Musings about life in retirement from academe
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...
Report on attendance at AUC 2005 – the Apple University Consortium Academic and Developer Conference held at Wrest Point, Hobart, 25 – 28 September <http://auc.uow.edu.au/index2.html?conf/aucconf.html~mainFrame> The AUC conference is held every two years. It is unusual in that the AUC offers several subsidised registration packages to each of the member universities. I was fortunate enough to have one of the...
Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom has posted a reflection in which he brings together recent posts by George Siemens and Barbara Ganley. The Siemens post that he cites offers some explanation of connectivism as a theory of learning, distinct from other theories such as constructivism. Connectivism does not replace other modes of learning but...
From the Oops, my slip is showing department: Albert Ip over at Random Walk in E-Learning is not allowing comments and does not seem to have an email address for contact. That leaves no alternative but to comment here although I’d prefer to have been able to do this quietly. Albert has posted Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends!...
READ MORE Is Multiple-Column Online Text Better? It Depends on how you read the research!