Blogs

The newest member of IHE's Blog U introduces herself and her writing.

In travel, detours present unlikely possibilities. As an academic, I have taken very few of these in my quest to get published and move at the top of my specialization. I have always taken a purposeful approach towards my time and effort-- whether attending a conference (network! find publication outlets! project collaborators!) or picking a topic to read or write about (must tie in with the military! build up, not out, onto existing corpus of personal publication!).

With a modicum of success, I've started explaining the need for investment in renewable energy (primarily solar and wind) to undergraduate students as a matter of eliminating waste.

Iloilo, Philippines Rosalie Arcala Hall writes about her experiences in getting outside of her discipline and growing as an academic.

Prior to this year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Pearson announced a new "self-service learning management system (LMS)" called OpenClass. Billed as being completely free, OpenClass integrates with Google Apps for Education and is available from the Google Apps Marketplace. The user interface (UI) is stunning. It's as if a traditional LMS was given a facelift by the Google Docs team (Note that Google did not create OpenClass). The interface is simple and reminds me of a blog. It's more web 2.0 in look and feel. The top portion of the UI features Gmail, Google Calendar, Gchat, Google Docs, and Skype icons. With such an aesthetically pleasing UI (coupled with useful functionality) I predict that students will love using OpenClass.

October has been tremendously busy. With an estimated 20 or 30 potential posts in my brain queue, I've decided to do a quick post as an introduction to further reflections on everything that has taken place in October. Think of this post as an appetizer or perhaps as an usually large amuse-bouche.

Academics have a weakness for the latest cutting-edge innovations. It’s kind of what we do. And in many cases, that’s a good thing. This week, though, I’ve seen two older ideas come back as new solutions to current issues. They’ve both been out of fashion long enough that they actually seem new, even though they’re anything but.

I was in a late afternoon meeting last Friday with a group of the kind of folks who are likely to be in a late afternoon meeting on a Friday. I think we had a dean and three department chairs there as well as at least two program coordinators—folks, in other words, who do a good bit of service, or who have put in so much time doing service in the past that they are now doing it full-time as administrators. Everyone was breathing that kind of sigh...