Dean Dad and I just finished Menand's new book - and I'm here to convince you to move it to the 'front burner' of your reading list! (Note to our academic librarian colleagues: Dean Dad read the book as an e-book through his Kindle app on his iPod Touch. I read the book as an audiobook from Audible on my iPod. Neither of us would have been able to read the book in the format we preferred if we ...

In my fantasy world our jobs in higher education technology include includes time for book discussion. The boss, or the unit, or someone would choose a book each month that relates to our jobs - buy the book for everyone - and set aside one hour for all of us to discuss. Maybe we'd all vote on the books. And all of us could choose the format we want to read our books. I'd choose audio. Maybe my ...

I've been rejected to teach online at the University of Phoenix. I'll survive. But I'll admit to being a little perplexed. The reasons that I applied to teach online for U of P are:1) I love online teaching, and teaching online works well with my schedule, as I'm able to teach at night and on the weekends.2) I thought that I would learn some things that I could take back to my day job - as the U ...

One good thing that I hope emerges from our whole discussion on curricular video and copyright is an extension of this conversation to include video projects.The real pedagogical action around video is not viewing, but creating.Yes, the option to incorporate full-length videos in our curriculum, be these documentaries or feature films, is an essential tool for teaching. Many of our learners learn ...

Is the debate we are having about copyright and online streaming of course video (behind a password through the LMS) lagging behind new methods of teaching? How do we situate the discussion within the context of wanting our students to have full, unrestricted access to the assigned class videos source files so that they can create their own new works of scholarship via a mashup?A video mashup ...

Even my worst days as a learning technologist beat the crap out of my best days in most of the jobs I've had. I've worked food service (Dunkin Donuts), and I've worked retail (ladies clothing - don't ask), and trust me that working in academic technology is a choice gig. Truth be told, I was terrible at any job that required a cash register. If you've ever worked behind coffee counter then you ...

Grand Nannie is 92. She wants to be able to speak to her computer to have it do three things: 1) Transfer her paper rolodex into the computer (by speaking) and then be able to retrieve the names (by voice) so she can dictate a letter.2) Dictate letters.3) Look at the news.Yes, I know that speech recognition programs like Dragon NaturallySpeaking can accomplish these tasks. But the problem is that ...

One of my colleagues jokes that when she retires from her academic tech gig that she is going to start a consulting company solely focussed on guiding ed tech vendors in improving their webinar demos. Webinars are the product demos given over WebEx (or some other synchronous tool) that have largely replaced the campus visit for at least the initial company show-and-tell. The demo webinar is a ...

Jim Groom is dead on - I'm pandering to the iPad. Why stop now?(But seriously….stay tuned for a full blog post responding to Jim's comments yesterday - I think he is on to something and I have the links of open learning resources at UMW to prove it).Back to the iPad pandering.Will the iPad let me get away with not buying Mac laptops for my students? And when I say "my students", I mean the 5th ...

The risk of the iPad for higher education is that the device will prove a "sustaining innovation" in learning technology.Sustaining innovations, as explained by Michael Horn in his amazing talk at the 2009 EDUCAUSE ECAR Symposium, increase the quality of the service or product but also drive up the cost. Higher education has been moving through cycles of sustaining innovation, where improvements ...