In some cases, “ed-tech” is shorthand for some very cool tech,. In some cases, “education” is just shorthand for a category within a larger app market. Sometimes all this talk about a definition of “ed-tech” prompts a great conversation about what we mean by learning in a mobile, networked world. And sometimes when we talk about “ed-tech,” we’re still talking about crappy tech and crappy education and crappy pedagogy and crappy outcomes.
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half-baked post alert
This is nothing new, but I’ve been internally coming back to it often enough that it’s worth saying out loud.
We’ve been working on identifying and documenting the needs of our campus community, with respect to an eLearning environment - with the unspoken goal of finding The One True Tool that will serve everyone’s needs. The further-unspoken-message being that everyone is (or should be) fundamentally the same, and that by finding and encouraging a single set of “best practices” that we’ll be able to help the lesser-able (i.e., different) people to adapt (i.e., conform). There are reasons to encourage conformity - it’s easier to support, easier to implement, cleaner to put into an RFP, etc…
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Best. Mother’s Day card. EVAR. I’m guessing they were working on similes in school that day…
Read MoreI just saw this amazing tool mentioned on BikeCalgary - an interactive map that lets you plot your bike commute route and then display bike-related incidents (I won’t call them accidents, because they’re not).
Turns out, my commuting route has only had 2 reported incidents in the last several years - both on a narrow stretch that causes me constant grief with drivers thinking they need to pass me even though it’s not safe to do so.
Read Moregreat video on city biking, by kona bikes (who made the bike that really got me back into biking big time )
so good. ride a bike. polar bears are epic.
Read MoreDave Winer linked to an interesting post by Om Malik linking to an article on burning out by Marissa Mayer. How’s that for a linktribution chain?
They are talking specifically about corporate and startup culture, but the discussion got me thinking about universities in general, and edtech specifically. What is it about edtech that feels so burnout-inducing?
Read MoreThe tech vision video for project glass was released today. The technology looks interesting, if a bit creepy.
But what hits me is that this isn’t about augmenting your reality. It’s about augmenting google’s documentation of everything you do, so they can mine it to sell to advertisers. The implications of a service actively monitoring and interacting and documenting and monetizing everything I do and say are just mind boggling.
Read MoreI’ve been pretty mindful about avoiding trackers on my site. I don’t use an external web analytics package (I do have the apache logs, crunched by AWStats, but nothing anywhere near the level of a Google Analytics or even WordPress Stats tracking). But, websites connect to other websites. That’s kind of their job. And other websites track stuff. So, even a website that doesn’t directly track people, by using YouTube videos and other hosted media, exposes people’s activity to those who track them.
Read MoreI’ve been playing around with gephi today, to see what I could come up with to display the discussion threads from my research data. Lots of manual data entry later, and I’ve got this:
and this:
WordPress sites are shown in red, Blackboard discussion forums in blue. So far, just a pretty picture, but I’ll hopefully be able to coax out a diagram or two that shows the difference in interaction patterns between the two platforms…
Read MoreIt’s fashionable to rail against the LMS, to lament the shackles of institutional constraint and to advocate for abandoning the concept in exchange for a DIY nirvana. There’s definitely something to the no-LMS movement, because it emphasizes individual control and grassroots innovation. But, there is also a role for the LMS in higher education. If for no other reason than the simple reality that most instructors, and many students, aren’t ready, willing, or able to forge their own solutions. Nor should they be required to. The DIY hobby craftsperson ethos is inspiring, but institutions have an obligation to provide tools to enable their faculty, students and staff. The LMS is only part of that - but I think it is a core part.
Read MoreI just put together some quick network maps for the online discussions from my thesis research data. Haven’t done any analysis - just some purty pictures to see any at-a-glance differences:
Both discussion platforms had about the same number of posts and responses, but the pattern of connections is markedly different for some reason…
Read Morehere’s a quick look at the aggregated metadata for all of the online discussions I’m using in my thesis:
About the same number of posts in each platform, with a bit more of a time-spread in the WordPress discussions, substantially longer posts in WordPress, about the same (non) use of images, more links in WordPress posts, and more attachments in Blackboard posts.
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