All Blog Posts (176)

Very quietly and almost invisibly, on post 546 of a very old thread, the owner of ScubaBoard, the largest forum in the world devoted to scuba diving, announced that the lawsuit filed the year before against the board and 101 of its "John Doe" participants had been settled.

ScubaBoard had been sued by someone whose business had been severely…

I spent the afternoon with the future, and he was motiviated by Legos, math, music, science and an encouraging mom.  I met with the young robot scientist Matt Bunting the day after he was honored as Student of the Year by EE Times.  Here's an excerpt, video and photo -- link to the full story here: Meet the modern day Da Vinci Designs Smart Spider http://intel.ly/lfxzqT.

It's "A Bug's…

I am republishing here a post I did recently with an interview with Clay Shirky. It is related to my research on the myths of Teaching and learning, technology & media. I am copying it here, but the video of the interview (as well as the original summary) is here: An Interview with Clay Shirky.

You can also access the series of posts on the Myths here: …

Moore’s Law has been around for 46 years. It’s a descriptor for the trend we’ve seen in the development of computer hardware for decades, with no sign of slowing down, where the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years.



The law is named after Gordon Moore, who described this pattern in 1965. He would know a thing or two about integrated circuits. He co-founded Intel in 1968.



Moore has said in recent years that there’s about…

An article in today's Education Week talks about the efforts of some social studies experts to achieve some level of consensus on national standards. They are afraid that because they are not part of state testing in the way that English and math are, they are being marginalized. The article does a good job, though, of showing how…

Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.

 A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama,…

"Father of the Internet" now focused on building a communications network capable of supporting deep space exploration.

Education Week has just published an article  blasting teachers for the low quality of summer school courses. It is really an amazing accusation, since the teachers have little to nothing to do with it.

Summer school quality is abysmal. Students learn little to nothing. They spend a few weeks in class, get their…

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just sent a letter to America's teachers during teacher appreciation week. In it Duncan touches on most of the familiar complaints teachers have about the pressures on them imposed by No Child Left Behind, but his biggest emphasis is on one of those complaints--while we put tremendous pressure on…

Learning in Networks of Knowledge is a new paradigm for higher education, based on the changing nature and form of knowledge work in contemporary digital networked conditions. The LINK site explores and supports this knowledge – network – learning approach. LINK contains dozens of ideas about teaching and learning via the Internet, as well as tools (freely available web-based applications) that you can use.

While throughout the site the term “web 2.0″ is used to describe the…

It is not difficult to observe the ubiquity of "Internet Addiction" as a phenomenon and/or accepted part of every day life in the Digital Age. Much less mentioned is the even more pervasive "cell phone addiction", "Crackberry addiction", "gaming addiction", or "texting addiction". Are we now at risk of seeing a vast presentation - a cultural commonality - of "Facebook Addiction Disorder"? (Or is sometimes FAD just a fad?) :-)



Some may argue…

In my study of the hiring, training, and evaluation of online teachers, I examined standards and training documents from the SREB and iNACOL. These were wonderful documents. If I had been on the committees that created them, the final products would have been much…

The Massachusset Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting an interesting exhibition about web culture. Researchers at MoCA are exploring aspects of this cultural trend that deals with memory and creative/learning process. The web culture is introducing an important paradigm shift in cultural studies. This exhibition gives us the occasion to explore and learn more about this cultural phenomenon. This exhibition, like the one actually presented at the contemporary art museum in…

This blog post is an invitation for anyone who would like to participate in a collaborative discussion that will hopefully lead to a valuable conclusion. This initial post will provide background and rationale for the project, and subsequent posts will get into its substance. The topic is one for K-12 online education managers, and it asks how they can best hire, train, and evaluate their teachers.

My entry into the world of managing online education programs came before the end of…

Liza Sperling

What is wrong with this question?

I am evaluating Meltwater, Hubspot and …