Musings about life in retirement from academe
A couple of weeks ago, not long after the release of the Queensland Education Performance Review, I was engaged in conversation with some colleagues about the recommendations in the report. As teacher educators we shared concerns about the capabilities of some graduates and, while we recognise the problems inherent in graduating teachers with deficiencies in literacy, numeracy and science, we...
Late last Friday afternoon I received an offer that I found difficult to refuse. One of our Faculty members had been participating in a trial of tablet computers, primarily for marking electronic assessment submissions, but was struggling to find the time to fully participate in the trial and decided to opt out. Suddenly the Faculty had a ‘spare’ tablet computer...
Peter Sefton has posted an impassioned plea to Stop saying ‘Protect our IP’ in educational contexts? In essence I think I agree with all, certainly most, of what he wrote but I might press a few points further and saw a few things that provoked comment. After a brief discussion of the idea of IP, he hones in on copyright...
I’ve owned the past few versions of KeyNote (since it was first bundled in iWork) but I really have not used it seriously in that time. I had played with it occasionally but, mostly because our campus is resolutely Windows fixated and everybody expects to be able to view PowerPoint presentation files but cannot view KeyNote files, I had not...
I’ve written on this topic previously (Chance encounters, May 2005) but I’ve been building up to another shot for some time and events today finally brought me to tipping point. This morning one of the members of our University committee that deals with our LMS passed on a copy of an EDUCAUSE report (Diaz, 2009). The committee chair later circulated...
I’ve kept a personal/professional web page on the USQ web site for as long as it has been possible to do so – since the mid-1990s. It has the usual stuff – brief bio, abbreviated CV, list of publications. Over the years I’ve done periodic renovations. It started as a set of simple pages, moved to frames when they were...
From 28 February – 8 March I travelled to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend the 20th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). With around 1100 delegates representing at least 40 countries, despite the global financial crisis this was still one of the best attended and the most international SITE conference I have attended since...
From 1 – 9 March I travelled to Las Vegas to attend the 19th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). With around 1350 delegates representing at least 40 countries, this was one of the best attended and the most international SITE conferences I have attended since my first SITE conference in 1998. I am...
A little more than 10 years ago universities were graduating teachers who would work in schools where the principal information challenge was access. Now that most classrooms have networked computers with Internet access, the information economy of education has been inverted and the information challenge has become one of selection rather than access (Albion & Maddux, 2007). When it is...
I was surprised last night as I was reading the latest edition of Education Review to find myself quoted in a article titled ICT doesn’t have to be a headache: University of Southern Queensland associate profession (sic) Peter Albion says, “the stuff that works best is the stuff that comes naturally”. He believes that everyday experience is a great motivator...