf life of maybe another year or two.
What is more important are the skills in being able to re-skill oneself or to move away from “mastery” to knowing where to find fellow practitioners. There was a gaping hole in terms of the social networking tools, the personal creation tools, the information consumption skills that are to me much more important, much more relevant now than how to create a spreadsheet to average numbers.
Holding back no barb, John Dvorak is a self proclaimed Creative Commons Humbug: Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten […]
Tagging is in. You’re It! From tagging web sites to bookmarks, to photos it is changing the way we look at and organize large globs of information. It is spreading to other content, like news, music, movies, heck, maybe even learning content… Yes, folksonomy is hip and happening, eveolving and causing disruption. However, it thrives […]
I am not trying to start a boycott, but am making my own pointless statement about my fatigue with the format and limited outcomes of attending the large educational technology conferences. I’ve barked and moaned previously (see “I’m Bored As Hell And I’m Not Gonna… zzzzz”) about the staleness and sad irony of the 50 […]
C’mom, admit it, you’ve ego surfed… typed your name into Google to see what you come up with, or if your site is in the top ten. No? Just me?
Well here is a new game to play, see what ads a Google search leads your name to.
This all came about since a colleague mentioned that the prolific and generous linking Stephen Downes had posted something on his “home page” about me. An…. ahem… full URL is always better, but just being curious, I used the search box on Stephen’s site which uses Google search. I lost interest in combing the results, but got curious about all the AdWord references to me.
And curiosity got the better of me so a clicking I went ….
A recent headline in the business section our local paper was headlined “Technology Transforms Classrooms”. It was about the use of personal response systems those devices where students use small wireless “clickers” to send a response to a central sensor that can do things like display summative statistics or store them for analysis. Now I […]
