Why I Would Have Avoided LA’s iPad Debacle In response to the Wired article “What Schools Must Learn from LA’s iPad Debacle”. [Full disclosure: I am a Pearson employee but have no inside knowledge of this deal. This analysis is mine alone.] When I learned of LAUSD’s shambolic iPad 1:1 program, I realized that it […]
As we look at traditional education and try and explain how it got this way, one topic is so taboo that it rarely gets discussed. as much as we love and value our students, they can be a little hard to take at times. Students, God love ‘em, are chaotic tornadoes of firing synapses, insecurities, […]
In response to 2U Learning Platform Update: Removal of Moodle, addition of accessibility options This article confirms what I suspected about 2U — that really the secret sauce in that solution is good quality instructional design. When I started learning about how they were using Moodle, it really looked to me like a robust Adobe […]
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 edTech products? Hi all, I’m […]
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 to think of our resources […]
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 more about what my readers […]
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 identified a few possible courses […]
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 are shared directly between the […]
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 outstripped wage growth (and everything […]
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 Theory of Change, and I […]
