Month: October 2005
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Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mauthausen
I spent most of the day today with Mrs. Eva Hance and Mr. Mark Geeslin, who gave morning and afternoon presentations at the Texas Tech International Cultural Center on the topic, “Surviving Dachau, Liberating Mauthausen.” This is education that matters. Please take the time to listen to the podcast of their presentation, which is just…
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ECAR 2005 study shows realities for digital natives
The “ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control and Learning” (PDF) should be required reading for educational administrators at all levels. At 134 pages long, it is doubtful many in our busy and harried culture will read the entire thing, but at the least each should read the Forward (4 pages…
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Blackboard and WebCT merger
The announcement on October 12, 2005 that the two largest commercial content management system (CMS) providers in the world are merging is a significant development. According to Information Today, Inc., “In the 2004 fiscal year, Blackboard had $111.4 million in revenue; WebCT had $38.4 million.” We are talking about big bucks today, but potentially even…
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Podcast14: Podcasting 101
This podcast is a rebroadcast of a workshop I provided at the TECSIG conference this past week in Austin, Texas, titled “Podcasting 101.” The description of the workshop follows: Podcasting is analogous to TiVo for Internet radio, and students as well as teachers in your district can and should be creating their own podcasts. This…
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BitTorrent and iTunes
In last month’s article, “BitTorrent’s Grab at Respectability,” Business Week revealed the surprising attempt to move a peer to peer (P2P) file sharing program most closely associated with illegal movie downloads into the legal mainstream. I have never used BitTorrent (yet), but from what I have read the amazing thing about the technology is the…
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Professor fails to understand podcasting value
An article in today’s Daily Toreador, the newspaper of Texas Tech University, is titled “Podcasting lectures could be latest classroom tool.” The article reveals the fear and misunderstanding with which many college faculty are approaching the subject of podcasting. In the article, TTU Classics professor Dr. David Larmour articulates common fear number one: that if…
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Reconceptualizing NCLB
Reconceptualizing NCLB by Dr Chris Moersch TECSIG 2005 presentation Refer also to my podcast with Dr Moersch from October 6th, when he also discussed this theme of reconceptualizing NCLB. assignment: view video clip from 1963 – research project on barbed wire What impact do these “technology” projects have on student achievement It’s all about instructional…
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Vlogging and free journalism
“Report It Now” is a grassroots video blogging (vblogging) initiative that again, offers a glimmer of how disruptive and exciting social technologies like RSS are and can be. Just think where we will be when thousands of students across the globe are armed with laptops and PC cameras, and are invited to be local news…
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Videoblogging for iPods
If you are interested in some initial reports about the new functionality in QuickTime Pro 7.0.3 that allows an export for iPod video, you might check out this post by Alan Fraser. Also, and maybe even more informative, check out Apple’s online tutorial for creating video podcasts with QuickTime Pro. Does the pace of all…
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iTunes Movies
Hey, hey, I told you so! (On 29 September 2005) Apple announced today that videos have come to iTunes and the iPod. I am not cancelling my Netflix account yet. But that may be coming eventually. If I was running the show over at Apple, I would try to create a service as wonderful as…