Like any mom of teens, I am trying to pull my 13-year-old son away from his game console and get him to try something that I think would benefit him for his growth—something like reading!
“But books are history,” Grant claimed. “And this…” he tilted his head toward the screen with his hands still fixated on the bat-shaped controller, “is the future.”
But, Grant, you see, history is…
Summer means vacation and working on next year’s course updates. But many faculty face a challenge that their physical and computer desktops have in common: chaos and clutter. Files for research, course materials, lecture notes, emails; it can all get overwhelming. Although we all have our personal quirks when it comes to managing our digital assets, taking steps to minimize friction from these habits can ease working with others, as well as free up time and energy to focus on pedagogical matters.
While I don’t love the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” (there’s a great article here on why), I think that too often we find ourselves doing tasks that we can do more efficiently. My colleagues have shared their tips for working efficiently already, such as using tabs to batch task repetitive work, using text expanders to save time, and even I’ve written variations of this idea with my post on using mail merge to quickly create data-driven documents. This time around, I’m returning to my finicky, temperamental, and all-too-powerful favorite tool: Microsoft Excel.
When I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.
Now? “I was just listening to a podcast about that…” is something I say with annoying frequency.
Thankfully, I’m not alone, as I notice many other people parroting back something they’ve recently heard in a podcast. But even though it feels like most of us are listening to podcasts, and most of us are learning interesting things from podcasts, I still don’t see podcasts as a top option when faculty are designing online courses. Why might that be?
While I’ll beg your forgiveness for the obvious hype-train connection in my title to the release of the film READY PLAYER ONE, the film does raise many questions about the future of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). For me, this question often comes up in the context of VR and AR in education, since my work as an Instructional Designer often means looking at new technologies that could change the way we go about the task of learning and teaching. Our office recently started a working group together with partners across the university to begin exploring what VR and AR in education could look like.
For as long as I’ve been interested in mobile learning, I’ve been on the lookout for apps that allow instructors to use mobile devices to structure student learning experiences outside of the classroom. Maybe you want students to go the Art Institute, look at three paintings in person and answer questions about them. Maybe you want students to visit seven buildings downtown with different architectural styles. Maybe you want students to go to the Bird and Butterfly Sanctuary and take pictures of migratory birds. Or maybe you want students to visit a few different ethnic neighborhoods, and you just want verification that they actually went.
Digital story telling is an instructional practice that is used to tell stories by using computer-based tools. For example, individuals or groups may tell a story by using a variety of multimedia such as audio, graphics, voice, text, and video. For centuries, many people have learned messages from stories that were either passed down orally or written in a book. We now live in such a technological advanced society that learners can now comprehend an intended message by using technological products of the 21st century.
In August, I posted the first of this “Tried and True Technologies” series. That post focused on how you can use mail merging in Word to make life a little easier. This time around, I figured we should just go for a big one: Google.
Google has a ton of apps—not just Mail, Docs, and Sheets either. They have a full repertoire of tools, called the “G Suite.” From this suite, there are few tools that I love and find incredibly easy to use. In this post, I’ll cover a tool I find to be underused: Google Keep.
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.
In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: Wells Fargo continued to grapple with the fallout from fake accounts. Equifax compromised data. Apple slowed down phones.
And to kick off 2018, there are vulnerabilities in computer chips that will affect “almost all computers, servers, cloud operating systems, and cellphones made in the past two decades.” Disheartening, no?
I’ve been thinking about the nomenclature employed in this case. Calling the two vulnerabilities “Spectre” and “Meltdown” accomplishes a couple things. Taken together, the names seem appropriately technology-adjacent, but I was most interested in Spectre, which evokes something elusive, ghostlike, and therefore understandably difficult to detect—which explains how the vulnerability went undiscovered for more than 20 years.