Hapgood

Just had the best conversation with someone on why faculty don’t use open content. Because, they say, you don’t put together a course that way. The way any sane individual puts together a course is 1) Choose a textbook on the main subject. The students will read out of this. 2) Choose a second text Continue reading

Note: this post was destroyed in the great database corruption of 2011. I’ve pulled this copy from the cached version at archive.org, where you can go if you want to see the original comments by peeps like Tom Woodward and Jared Stein. I had a revelation this fall. A Joycean epiphany, suitable for novelization. My Continue reading

What does “Good Enough” OER look like? It looks like Sal Khan. I just saw his stuff via Jon Udell, and it blew me away. Technically, it’s not under an open license, but every single person involved in OER should look at the site. Right now. Forget the “lecture capture” vendors. Don’t worry about editing out false starts. Don’t Continue reading

Hillary Clinton, yesterday: In a sweeping, pointed address that dealt with the Internet as a force for both liberation and repression, Mrs. Clinton said: “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society. Countries or individuals that engage Continue reading

A good friend of mine asked me what I thought of the Lanier article in the NYT. Well,  first reaction is that I’m sick of this media narrative: “Person X was once part of the Digerati. Now they have have turned against it! The fact that they were for it before and are now against Continue reading

The newest AAC&U employer poll will be released next week, and the AAC&U has said that written and oral communication will, for the first time, surpass collaboration as the skill most desired by employers. What I would love to see teased out, though, is what kind of writing employers (and students!) want. I’ve never been docked Continue reading

Just a short thought from the car-ride to work today. If we are moving to a reputation based economy, where one’s ability to make a living is based on their network reputation, stealing attribution is a far greater crime than stealing intellectual property. The newspaper reporter who does not link to the blog that actually Continue reading

I thought I’d put this up a year ago, but it looks like I never did. Basically I filmed my daughter talking about this game Castle Crashers she plays and how she uses the web to figure things out about it. A bit of background — Castle Crashers is a side-scrolling beat-em-up game that is Continue reading

Thinking about the Murder Mystery study (below) and technology… and maybe about self-esteem in general. We knock the focus on self-esteem now, because we confuse it with the specific practice of telling kids that they are smart at every opportunity and expecting that to make them smarter. So what passes for debate on “The Self-Esteem Question”  is Continue reading

Fascinating psychological study: To investigate determinants of mystery enjoyment, a short story was manipulated to produce different levels of uncertainty regarding two suspects’ criminal involvement (low vs. high uncertainty) and to create different resolution types (denouement, confirmation, and surprise). Participants’ (N = 84) reactions and enjoyment were ascertained via questionnaires after reading the mystery development Continue reading