Blogs

Halloween seems to bring out the best in higher education web-based creativity. When Todd Sanders (#SAtech Profle #1) sent me an email with "Academic Zombies" in the subject, I knew I was in for a treat! The Office of Academic Advising at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB) has, according to Sanders, "taken to the social web in a big way since July. They've ditched safe and cautious, for risky and fun. This isn't a social web success story, it's a story on the reevaluation of current communication practices... daring to stand out, putting in the extra effort, not fearing failure."

Last weekend we went pumpkin-picking, and then stopped for lunch. I ordered a Blue Moon with my burger, which, to my surprise, came with a slice of orange on the glass.

In statistics one finds the experiment of flipping a coin and observing if the coin lands with heads facing up or with tails facing up. This is the central idea behind probability distributions that can be applied to many different situations involving uncertainty. I thought of the idea of a two sided coin recently when I realized that I am somewhat ambiguous about the coming holiday of Halloween.

What is motivation? On one hand we mean motive, or the reason for doing something; on the other we mean the energy and enthusiasm a person invests in the thing that she or he is doing. When teachers are talking about motivating students, it seems to me that the two meanings are conflated.

This weekend I’ll be attending THATCamp Publishing in Baltimore. If you’re not familiar with THATCamp, it’s a series of unconferences...

At last year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, it seemed like everyone was talking about mobile technology. Whether or not a product was actually ready for human consumption made little difference to some companies as mobile dominated most conversations.

I'm always curious about what books our IHE community is reading, and how we choose what to read. My dream IHE site feature would be an interactive dashboard that gave real time and historical information of our reading preferences, and provided a method that we can make recommendations and share our thoughts about our books.

"Maven" is a Yiddish word from the Hebrew "mevin," meaning "one who knows." Synonyms for the word are "expert," "gatherer of knowledge" and "geek." I always thought of the word as being somehow feminine in nature, suggesting a woman who is well-dressed, perhaps, and hovering above the crowds, but not separate from them. A blogging college professor, perhaps?