There is a story circulating that the iPad improves Kindergartners literacy scores. This title implies the hardware device or iOS is responsible for the improvements when much more likely there are specific applications responsible. After all, putting an Mac in a classroom with software designed to help literacy is more likely to improve literacy than…
Stephen Hawking missed his 70th birthday party this past weekend. He was not feeling well. There has been quite a bit floating around the Internet about how he as survived decades after getting an estimated months to live. Even Intel talked up how they are working on a way to help him speak faster. Speaking…
At 30:00 Steve Jobs talks about how innovation came about because people wanted something for themselves to use that was actually good. Maybe this is the takeaway message for dealing with any technology, especially in education. If <name your institution’s LMS> sucks, then look around and cobble together something actually good. Or failing that make your…
Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. So naturally the fanatical fans were devastated, the normal fans were sad, and the rest of us understood. Comparisons made to Martin Luther King, Jr, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Edison, and yes even Tony Stark seemed maybe somewhat exaggerated. Though not by much. He possessed intense curiosity, powerful intuition, great vision and…
During first couple years at my first real job post-college, a friend of a friend would IM me questions about how to solve computer problems for which he could not figure out the answers. These requests started as me doing the work for him with dubious promises of doing the same for me. (I knew…
“We have stronger opinions about [iPhone vs. Android] than we do the moral frameworks to guide our decisions.” To be fair the choices were selected to be ones most people would have to have taken a Philosophy major to understand, Kant versus Mill. There are other moral guides like Jesus, Aquinas, Richard Dawkins, Mohammed, Pope…
Companies are personalizing web sites for us. Facebook only shows us things like what we have before clicked. Google gives us search results tailored either to our user id or a number of factors. Basically, our perspective of what is on the Internet could be highly flawed due to actions we had no idea was…