Technology for Teaching and Learning

I teach workshops on media production, often focusing on empowering students to create videos and web pages of their own, and I have plowed through all sorts of snags along the way. I’d like to take a few minutes to share with you some of the things I’ve run into, some strategies I’ve devised, and some thoughts about how all of this works. I’d also really like to hear your thoughts, ideas, and methodologies!

My favorite “Explainer”, Lee Lefever, just posted a new blog about the new age of the video explanation.  In it, he postulizes that perhaps 2012 will usher in a new genre for video:  ”Drama, comedy, documentary, advertising and explanation.”  Lee does a great job of explaining (no surprise there) why this trend is being enabled and adopted globally, [...]

While we all acknowledge that Wikipedia is not primary literature and should not be cited as a resource in most academically oriented works, we also are cognizant that Wikipedia is the first stop for many of our students on the way to more in depth research. Not today!  Today Wikipedia’s English language site is in blackout mode! Why you might ask?  It political [...]

As the new term approaches many faculty across campus are beginning to reach out to their students. This got me thinking about the what tools our students using for electronic communication.  According to the 2011 ECAR National Study of Students and Information Technology in Higher Education (http://www.educause.edu/library/ERS1103), Email and Texting are students’ two most common electronic communication tools [...]

As we head off to the holiday break many of us are thinking about how courses will run in the Spring semester.  For some it is logistical question, but for others it may be larger questions of course delivery and project design.  I was reminded recently of an interesting article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly on rethinking [...]

WPI is pleased to be participating in NERCOMP’s LMS unSIG Unconference this March! Whether your campus has adopted an out-of-the-box learning management system (LMS), an open source solution or has developed a home-grown course management system (CMS), challenges surrounding management, deployment, assessment, upgrades, training, support, security and integration with campus resources are universal. The LMS [...]

As you most likely have heard already, WPI’s course management system is getting a fresh new look in the Fall of 2012 with the upgrade to Blackboard 9.1 (Bb9.1)!  We are very excited about the update and hope you will be as well. Interested in seeing what it is all about?  You have two options: [...]

Fair warning:  This post contains more questions (we like to think of them as thought-provokers) than answers about navigating the world of social media.  We’d love to hear your thoughts – please comment! Can Facebook get you fired? Or maybe worse, not even hired?  Boston University School of Management Professor Kabrina Chang recently spoke about [...]

col·lab·o·rate – verb \kə-ˈla-bə-ˌrāt\ 1: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor – Merriam Webster Online Collaboration is at the heart of the WPI project system but, as many teams know, collaboration can be hard.  You need to keep people, documents, and tasks all organized and this can be a [...]

Everyone has heard the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but sometimes a picture just does not do justice to a what is being presented in the classroom.  This is where video can come in! Video has been a part of classroom educational technology since 1910 (Saettler, 2004) and its use has continued to grow [...]