Category: Education


  • What is the worst possible outcome of an event from an admin’s perspective? You lose everything. Next worst is lose a large portion of the data. Losing days worth of data, as Utah did, is huge. This is the biggest news since the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, I think. To Utah’s credit, they have…

  • PLEs reflect the needs of a student information gatherer. VLEs (aka LMSs) reflect the classroom and institution online. (PLEs vs VLEs) Blackboard Vista is a VLE. Its competitors are all VLEs. Vista is the worst VLE of them all as its designed to host multiple institutions in one site. The GeorgiaVIEW project takes the VLE…

  • The Age of Enlightenment ended over a century ago. It was known for producing a number of intellectuals. Are intellectuals a dying breed? According to Wikipedia, “An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate, or ask and answer questions about a wide variety of different ideas.”…

  • Since restaurants get sued for not paying royalties for public performances of copyrighted music, it seems likely playing a song at an athletic event is a public performance. I wonder how much the UGA Athletics or just UGA pays ASCAP for the ability to do this? Certainly, its not academic use. 🙂 Youuuuuuu – Red…

  • Fear brings out the worst in people. Fear of change or the unknown manifests in criticism, anger, and overreaction. Yes, I am guilty of this like everyone else… I am not somehow above all this. The idea of democracy, I think, where everyone is able to provide input into the making of a decision was…

  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…

  • I laughed when I read this: In classes, faculty told students about the [Georgia Gwinnett College’s] policy on cell phones: Use them for everything. Students are required to have cell phones so they can connect with faculty, administrators and other students quickly. Article Awesomeness.

  • On the measure which pulls from the Who’s Online table, we hit ~9,970 today at the peak. It was over 9,000 from 11am to 7pm. Its been a busy day! I had expected a second peak today at around 8pm. It doesn’t look like we are going to get it.