Blogs

With only one child at home — and him a teenager — Halloween crept up on me unawares this year. Over the weekend, Mark was away visiting our daughter over the weekend for Parents’ Weekend, and I was home with Nick waiting out his bronchitis and the rain — so we didn’t buy any candy, didn’t carve a pumpkin, didn’t decorate the house. Nick is too old (his decision) for a costume, so the whole thing almost passed us by.

One of the great things about our ed tech world is how our people sometimes move back-and-forth between academic and company gigs. If you want to sell, serve, or code for a higher ed customer then the best prep is have come from that world. If you want to evaluate vendors, negotiate contracts, and engage in meaningful partnerships with companies then having worked in the corporate sector will be your best education.

One of the common comments of the mainstream media, characterizations of TV talking heads, and complaints of elected officials is that the "Occupy" movement is inchoate. What do they want? What are their demands? What is their agenda?

What was the most outrageous student term paper you've ever marked and why?

At our annual Board of Education retreat, this year’s session began with a TED Talk segment on leadership. Ted Talk is a well known non-profit organization whose goal is to highlight “Ideas Worth Spreading,” and this particular segment featured a discussion on leadership led by Simon Sinek, an author and speaker who focuses on leadership.

I have a bold proposal: to make standard in all vendor contracts regarding the transmission and storage of institutional information that the vendor will comply with applicable privacy and technical security regulations in existing federal privacy laws.

I'm hoping that the Desire2Learn (D2L) and Sakai folks among our IHE community will tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about. When it comes to the LMS (or really anything in life), where you stand is where you sit. I've been on Blackboard for 10 years now (across 2 different institutions and in roles ranging from instructor to learning designer to program manager), so naturally I'm biased toward what I know best.

This past weekend (extended weekend, really), I attended the Canadian Writers Research Collaboratory (or, CWRC) conference with the theme of “Space/Place/Play.” This is a significant collection of digital humanities projects, all involving Canadian literature, writers, and texts in some form. It was a really fantastic experience, and, in the spirit of the theme of the conference, I’ve modeled my thoughts on the conference according to the themes.