Sustainable Sustainability

Yesterday I finally took all of the cardboard boxes from the garage to the recycling center. After only four months (since moving here) I somehow managed to fill half of one bay. Arriving at the recycling center, I found ten or so large dumpsters with sliding doors in the lids. Looking to see which one [...]

“Enhanced Physical Reality”

…is how Ubimark describes its application. The gist of the technology is a 2-dimensional graphic is printed on a page (textbook, map, brochure, etc.). The user “scans” the graphic by taking a pic with their iPhone camera. The graphic is recognized as an URL by the iPhone App and displays the related link in the [...]

Extending the Virtual Classroom

The LMS of today is too confining a virtual learning environment. Such closed systems lock out all but those officially enrolled in the course. The emerging LMS needs to accommodate others in addition to students and faculty, allowing learners to benefit from interaction with a broader network and community of practice. Last semester, as part [...]

Technology-Induced Agoraphobia (TIA)

One of the things I enjoy most about my job  is helping faculty decide which technologies to use for teaching and learning. Several times a week an instructor may approach me looking to solve a challenge in their classroom with technology. As a learning technologist (another fun) part of my job is spending time exploring [...]

Net-gen’rs, Digital Immigrants, and Geeks!

A small group of us on campus has been investigating alternatives for our next learning management system. We are considering four solutions: two proprietary and two open source systems. As I was reporting on our team’s progress the other day, we got into a discussion about student readiness. One of my colleagues said that he [...]

Blended by Design

For the past several years I have offered weekly walk-in sessions introducing faculty to various online technologies for teaching & learning. Invariably, an instructor will find a particular solution intriguing and decide to integrate it into their class. Many of the attendees teach in a traditional face-to-face format and their goal is to simply add [...]

Emerging Technology

Draagbare radio / Radio hat, originally uploaded by Nationaal Archief. Okay so this ended up going a different way. The Draagbare radio / Radio hat, found in “The Commons” on Flicker, was perhaps the earliest attempt at a portable radio. One more example of a technology that should probably not be used while driving.

The Future of Online Learning

I predict that in ten years there will be no such thing as “online learning”. There will be only learning; all learning will be to some degree online. Students will choose to what degree based upon their personal learning preferences and the availability of course sections in relation to their location and schedule. Sloan-C recently [...]

Here comes Open Content

Each year New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative publish the Horizon Report, listing emerging technologies for teaching & learning and predicting the time-to-adoption for education. The report lists the technologies to watch into three time frames: one year or less, two to three years, and three to five years. in this year’s report: One [...]

Academic Technology

We just finished a two-year project migrating from WebCT Campus Edition 4.1 to Vista 4x (now 8x) at our university. We enjoyed a fair amount of success. In addition to migrating from one deployment to another which was significantly more complex, we also integrated our CMS with our Luminis portal and Banner student information system. [...]