One of the students in my Biology 20 class this semester has a laptop which he uses as a learning support. He has dyslexia and the word processor greatly increases his ability to communicate in written form, as well as my ability to read it. One of the other students in the class asked if they could use a laptop in class if they brought it from home. My immediate reaction was “Sure – that seems only fair to me”. So I’m wondering what I would do if they all showed up tomorrow with their own laptop? There are a few stores in town where I could walk in and pick up a netbook for under $400. That’s enough for many of my students to find funding for it from parents, savings, job earnings, allowance – kids seem to have … Continue reading »

I greatly enjoyed attending the IT Summit earlier this week and as with all conferences, I learned as much from the informal conversations as the formal sessions. Dean, Rick and Alec were attending the conference so we took advantage of that to sit down for a conversation over supper and refreshments at Winston’s Pub in Saskatoon. We were joined by Dean Loberg, Kyle Lichtenwald, Clarence Fisher and Kathy Cassidy. It was a great conversation and I hope you’ll enjoy listening to it. [display_podcast]

I have many tabs open in my browser right now which may be contributing to the rambling state of mind I have as I write this. Two of them are alluding to the same idea – that we need to monitor the unintended consequences of technology in order to keep focused on its intended use. Alan Levine points out that all our social technologies might have a perversely opposite effect to what we intend: Words are awfully cheap now, they fly around at near light speed (not really, this is metaphor land). They go farther then ever, to unintended places, and thanks to the google-bot, they are out there for a long time. And we don’t see where, how they land. We are hyper-connected, yet at the same time, rather disconnected. The google-bot is such an unforgiving beast since it … Continue reading »

I’ve been thinking more about creativity and learning. As so often happens, a couple of things came to my attention that are related to my ideas from yesterday. First was this TED talk video that came into my iTunes podcast list just today. It is entitled Why play is vital — no matter your age. In it, Stuart Brown talks about the necessity of play, including why it is necessary for learning. As I was starting to write this post, I learned via Twitter that Raj Boora wrote this regarding the video: if we allow ourselves to be creative as we are in early childhood and to play as we ought to, we can achieve great things. Perhaps those people who are very successful – those who never “work” but rather play and are creative with their entire body (the … Continue reading »

David Jakes seems to take issue that the largest tag in my tag cloud is Dean Shareski. Sorry, David, I suppose I should use some other tags on my  posts. I won’t even link to Dean’s blog in this post.

I think that the 20th century was very much a technological century, at least in the economically advantaged parts of the world. So many technologies – of war, of medicine, of communication, of transportation and on and on – were developed, more than any other century in human history. (No source on that, I’m just pulling facts out of thin air. You’re allowed to do that on the interwebs). The advancement of technology was seen as one, if not the most important, of human pursuits. I’ve been noticing lately that technology has been losing our attention lately. It hasn’t become unimportant – developments in medicine, transportation and energy production are still critical to our well being. But we’ve got such a surfeit of technology available to us that it’s just become part of the environment. It’s just there. I think … Continue reading »

This is a wickedly cool solution to a common situation. Quite often as I’m skimming through Google Reader, I come across a tasty looking blog post that looks interesting but is too long to read through at the time. I could bookmark it in my delicious account, but I’m likely to forget to do this. I figure there are two solutions: Hire someone to write me a short summary. I wouldn’t want to go this route, even if I could afford someone to do it, because I’d lose the full body of thought the author wanted to say. In Mac OS, this can actually be done automagically using the “Summarize” service (available from the application menu -> Services). It will create a reasonable summary of any selected text. Hire someone to read the post to me. Better yet, hire someone … Continue reading »