Blog Juice for Educational Technology

For my regular readers -
It’s been a rugged year healthwise. A week and a half ago, I had a bad fall. This happened in Ann Arbor while visiting my brother for his 50th birthday. Having the accident there was an added burden. I had surgery on my left l…

It’s probably not a great idea to imitate your kids in their recreational pursuits, but after having seen my older son absorbed in the puzzle page of the Newspaper working on some number thing, I tried it myself and very quickly got hooked on Soduku. (Or is it Sudoku?) I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. There is the challenge of figuring out how to do work through the puzzles and there is

School started here last Wednesday. Although it comes out each weekday and is free, today is the first day I picked up a copy of our student newspaper, the Daily Illini, which I read over my lunch break. This past weekend I had read a book review on Fr…

Through the magic of TiVo on Monday night I watched the second part of Martin Scorcese’s documentary, No Direction Home, about the early years of Bob Dylan and a songwriter and performer. I had caught the tail end of the first part the week before…

I suppose this is true of most fields or enterprises, but certainly with learning technology there seems to be an imperative to keep up with the profession and stay in tune with current developments. This need is somewhat at odds with my own persona — I have a preference to tread on paths that were familiar in the past but have long since lost their interest for the masses. They have moved on

When I applied to college in fall of 1971, we were only allowed to apply to 3 places (plus a school in CUNY such as Queens College and I believe also one school in SUNY, though I opted out of both of those options). We were a big public high school in…

When I was a brand new assistant professor, 1980-81, a bunch of my colleagues played bridge together at lunch. While this was mostly a social thing, it was also moderately competitive. One of the folks was an expert tournament player and he had made …

I found this piece from Scientific American, The Expert Mind by Phillip Ross, a really excellent read. There are several ideas in it that challenge our beliefs – principally on the innate smarts versus learned behavior dimension – this piece argue…

I’ve been feeling a bit odd the last couple of days, since the news of the Blackboard Patent and the lawsuit against D2L has come out. On the one hand, since I view it necessary when dealing with a vendor for an application as big and important as …

With the intense heat the last couple of weeks, I’ve been spending less time outside than I might otherwise do during the summer and in particular in the evenings and on the weekends I’ve been watching a fair number of movies. On our one set that…

It is interesting to see how TV depicts someone with substantial intelligence and education. Surely that must mimic our own stereotypes about such people. On my favorite show for the last couple of years, The West Wing, the resident genius was Jed Ba…

I’m mostly through reading Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind. I’ve got some issues with it and in some places I was hoping for some more depth than I found. But there are definitely some things to ponder in it and some things to try. On of …

I am now back from the WebCT Users conference, one day before it has concluded. I’ve got some meetings on campus today that I can’t miss so I left the conference early. I don’t want to do business with the Blackboard company in my blog; that d…