This post started life as a response to a question on Reddit and grew into a far-reaching manifesto on my approach to staying current in edtech. The question is reprinted at the top and my remarks follow. In Response to: Hi teachers, how do you normally find out about new …
A response to PowerPoint Remix Rant by Mike Caulfield. Mike laments how the long list of specialized graphical tools in PowerPoint is a recipe for making Open Ed Resources that are next to impossible to reuse, remix, and repurpose to other contexts. Most things work like this, unfortunately, encouraging us …
You may know that most websites collect some data about your browsing habits when you visit the site. Some of these cookies are pretty benign, giving the site owners basic statistics they can use to customize content. I use WordPress JetPack and Google Analytics on TedCurran.net so I can understand …
I have been researching open source user feedback tools, and I stumbled upon a very nice app called AllOurIdeas.org. The app takes a novel approach to user feedback, allowing your audience to choose between two suggested answers that you “pre-seed” into the survey. This is great if you have already …
You can think of BitTorrent Sync as “Dropbox without the Cloud”. Not to be confused with the underlying technology of BitTorrent, this is a way of keeping a folder and files sync’d across multiple computers, but unlike Dropbox, your files are never stored on a remote cloud server. Instead, files …
This is a reflection on Joshua Kim’s article, 6 Objections to Technology in Higher Ed. I’m going to address each of the major points, but for more context, please refer to the original article. Objection #1 – Money Spent On Campus Technology Is Money Not Available to Spend Elsewhere: Price growth (tuition) has …
One thing I notice after following several edtech theorists for years is that we’re all creating solutions to different problems, calling that THE BIG PROBLEM in edtech, and talking too little about the different contexts we’re in and unique challenges we are attempting to address. Michael Feldstein calls for A …
Foodies make an obsession out of “knowing your farmer” and “knowing where your food comes from”, but shouldn’t the same thing go for the people behind your most beloved apps? One weird habit I’ve gotten into is to actually emailing quick notes of encouragement and suggestions to the developers of my …
This video shows you how you can quickly convert a Markdown formatted presentation outline into an HTML5 presentation using Reveal.js. I think this method is a great way to familiarize yourself with web technologies while producing attractive and powerful presentations that work great on desktop and mobile devices. You can …
The Social Media Status Quo is Broken Most people and businesses maintain several social media profiles, flitting from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to LinkedIn (and beyond) to keep up with all our different circles of people. We use all different smartphone apps because each little tool does one thing better than the others. As …
