A while back I wrote a post that ended with this graf: Calls for efficiency in education are fine, and talk about affordability and social justice is critical. But by the time that teaching — one of the hardest jobs to automate — is significantly automated we will be at the end of the robo-revolution, not the Continue reading

  Slideshare has been good to me. Outside my surprise Latvian Top 40 hit,  my “Slidecasts” (PowerPoints plus audio overlay) rank as some of my more popular productions. If the Slideshare analytics are to be believed, my combined presentations on Water 106 (I did a bunch) have been viewed collectively over 4,000 times. My presentation Continue reading

So one of my non-edtech tech predictions in January was that the OS-based lifestream would kill the web-based mega-service, discussed most clearly in “Revenge of the OS”, but also in the slightly later article titled “The OS-based Lifestream Will Kill the Web-based Mega-Service”. Well, the end of the year came early in 2014, because this Continue reading

Someone emailed me and asked if I could point to posts on my blog that explain the federated wiki idea. I started to pull together some links, but realized that many explanations were out of date. I’ve been fooling around with this for several months now, and I know a bit more than I once Continue reading

From the comments on my last post —  friend of the blog (and Sloan-C Karoake instigator) Michael Berman lets us know he got some bad news about the Udacity certificate he earned in 2012. Please note this is a real email, from “Amanda Sparr, Coach @Udacity”. This is not a parody. (Really!) Dear Michael, Nice work Continue reading

From Blogs are the Vinyl Records of the Internet The quote comes from a full article in the Washington Post about the decline of blogging in Iran. A few years ago, Iran emerged as a culture filled with high traffic, powerful blogs. It was called Blogestan. But, these days, as in many other cultures around Continue reading

I don’t talk enough about the classes I work with. I’m trying to change that, starting with my own class, T&L 521: Educational Technology. I ended up teaching this class because they had a last minute schedule conflict with the person who normally does it. It was a one credit class with pre-service teachers who Continue reading

I’ve wanted for a long time to embed questions in things like course wikis and blogs, questions that fed to a centrally managed backend system. Finally a number of people are working on this — Instructure’s Canvas mentioned this as something under development (or maybe here at this point, we’re an Angel campus, unfortunately). Bill Continue reading

Phil Hill has a great analysis of the NYT interview with Richard Levin, the new CEO of Coursera. And core to that analysis is a point I’ve made before — that Ivy League institutions *do* have experience in online education, but they are so committed to covering up their failure in those efforts that they Continue reading