Category Archives: Uncategorized

Did the Office of Student Life at Columbia University misfire Monday when it offered a $500 prize to the undergrad who can collect the most secret passwords from fellow students?  Will this game achieve their goal of engaging students in … Continue reading

[src: djsoundwav’s YouTube Channel] Are we afraid to ask students “Do I have your attention” because they’ll say, as Zuckerberg does in the clip, “No”? Of everyone I’ve been reading lately, Howard Rheingold is the most innovative thinker about attention … Continue reading

Just a short post about predatory practices among for-profit online learning vendors, and the high cost of brick-and-mortar public universities. The NYT placed a story today in my content aggregator, which means it was one of the 3 top stories … Continue reading

Last week’s two NYT articles,”Learning in Dorm, Because Class is Online” and “Live vs. Distance Learning: Measuring the Differences“, both by Trip Gabriel, attribute a number of maladies to online course delivery: hyper-crowded classes (1500+!), lack of faculty/student interaction, student … Continue reading

USC President Max Nikias believes that undergraduates benefit most from face-to-face learning environments. Faculty working with undergraduates are discouraged from creating courses with distance learning components of their residential classes. F2F is quickly becoming perceived as a luxury because august … Continue reading

[Sun a couple hours from rising.  Breath steaming in the cold, but feet bare anyway.  Soundtrack: DJ Wombat‘s Deep House mix.] I like to be alone.  Social media has made it more fun.  I no longer like to read nonfiction without … Continue reading

View The Wilderness Downtown in Google Chrome or Safari 5. Almost everyone likes “The Wilderness Downtown,” the interactive film by Chris Milk set to the song “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire. David Pescovitz at Boing Boing declares “The Wilderness … Continue reading

“The focus on education and accreditation instead of learning is something we need to change.” Joi Ito–entreprenuer, dropout, thought leader–has at least one reason to care about the fate of the university:  his sister Mimi is a distinguished cultural anthropologist … Continue reading

Following up on how DP’s course design plays out IRL.  This just in from the “Regain Control” team: their Tracking Our Children entry analyzes data reported in the WSJ that kids’ sites dropped 30% more cookies on kids’ sites than … Continue reading

I’ve been thinking lately how to give my students group work experience that, were I a student, wouldn’t make me break out in a nervous sweat. Dave Parry has come up with some rules of engagement that cede to students … Continue reading