Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet.
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Episode 3 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, looking at the transition from monolithic vendor-provided enterprise solutions to more flexible and adaptive projects. Some of the segments are also used in episodes 1 and 2, but in order for this to work as a standalone piece, needed to be re-included here as well. When I do a longer supercut version, I’ll remove the duplicate clips.
Reclaiming Educational Technology - episode 3 from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.
Read MoreAfter consulting the available stats and readership metrics, I compiled the following likely-comprehensive list:
Episode 2 of Reclaiming Educational Technology, focusing on the DTLT unit at the University of Mary Washington, and how they are able to successfully foster a culture of innovation.
Reclaiming Educational Technology - fostering a culture of innovation from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.
Read MoreDuring the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event1, and off we went.
Read MoreAudrey Watters, presenting to Pepperdine University:
Ed-tech works like this: you sign up for a service and you’re flagged as either “teacher” or “student” or “admin.” Depending on that role, you have different “privileges” — that’s an important word, because it doesn’t simply imply what you can and cannot do with the software. It’s a nod to political power, social power as well.
Many pieces of software, despite their invocation of “personalization,” present you with a very restricted, restrictive set of choices of who you “can be.”
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UCalgary made the national news, with this segment titled “Calgary professor bans modern technology in his classroom”1.
I really don’t know what to say about this. My gut reaction is something like “if they’re tuning out and checking Facebook in class, that’s data about how the class is going, and banning technology would just hide the symptom rather than actually fixing anything.”
Also, the prof still uses her own tech in every class, with laptop and projector etc… fired up. So, it’s not about technology on its own.
Read MoreWhen we work with instructors, there are 3 general groupings, in terms of their comfort level and technology integration and innovation in their courses.
There is a small group that doesn’t use much technology, doesn’t integrate much in their teaching, and don’t pursue any strategies that would be considered “innovative.” From the outside, this group is often labelled as Luddites or dismissed as being laggards, but that is definitely not always the case. There are important innovations happening in this group, but they may not be visible to outsiders because they aren’t using the shared language of silicon valley innovation. Not every innovation requires high technology, or even technology at all. We can learn much from the Reluctant adopters, because many of them are reluctant to adopt mainstream technology because it doesn’t do what they need.
Read MoreI did some googling (DuckDuckGoing? that’s not a thing yet, is it?) on Michael Betzler, who was the director on the previous skateboarding documentary. Looks like he now is/was director at the olympic media consortium. Before that, he was involved in this bit of awesomeness.
I would have been the same age as my son is now, when this footage was shot. Wow. My dad had his insurance agency in the Lougheed Building downtown, so I would have been down there pretty regularly. Amazing, how much the city has changed in just a handful of decades…
Read MoreThis documentary is awesome.
So many 1986.
Read MoreI picked up a Swivl robot camera mount to kick off our “tech lending library” here in the EDU. It’s a pretty interesting piece of kit that will let anyone record a session without having to spend $100K retrofitting a classroom with PTZ cameras and switching boards. Slap this thing onto a desk or tripod, drop your iPhone (or iPad, or Android device) into the slot, plug the microphone cable into the mic jack on your device, and hit record. Done. It now automatically tracks the lanyard, which also has a built-in microphone that sends decent audio to the recording device. Nice.
Read MoreI’ve been noticing this for awhile under iOS7, but had been hoping it was a storage bug that would have been fixed in iOS8. Nope.
I “cheaped out” by only springing for the 16GB iPhone5, which means that I effectively get 12GB of space for stuff like apps, music, photos, etc… Shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve been hitting the cap pretty regularly now. I’ve resorted to deleting big apps, deleting all of the music that I’d put on the phone (thankfully the train ride is very short now), but still the danged phone reports no free storage.
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