I’m preparing for a talk on the future of reading and decided to keep track of what and how I read today. So, I started my morning checking e-mail, which involves two steps, my main e-mail (work) and my gmail (fun). In my gmail, there was a link to an article in the NYT about…
To ban or not to ban laptops in classrooms? What about cell phones? And calculators? Before we hand students a list of technologies to leave at home, let’s consider the real problem: attention vs. distraction. If you’re going to ban everything distracting students, you should consider what you’re wearing, how you talk, the guy in…
When I was in high school in the late 80’s — early 90’s, it seemed that the U.S. education system was an abysmal failure — after all, weren’t the Soviets and the Chinese students scoring higher in math? Today, headlines still decry our education system as a failure. In a recent op-ed piece published in…
I recently attended a truly fascinating workshop, but I’m not going to blog about it…yet. I’m studying how a particular user group conducts research online, so if I discuss preliminary observations, I risk biasing my sample. To blog or not to blog seems to be a conundrum facing many researchers. Some choose to blog immediately…
Yesterday, I attended the RoSE Design Charrette, hosted by the Transliteracies Project at UCSB. Under Alan Liu’s guidance, many interesting, innovative interdisciplinary projects have emerged from this program. In anticipation of attending, I read the online description of RoSE. Like seeing a movie preview, I started to imagine what I thought RoSE would be. I…
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field. I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition…
My dissertation is now available online, thus increasing the chance that more than three people will read it. Here is the abstract: In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they…
What do you do with the stacks of journals you amass annually as part of your professional memberships? Use them? All of them? Add them to the “free take one” stack in your department’s mailroom? I recycle them on a quarterly basis, after perusing the Table of Contents and any potentially relevant articles. Do we…
Well, Apple’s much anticipated tablet is here: the iPad. Without the benefit of testing it yet, I did a quick tour of the features demonstrated on the Apple website. It looks like a grown-up iPod or iPhone…larger screen and more functions. In fact, maybe it’s the future of laptops — touch screen keyboard, slim design,…
I just read William Zinsser’s beautiful address to incoming international students at Columbia’s school of journalism. Toward the end, he says: “The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t the swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups,…