This morning, our local radio host was ranting about people “cheating” on the Tuesday trivia question. She complained that they’re a small radio station and can’t afford to give prizes every week and, of course, now with Google, people always get the questions right. The radio host said the questions should be something that stump…
Recent releases of the iPad and Droid met with anticipation and enthusiasm. As users of technology, we seem to be excited by what’s next and new, but I wonder how long we will sustain this energy. Will we reach a point where we’re fatigued? With the release of Google Buzz this week, I’ve noticed that…
A colleague of mine recently asked for reading recommendations in the area of Educational Technology, and I started thinking about the trail I followed (a la, Vannevar Bush) to arrive at my current notions of the field. I taught college composition from 1998-2003. Some of my colleagues were teaching Dreamweaver or FrontPage in their composition…
My dissertation is now available online, thus increasing the chance that more than three people will read it. Here is the abstract: In university settings, students are increasingly required to conduct online research to complete course-related assignments, yet often receive little instruction in the skills necessary to proficiently locate, evaluate, and use the information they…
What do you do with the stacks of journals you amass annually as part of your professional memberships? Use them? All of them? Add them to the “free take one” stack in your department’s mailroom? I recycle them on a quarterly basis, after perusing the Table of Contents and any potentially relevant articles. Do we…
Well, Apple’s much anticipated tablet is here: the iPad. Without the benefit of testing it yet, I did a quick tour of the features demonstrated on the Apple website. It looks like a grown-up iPod or iPhone…larger screen and more functions. In fact, maybe it’s the future of laptops — touch screen keyboard, slim design,…
I just read William Zinsser’s beautiful address to incoming international students at Columbia’s school of journalism. Toward the end, he says: “The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t the swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups,…
Responses to my earlier post about Google-proofing essays made me think about the purpose of “research” assignments in the primary grades. James Ford mentioned that when he was 8 years old, he would copy text out of an encyclopedia. I did, too. Of course, we were handwriting, so we engaged in a low-tech copy/paste. Reflecting…
Most of the fun tech tools I use were shown to me by designer friends and colleagues. I find this realization interesting, because I’ve spent the past six years working closely with Computer Science students and can only think of one app a fellow student showed me the entire time we worked together. My art…
In the New York Times last week, Michelle Slatalla wrote a reflection about reading and the loss of attentional focus possibly caused by technology. Her reading experience echoes Nick Carr’s description in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Basically, with so much information available online, she has a hard time focusing on reading a novel…so many…