Just wanted to highlight this interesting article, talking about an English professor at Oklahoma City University who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. She teaches her class via video conference, and of necessity has learned a new approach of listening and letting students lead the discussion: Taught by a Terrible Disease This interested me for several reasons. […]
Category Archives: Education
Chris Dawson, I understand you are concerned about your school system being sued by the RIAA in your post, “Let me say it again: Stop sharing music!” But spreading nonsensical fear and misinformation isn’t the way to do it. It seems an odd choice to restrict academic openness and freedom for the sake of bad […]
Truly free homeschool software
22-Jun-09Recently I’ve been seeing articles about homeschoolers using free software: Free homeschool software: Probably the best conjunction of words that a homeschooling parent has heard since they found out that their child is going to summer camp. Why shouldn’t it be? Getting more for less is as American as homeschooling itself. I’ve commented on several […]
Dead tree irony
26-Mar-09A school district in Texas has US$4.6 million in textbooks sitting in warehouses and school backrooms. Why? Because they must provide textbooks for all children according to the state constitution, and they do so in the classroom, but don’t give them out to take home because of damage and loss being charged to the school […]
The last day of CUE 2009 I was stuck by the pure awesomeness of one of the final presentations in the open source pavilion. It was titled Intro and Demo Open Source (Free) Software Programs for Educators! (found 1/3rd of the way down the conference sessions page). The three presenters, Shin, Katalin, and Branka, were […]
Moodle as a killer K-12 app
06-Mar-09We talk about killer applications, the killer app, which are programs so good they change the nature of a situation. Email is long considered a general audience killer app, when you think about the impact it has had over the years. For educators, is Moodle the killer app? Sure looks like it. This is written […]
Stumbling around in the K-12 space
06-Mar-09This week I’m fulfilling a talk obligation that David Nalley and I set up last Fall, to talk about the advantages of bringing a culture of participation to the classroom. In particular, this is the Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference, with teachers and technology coordinators from K-12 districts across the country. K-12 is short-hand for primary […]
Polarity of child raising
26-Feb-09It seems to me there are two fundamental world views that drive parenting. Depending on which you subscribe to, it says how you are going to make many choices from there. Your goal is to prepare your child for a rich and abundant life in the real world. Your goal is to let your individual […]
Free and open texbook FAIL
07-Feb-09An article this week (“Free College Texbooks: Fad or Fabulous?“) got me excited that truly free content might be making its way to a more mainstream use in education. The company, Flat World Knowledge, promotes their content as being, “Created by experts … enhanced by users … free to all,” and they appear to be […]