A Hackable Hole in BuddyPress
Mainly documenting this just so I will have it somewhere I can find it easily, but maybe it will help others, too. On the Macaulay Eportfolio system we do not restrict account creation by email domain (since we want our students to use whatever email address they want). Instead we use a shared codeword which […]
The Emerging Doitocracy
A meritocracy is not enough, when it requires someone, somewhere, to recognize that merit as an abstract concept. We live in a world where, increasingly, the reliability of credentialing is suspect. Where the proof of merit is not a degree or a position or a title. In that situation, when it’s tough to trust a […]
STEAM
Thanks to Michael Branson Smith for the great tip to listen to Adam Savage’s talk “Why We Make” at the 2012 San Francisco Maker Fair. Savage explains with some brilliance how art is always part of STEM (art is where it all begins), and how learning works best when it comes through “making what you […]
On Wizards and Learning
There are many things to like about Gandalf, but one that especially appeals to me is that he isn’t a wizard just because he was stolen away and adopted by wizards when he was a baby, or because another wizard bit him and sucked his blood, or some woman in a lake chucked a sword […]
More of the Greatness of the WordPress Community
I had a great time at this year’s WordCamp NYC, hanging out with the other CUNY WordPress folks, and talking WordPress in education to a (larger than expected) and very interested crowd. We tried to pitch for broad appeal, and I think we hit it, and not have too much inside baseball (not too much) […]
Smarthistory and the Google Art Project
Big news today in the world of art–and the world of teaching and learning with and about art–and the world of “jailbreaking” the museum (or access to all kinds of cultural knowledge). Actually it’s two items of big news. The first is Google’s announcement of version 2 of their already tremendous Google Art Project. They’ve […]
“Rebuilding the LMS”
Campus Technology has a feature this month on “Rebuilding the LMS for the 21st Century.” The reporter interviewed me at some length a few weeks ago, and did a pretty good job of capturing what I said. All in all, a pretty good article. Of course, I would probably say it’s better to throw the […]
For the Better Review of Proposals of All Kinds
This is a fairly technical solution to a fairly limited use-challenge. But it’s not a scenario that is completely unheard of. It’s something that we’ve faced here on multiple occasions, so I decided to finally take a swing at a somewhat user-friendly and somewhat elegant solution. Here’s the challenge. There are lots of instances–applications for […]
The first MIT.x course
MIT has opened enrollment for the first of the new MIT.x courses, “Circuits and Electronics.” The course is free, and in this first pilot instance, even the certificate gained for completing the course successfully will be free (MIT expects to start charging for those some time soon). 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is designed to serve […]
Of iBooks and textbooks. And Authoring. By Students.
So there’s been a lot of excited posts–positive and negative–in a lot of different places about Apple’s announcement last week that they were ready to “revolutionize” the world of textbooks. Some of the best of those that I’ve seen are from Audrey Watters at Hack Education and Kathleen Fitzpatrick at ProfHacker (both of these are mainly critical). […]
