I came across this post on the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks back about a revolt of sorts that is happening in some pockets of academia. Many people seem sick of Blackboard (and in my opinion its anti-competitive tactics) and seem to want to move to different instructional technology media.I don't blame them. Blackboard has become the Frankenmonster of the LMS world. If a new feature comes

I came across this article a while back on Open Source Exile about the deficiencies of the MARC format. For those of you not in the library world, MARC is essentially a digital version of the information you found in the card catalog.The article echoes a lot of my thoughts on the subject from when I was reading about information organization and cataloging a few years back when I first started working

I was reading this article on Scienceblogs with an associated graphic on where info comes from (click to enlarge):further on in the article there is a more parody-like version of the same chart (click to enlarge):For what it's worth, the original article is short and easy to read - so you should read it.Here's my favorite quote from it:So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if

I came across this presentation about blogs in Education a while back (see end of post). I actually think that blogs are a quite useful tool in an educational environment. For the student, if the blog is student-based, it provides an opportunity to start building a portfolio of academic work. The research papers that the student writes can be posted in blog format. Obviously if the paper is 30, 40,

Here's a little weekend humor by PhD :-)

I came across this article on First Monday on Folksonomies a while back but I never really got around to reading it until now.It is an interesting article and if you have some time go and read it. It gives the uninitiated a brief look at organization of information in the past, and how folksonomies differ from what has come before them.It seems to me that the criticism of folksonomies are a little

There was an article that I saw a few weeks ago called Expert Predicts 6 Future Trends in Training. Being a sucker for predictions I went right ahead and I read it. I have to say that the six predictions were quite good - because we are already there, and we have been there for a while now.We covered all of these issues when I took courses in my MBA program about three years ago in topics such as

Here's a post to get me back to the linguistics aspects of things :-)I was over at Steve Kaufman's blog the other day (yes a little late - google reader items are a little backed up) where he had a video post about Esperanto and French Immersion (two topics). I don't know much about immersion programs (yet) - much less French Immersion as is practiced in Canada, but I do have some thoughts on Esperanto.I

OK, file this under "You needed a study for that?!"I was reading an inside higher ed. article recently with the same title as this blog post. A study was conducted and surprise! surprise! (NOT!) Students have a greater effect on what fellow students choose to major in rather than aptitude in a particular subject!You really didn't need to do a study because this falls under the "D'uh" category. Of

I came across this presentation on the use of twitter in educationPersonally I would use twitter for informational purposes like: "in the office" - "not in the office", "class moved to room xxxx", and "assignment X due in my mailbox by xx/xx/xxxx"IM is better for collaboration, chatting and discussions. Twitter doesn't really fit into this in my opinion.Twitter in EducationView more presentations