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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Digital Learning Environments Conference

Following the IT track here at the HP Digital Learning Environments Conference. Thoughts:

1) Why do they always talk about all these cool learning ideas but we sit in rows and watch text on PowerPoint slides? However, the keynote information was pretty darn good.

2) Good Quote "A Solution in Search of a Problem"

3) Student/Teacher Laptop Programs" "Make it smaller, faster, and less expensive and it will be prevalent"

4) More and more students walking around with the internet in their pockets. Our willingness to manage all this and the time involved are what will hinder or help the situation.

5) Which is more important these days, the information or finding the information?

6) Not letting students have cell phones (for example) is just us saying we don't want to manage it. The thing is that we're going to have to manage it, with the internet in everyone's pocket eventually we won't have a choice. So we need to take the time to figure out how to manage it. Many students don't even need our network (i.e. 3G).

7) One speaker said "Not embracing it (technology and the fast pace it's moving) is criminal."

8) My favorite quote "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."

Finally, we should really be using Atomic Learning more on campus. It's an amazing resource for learning and testing...

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

A good resource for free eBooks...



Found a site that bills itself as a "PDF Search Engine" which is, upon closer inspection, an excellent resource for eBooks. I did several obscure and not so obscure searches and got nice results. Great to download to your iPhone, iPad, computer for reading. And free! CLICK HERE |