Blogs

In my world, fall means back-to-school. This fall, across the world, back-to-school means MOOCs. For somewhere close to a million people.

Are you going to EDUCAUSE in Denver the week of 11/5? If you are an "IT Decision Maker" on your campus, someone who decides what your institution or school or even department purchases, then there will be many folks at EDUCAUSE that will want to meet you. How do you choose which vendors to meet?

The greatest higher education technology conference in the universe takes place next week. The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is simply amazing. As the epicenter of higher education and technology, this event offers up something for anyone who works in higher education. Ok, I know that I sound like an extreme fanboy right now, but trust me, this is an outrageously fabulous event. On my meeting calendar I've scheduled conversations with representatives from Pearson, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, AT&T*, and Ellucian. The amount of information that will be disseminated at EDUCAUSE is staggering. Major product announcements, press embargoes, non-disclosure agreements, and an enormous exhibit hall…EDUCAUSE is the most jam-packed event of the year for the ed tech crowd.

There is a concept in geometry known as the “centroid” of a triangle. This is the point at which the...

A very sad way to make the point from yesterday's post.

Instructure announced today that it’s launching a new service called Canvas Network. The service is being positioned as an alternative to existing MOOC vendors or platforms (such as Coursera or EdX) to allow schools to teach open online courses on the Canvas platform.

The Girl dressed as a Tootsie Roll, and The Boy as a Jawa from Star Wars. They were endearing, but not scary. I had front door duty.

I’m not sure if this blog has ever acknowledged how close the emotions attached to raising a pet are to raising children, even though I would venture a guess that there are just as many academics with pets as kids. Universities do, in fact, offer insurance for animals (even before domestic partner benefits), and a $7.6 million donation was recently made in a cat’s name to UC Davis’s School of Veterinary Medicine, but it doesn’t seem politically correct for pet owners to insist that their animals are loved and return affection every bit as much as human dependents. As someone who has raised both, though, I think I can safely say that my cat seems to love me with more dependability than my teenagers.