When I was a young high school teacher, I remember reading an article drawing a distinction between “activity” teachers and “outcome” teachers. Activity teachers were the ones who planned their lessons full of engaging activities, but who didn’t think deeply about the learning outcomes that they’r...
I tried to get into Apple's iPhone after years as a happy Android user, but even in 2022 there are significant areas where the Android UX is just better than the best that Apple can offer on iOS. This post outlines some of the observations I've made since switching from my iPhone 12 Pro to this year...
There are multiple stages each learner goes through in the process of learning something new. Learning (as well as “online learning” and “eLearning” and “remote learning”) are first and foremost a human, learner‐centered activity that is only augmented with various technologies.
Don’t get this t...
Online learning tools like LMSes and 3rd party apps offer a variety of ways to notify learners of key events in their course. The new ubiquity of smartphones among learners opens up a wide variety of ways we can grab their attention – but with great power comes great responsibility. We need to t...
I often find myself being the old curmudgeon when the topic of gamification in learning comes up.
Don’t get me wrong – I love video games, but I think the characteristics that make a great game also make it a poor fit for most learning tasks (or at least, the types of tasks that we often teach in...
So after reading this guy’s rant about how terrible his experience with iTunes is, it reminded me of a big “I told you so” that I want to share. While your apps would like you to think of your music, movies, and documents as being theirs, they’re really yours, and you should always know where...
You can think of BitTorrent Sync as “Dropbox without the Cloud”. Not to be confused with the underlying technology of BitTorrent, this is a way of keeping a folder and files sync’d across mul...
This is a reflection on Joshua Kim’s article, 6 Objections to Technology in Higher Ed. I’m going to address each of the major points, but for more context, please refer to the original article.
Objection #1 – Money Spent On Campus Technology Is Money Not Available to Spend Elsewhere:
Price g...
This video shows you how you can quickly convert a Markdown formatted presentation outline into an HTML5 presentation using Reveal.js. I think this method is a great way to familiarize yourself with web technologies while producing attractive and powerful presentations that work gr...
One of the thrilling features of the Iron Man movies is the idea that Tony Stark can step into a mechanized robot suit and control it as if he were just moving his body naturally. The suit is expertly designed to understand his movements in real time and seamlessly amplify them to give him superhuma...