To fully function as a student in today’s Western democracies means having access access to the Internet. In some cases this means students use Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Drupal, Blackboard, or wikis (to name a few examples) to submit homework and participate in collaborate group assignments. CMSs are great because teachers can monitor the effectiveness […]

As of this week I’m working with a series of incredibly smart, erudite individuals to set up and run a graduate student conference - I’m excited, but nervous! I want to quickly note what technology we hopefully will be using, and then note some of the immediate challenges standing before all of us, and invite […]

Academic environments are (theoretically) places where students come to be educated - they arrive on campuses after (typically) being cocooned for 16+ years - universities are where students emerge from their cocoons fundamentally transformed.
Plato and Shame
I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with students for more than two years now; the past year […]

I want to toss up a few links that I’ve found particularly interesting/helpful over the past couple of months. I’ll begin with a way to read, move to a review of the newest tool for electronic education, and conclude with an article concerning the commercialization of the core platforms electronic resources are accessed from.
Reading 102
We’ve […]

Normally when I talk about retaining data, I talk about retaining targeted information - don’t save everything, only what you need, and (if the information is about other people) only what you said you’d retain for particular stated purposes.
I was at a TA Conference yesterday, and at the tail end of it one of the […]

This is a short post, but gives three definitive examples of why we need to develop and instill norms in youth concerning how to use digital resources.
Let’s help this hottie find her camera!
Here’s the story (remember that…story).
In Britain a young woman (unfortunately) lost her camera. Some delightful chap decided that, rather than keeping the […]

In this post I want to consider privacy from a bit of a ‘weird’ point of view: What information do you want students to reveal to each other and yourself, and what do you want to reveal to them? What ethical responsibilities do educators have to their students concerning their disclosure of information to one […]

I have a lot that I could talk about here, but rather than working through philosophical arguments for the value of privacy in education, I want to constrain myself to establishing some key points that educators should be mindful of when using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom. I begin by listing a series of […]

Wiki means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian and is commonly used to refer to relational databases that allow for collaborative content creation and revision. These databases have some similarities to blog structures, insofar as they allow a group of people to comment on content, but are distinct from blogs insofar as they upset blogging’s authorial structure by […]

Blog/WebLog: a web page containing brief, chronologically arranged items of information. A blog can take the form of a diary, journal, what’s new page, or links to other web sites. (Link to “Weblogs in the Classroom”)
Blogs and blogging are one of the most prominent of social networking technologies. They allow bloggers to centralize content in […]