Learning Innovation

Are you in New Orleans this week for the big Blackboard conference (or BbWorld as the company brands the conference)? What are your big goals for the conference? What do you hope to learn from Blackboard?

We hear all the time that we are entering the "post PC era." Computers are out. Tablets are in. We will no longer be lugging around heavy machines with failure prone hard drives and bloated client applications. We will be carrying around thin and light screens (keyboard optional) that are portals to our cloud based apps and data.

I'm calling it. The age of software training is dead. We should never purchase another application or platform for our campus that requires any workshops, documentation, FAQs, or dedicated support people. If software is not intuitive and simple enough for people to teach themselves to use it then that software is flawed.

What would happen if the academic IT Department became the academic Collaboration Department?

Have you ever had an A/V (audio / visual) failure during a conference presentation? You are all ready to go with your talk and the projector will not work, the slides will not load, the audio is on the blink, your multimedia refuses to play?

This past Friday was the 5th anniversary of the launch of the iPhone. Over at the NYTimes Bits blog Brian Chen, author of Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future -- and Locked Us In, has some observations about how the iPhone changed phone and software industries.

I'm trying to decide if the mounting evidence of our irrationality, poor decision making, and now even dishonesty is depressing or liberating. Reading Ariely's previous books meant accepting the fact that we will make bad decisions, and what we learn from his latest book is that given half a chance we will also lie about our actions.

Dear Google. Congratulations on your release of the Nexus 7 tablet. At $199 bucks at launch you have done the first important thing - keep the costs down. The hardware specs seem reasonable, and I expect that the Nexus 7 will work really well as a media consumption and gaming device. My question to you, Google, is if you have thought about the Nexus 7 as an educational device?