Learning Innovation

This past Monday I attended the Innovation to Drive Productivity in Postsecondary Education meeting sponsored by the The Department of Education that Paul Fain describes in his 10/2 IHE article. I'm writing this post in an effort to respond to some of the comments to Fain's article.

I read Harvest Moon's beautiful essay "Quitting an Adjunct Career" with both sadness and a sense of familiarity. Like Harvest, I also trained as a sociologist, and have taught numerous sociology courses outside of the tenure track. Like Harvest, I also made the decision to not engage in anymore adjunct teaching - as the rewards for doing so have become inadequate to the opportunity costs inherent in the incredibly time and energy consuming task of teaching. And like Harvest, I also deeply miss the many joys of teaching.

This fall I have 3 flights on USAirways. Unless something changes between now and EDUCAUSE, on none of these flights will I be able to manage my travel on my iPhone.

It's somewhat of a core tenet amongst our edtech crowd that we should be platform agnostic. Mac, Windows, Linux - our e-learning materials will work as long as you can fire up a browser.

Our students want to interact with their courses on mobile devices. The problem is that we have built our online platforms mostly around the browser. The LMS providers are all putting out mobile apps, but so far I have found that these apps offer a poor experience compared to the browser.

Have you experimented with building a course yet with the new iTunes U Course Manager?

An understanding of the causes and consequences of economic inequality may be one of the most important issues for any educated person to grapple with, yet the number of our students who read The Price of Inequality is most likely very small.

Whispersync is Amazon's new feature that allows for Kindle e-books and Audible audiobooks to sync up. This makes perfect sense, as Amazon owns Audible, and can leverage common platforms and accounts to provide a seamless reading experience across e-book and audiobook reading methods.