Today's NYTimes has a story Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod about universities handing out iPhones and iTouchs to freshmen. A part of this may be making specific universities look "cool" to their incoming students - a requirement in the highly competitive world of...
Posts related to: Technology
Day 2 Morning session, Mishra & Light
I just completed my presentation Education Technology and Teacher Education, the TPACK framework. I think it went well, though you have to talk to ask the audience what they "really" think. I had been allocated 60 minutes for my talk - but Radha and I discussed...
TAPS / TPACK videos
A few years ago, as a part of our PT3 project Matt Koehler, Ken Dirkin and I video taped a series of teacher interviews around authentic problem solving in teaching using technology. The teachers were winners of the TAPS (Technology in Authentic Problem Solving)...
Post-lunch session: Nancy Law
The last session of the day was led by Dr. Nancy Law, Director, Centre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kong. Her session was titled Using ICT to support learning: lessons learnt from international studies I met Dr. Law at SITE 2008 and then...
Post-lunch session: Geetha Narayanan
Geetha Narayanan, Director Mallya Aditi International School and Srishti School of Art Design and Technology, is someone I have wanted to meet for a long time. One of the pleasures of of this conference is getting an opportunity to hear her speak ... and I was not...
The strange beast that is higher ed
I have blogged previously about the challenges faced by higher education (here and here), exacerbated (or maybe revealed) by new technologies. Here is an essay by Charles Murray -- not a person I thought I would ever cite approvingly 🙂 He has a recent essay in WSJ...
Open source conferencing
Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti's blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download...
SET conference: Mid-morning session
The next session State of ET in India Today and was led by fellow BITSian Manas Chakrabarti (now an independent consultant). He led an panel of teachers who have been using technology in their teaching. What was interesting was the manner in which corporate interests...
Links of interest
During Dr. Jalaluddin's keynote I took some time to search online for some reports, prompted by what he had been saying. (Yes I was listening not just browsing). The first is an European study: ICT in Schools: Trends, Innovations and Issues in 2006-2007. You can...
Blogging SETS: Morning session
I am trying to live blog the conference: Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity [Full agenda here]. Let us see how far I can keep this up. August 20: Morning session: The pre-conference session has been about meeting old...
Heading to India
I leave for India tomorrow to participate in a Symposium on Education Technology in Schools: Converging for Innovation & Creativity being held in Bangalore from the 20th to the 22nd of August. The meeting is organized by the Quest Alliance, USAID and International...
Is the web making us stupid?
... or just narrow? I just discovered Britannica blog, a pretty lively virtual space for intelligent discussion. How I had not come across it earlier is a mystery - but again that is the beauty of the web. Anyway, there is an ongoing discussion there about how the web...
The making of “Editing is Cool”
I had posted about this really cool video I recently found (see Life is about editing). Behold my surprise when one of the comments on the blog was from none other than Allee Willis (see her wikipedia page here, and personal website here). It was just great to hear...
Digital before his time
A recent story in the NYTimes about Peter Gabriel (An Old Rocker Gets Digital) brought back memories of Peter Gabriel's album covers. It tells you a lot about me that I know album covers better than I know his music! During his time with Genesis and later, when he...
Life is about editing
A fun and thought provoking, recursive music video by Allee Willis titled "Editing is Cool." The video attempts to capture the process of creating this very video, from the lyrics, to the music to the special effects and so on. Denise Caruso (at Salon) quotes Allee...
Blogging for the iPhone
I have been playing with an iTouch for the past few days and have have been quite impressed. What bothered me somewhat though was that my website (something I have spent hours designing) didn't morph itself as gracefully as I would have liked into this new interface....
How does my browser know I am Indian?
Over the past few weeks I have noticed that some webpages I visit have banner ads that are targeted to me quite specifically - in particular to my Indian origin. For instance this page (a story about ipods being used by the army) contains a set of banner ads that seek...
Browsing for gender
Just found out about this rather nifty tool that looks at your browser history and estimates your gender. My personal results were as follows: Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 24% Likelihood of you being MALE is 76% Try it out for yourself, or read more about how...
The end of practical obscurity
There is a somewhat troubling story in NYTimes a couple of days ago: (If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?) about CriminalSearches.com, a free service that lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United...
Ask-ing Cuil questions of Google
How do we evaluate a search engine? Chris Wilson attempts to answer this question (with help from the crowd) in his article on Slate "How To Talk to a Search Engine: Three queries to help decide if Google or Cuil or Ask is right for you?" The three search items he...
AllTop
I just came across a rather different kind of news aggregator, at least compared to Google. The brainchild of Guy Kawasaki (ex-Apple evangelist and tech guru) you have to check out AllTop. This may actually become a regular destination for me.
Pogue on design
David Pogue has couple of great examples in his latest posting about bad design in the world of software. Check out: It’s the Software, Not You. Potentially useful in CEP817/917...
Killing with a thought
I had recently posted a note (It's only a game...) building on some thoughts in an article by William Saletan. In this article Saletan describes how weapons are increasingly becoming like games. His recent post takes that whole thing one level further. He describes...
Flipping the Tech & Ed equation
My research and scholarship has mostly been in the area of educational technology - i.e. how to improve / facilitate learning through the use of technologies. David Brooks in his latest op-ed (The biggest issue) in the NYTimes flips this around somewhat. Citing...
Font Face Off
Mike DeSchryver sent me this video... very funny particularly if you are a typophile like me...
On embodiment in online learning
Patrick Dickson just forwarded me an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled The Sensuous Classroom: Focusing on the Embodiment of Learning [Subscription required]. In this article Suzanne Kelly, the author, bemoans the absence of the physical body from...
Textbooks meet Bittorrent!
NYTimes article on how publishers are responding to the advent of peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files. Check out First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
Reading online & off
Nice article in the NYTimes (Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?) about today's generation and how much of their reading happens online (as opposed to reading books). I have seen a change in my reading over time as well. Most of my reading today happens...
Not so Cuil
I was just trying out Cuil the new search engine and came up with some strange results. This is what the front page looks like, rather dark for my liking, but again they had to do something different from Google's stark white front page. if you click on the "About...
A cuil new search engine
Cuil (pronounced cool!)... check it out. How does it compare to Google? Functionally? Design-wise?