cc licensed flickr photo shared by GreyArea I’ve been answering some emails and marking some assignments for my online Computer Science classes this morning, and I’ve noticed that I tend to insert smileys in my emails to students and the corrected assignments I return to them. One of the things I miss in my online classes are the moments that have nothing to do with the course, but are vital in establishing a positive relationship with a student. We come to understand each other not as a teacher and student, but as two human beings. I don’t get those moments in online courses. My contact with students is usually via email, and only when they are having difficulties understanding a concept or wondering what a question means. It is a relatively formal relationship. Smileys are the moments that break us … Continue reading »

I listened earlier (and am now re-listening) to Bud Hunt’s podcast “Why Technology?” as a response to Ben Grey’s article “Why Technology?” at Tech and Learning. Bud makes a really good point about a tendency in some various educators – educational technologists, teachers and administrators – to get caught up in something I’ve referred to previously as Bright Shiny Object Syndrome. The reasons why you pick a blog as a tool have to do with what it is you’re trying to do with the writing … the writing should be the really important thing in a blog, not the fact that you used a blog. I think with technology we allow ourselves to get excited that we’ve used a new tool even though maybe we didn’t actually do anything with it, we just sort of picked it up and waved … Continue reading »

I have been known to be exuberant about the use of Google Docs, having presented about Google Docs at conferences and worked with classes for getting set up to use Google Docs. I’m not going to give up my love for Google but it is tempered when I read articles like this – Google Docs suffer privacy glitch (which happened back in March. Just goes to show how much I pay attention to the world): Though the documents were shared only with people whom the Google Docs users had already shared documents, rather than with the world at large, the problem illustrates one downside of cloud computing, in which Internet servers host software previously run on a person’s own computer. The flip side of a cloud-computing advantage, that a person can get access to those documents from any Internet-connected computer … Continue reading »

The MacBook had been running kind of slow lately. Checking system stats I saw that Firefox was using a fricking ridiculous 1 GB of RAM. I remembered that Safari 4 Beta had some issues (notably with WordPress as I recall, but this post is proof that is no longer an issue) but I was willing to take another look. Firefox had some major advantages due to all the plugins available. It also allowed me to specify an application to open downloaded files which made my workflow silky smooth for loading word documents submitted by my online students up to Google Docs via the terrific little GDocs Uploader application. But right now I don’t care. I tend to leave my browser open all the time and the memory leaks in FF were getting ridiculous. I am consequently once again trying Safari … Continue reading »

I realized about a week ago that I hadn’t actually taken a look at Google Reader for about 2 or 3 weeks, and I hadn’t really missed it. For the most part I had been either finding interesting blog posts or other things to read via twitter, or I went to check out the blog for a few people that were usually pretty good reads (just like in the old, pre-RSS reader days). I started wondering if part of the problem in Google Reader was its signal to noise ratio. Over the years I had subscribed to so many things that were interesting at the time, but have since faded from interest. So it was time for a little creative destruction.Out with the old and in with the … well, probably still some old ones but I’ll be interested to … Continue reading »

See you in the operating place! Originally uploaded by massdistraction I’ve been distractedly finding songs that I remember from some of my mix tapes I made so many years ago. That got me thinking (and tweeting) about the linearity of mix tapes. It’s sad to think that my kids will never know what a mix tape is. Playlists just don’t have the same linear narrative feeling. I think the difference is all about control of the artistic process. When you create a playlist for an iPod or other media playing device/software, you create a set of content for the listener then they decide the order for the music to be played. Mix tapes provided not only the content but also the context for the music. There is a certain order that reveals something about the person making the tape – … Continue reading »