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« Previous Entries Next Entries »How to escape the rat race
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008Are you suffering from information overload? Are you drowning in email? Is your voice mailbox full? Are you totally stressed out? Here’s a potential solution I spotted in the window of a real estate company while vacationing in St. Andrews, New Brunswick:
Best to read up on local history, though. Samuel de Champlain and his colleagues [...]
Epistemic Games Encourage Creative Problem Solving
Friday, June 20th, 2008Eighteen years ago, I bought the original SimCity game and subsequently went for two days without food or sleep. I obsessively worked away at creating the perfect city filled with happy citizens. The day my virtual city obtained a stadium remains one of the highlights of my technological life.
Games that encourage learners to think like [...]
Create Cool Teaching Tools Using a Wii Controller
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Let’s be honest. It’s been pretty tough for departments to justify purchasing video game consoles for training purposes. Sure, Wii Sports may improve your golf swing or bowling accuracy, but, apart from reducing workplace stress and increasing worker morale, video game consoles haven’t yet made a significant impact on workplace learning.
Thanks to Johnny Lee, you [...]
Connexions: A Free Course Repository and LCMS
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008Last month, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced its annual Berkman Awards for outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society. One of the winners this year was Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk.
Professor Baraniuk won the award for launching Connexions, a public learning content management system (LCMS) that allows teachers [...]
Apple vs. Google: Battle of the Management Styles
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008Apple Computer is getting a lot of press these days, but the focus isn’t always on its computers, iPhone, or ubiquitous iPods. Rather, various sources have written about how Apple is run very much like a traditional top-down company. People are told what to do and then sent off to do it. If they do [...]
First Spam Message Ever Sent Made No Mention of Mortgage Refinancing or Viagra
Monday, April 28th, 2008This coming week will mark the 30th anniversary of the birth of e-mail spam. According to technology writer Brad Templeton, the first spam message was sent on May 3, 1978, by a Gary Thuerk to 320 e-mail Arpanet addresses and read as follows:
DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE [...]
Facebook Chat: Yet Another Instant Messaging Application
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008The new Facebook Chat application was installed into my profile when I logged in this morning. I can now chat with any of my Facebook friends who happen to be online and logged in.
That brings the total to three ways I can chat with people through the Web services and software I use on a [...]
TeachStreet: A New Social Learning Site
Monday, April 21st, 2008A new social Web site has just appeared, designed to put learners and instructors together. TeachStreet’s (www.teachstreet.com) beta launch currently focuses on the Seattle area and boasts a listing of 25,000 available classes. Topics include anything and everything:
Languages
Fitness
Hobbies
Academic subjects
Etc.
How It Works:
Search for a topic you’d like to learn. (Since I’m currently experiencing a bit of [...]
Happiness: The Hottest College Course
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008My colleague, Gary Woodill, thinks I’m getting all Oprah-like by reading books about happiness. I’ve been trying to convince him that positive psychology, the study of happiness, is just as legitimate as the study schizophrenia, depression, and other psychological ailments. So far, Gary’s unconvinced.
What should help convince my doubting colleague is that students in more [...]
In Praise of Unusual Courses
Thursday, April 10th, 2008I’ve taken a number of unusual courses in my academic life.
A college I attended offered a course titled “Introduction to Welding,” which sounded like a good way to get three credits. I really enjoyed it. Getting metal pieces to stick together was great fun, and the risk that the gas tanks might explode provided the [...]
