Musings about life in retirement from academe
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...
I did intend to take a break over the Christmas – New Year period of 2005-2006 but I also intended resuming after a few weeks. Somehow life became busier and time evaporated for a few weeks. Then, having lost the habit, it became easier not to try to resume – especially as I had a spate of comment spam, couldn’t...
Will Richardson, whom I’ve always thought made good sense, has posted about a script for removing bad words from pages in Firefox. The script is available as a JavaScript file complete with the list of “bad words” in plain text. Talk about a great aid to education. Want to know what words are regarded as “bad”? Well then, just look...
Peter Sefton at PT’s Outing asks himself and anybody who is listening “Why do I keep going on about HTML export from word processors?” He begins like this: I spend a lot of time on this site going on about HTML, particularly XHTML export from word processors using styles. Why? Surely in 2005, when the mainstream use of the web...
READ MORE Why does PT keep going on about HTML export from word processors?
It’s Sunday night and I’m just now trying to pull together some thoughts about some things that I started reading on Friday night but have had to let wait because I had more pressing work and social engagements. Now I’m wondering how to make any sense of what is a very mixed bag of posts I marked as I came...
My email today included a TOC alert for the Journal of Interactive Learning Research 16(4). There was more than one article that looked interesting enough to be followed up when I have a few minutes but one caught my eye and demanded immediate attention: Herrington, J., Reeves, T. C., & Oliver, R. (2005). Online learning as information delivery: digital myopia....
READ MORE Digital Myopia – Online education as information pushing
The rate at which new tools, mostly online and free, are appearing seems to have ramped up recently. I’ve scarcely had time to register their existence and bookmark them. I’ve certainly not had time to try them all but many of them do seem to have some potential for teaching, learning and research online. Writeboard is a new tool from...
An article in Macworld confirms it – MIT to launch $100 laptop prototype in November. This project has been talked about fairly widely over the past year or so but this is the first really firm news that that I have seen. The article includes a picture and describes key features – 500 MHz, 1 GB RAM, “skinny” Linux, multiple...