Short post, but a note at where I’m at on the wiki project. I’m a maddeningly circular developer, because I write code to help me think about problems. The Dokuwiki work is coming along well, given the amount of time I actually have to give to it, and given I took a detour to make… Continue reading

Google is not supposed to be building profiles of students for advertising purposes. It’s looking like they did. The suit maintains that, because such non-Gmail users who send emails to Gmail users never signed on to Google’s terms of services, they can never have given, in Google’s terms, “implied consent” to scan their email. The… Continue reading

Via @fnoschese, here’s the Google Trend on searching for “Lesson Plans” Wow. I can think of lots of little reasons why this might be happening, but none seems sufficient in itself. I know for instance that my wife Nicole used to search a lot more for art lesson plans but two things happened. First, she… Continue reading

David Wiley started it, Bill and Darren continued the discussion. Stephen Downes jumped in. At issue: is there a need for a “Fifth R” in what we have come to know as classic 4Rs openness? Does openness require a “right to retain” the work? I have some ambivalence here — the fact we need to… Continue reading

Missed this statement from ECAR 2013 last pass through it: What Is the Current Context for E-Text/E-Textbook Use in Higher Education? According to a recent ECAR/Intemet2 e-text evaluation project, the cost of textbooks was the most important value driver for e-textbooks, but cost-savings potential did not trump functionality when it came to student use of e-text for coursework.‘ “Students… Continue reading

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” – Woody Allen I’ve been using speed reading software for several years now (in combination with more traditional methods) to skim non-fiction books over the weekend. These aren’t like the older programs, which aim to train you to read normal books faster. Instead, they… Continue reading

I’m realizing some of the design description of the Federated Classroom Wiki on Hapgood is out of date. So here is how it is currently working (or soon to work based on some scheduled coding). This is the process you would use as a user. Setup Install! Your institution installs Dokuwiki on a server, on… Continue reading

Ok, I’m playing around with the name of this thing Tim and I are building. If you’re not up to speed on the Federated [something or other to do with education] Wiki, you might want to scroll below and catch up. Or just start with the screencast of the proof-of-concept. Keep in mind when looking… Continue reading

Jared Stein has an excellent post up on a point that is near to my heart. People in the humanities who criticize flipped classrooms often don’t realize that their class is already flipped. The reason why they don’t get “flipped classrooms” is it does not solve a learning problem they have. They’ve been able to teach… Continue reading