Multilitteratus Incognitus

I came across a blog post on InsideHigherEd recently about PhD programs and the disappearing tenure-track job market and how PhD programs should help their students to do something more than research and specialization in an area that has a focus on tenure-track professorial jobs (because as we all know adjunct instructor pay stinks). The main point of the author here is that PhD programs should include: Teacher education because simply knowing your subject matter does not make you a great teacher of said subject matter Higher Ed. Management - so you know the inner workings of your environment Leadership Development Media Training Now off the bat, I don't get the media training piece - perhaps someone could explain this to me.  Leadership development - well, shouldn't you have had this when you were working on a Master's degree?  As part of my MBA, MSIT and MEd I've worked in teams for projects, even as an upper level undergrad taking grad level science courses ...

A week or so ago I saw this posted on eLearning Brothers and I had a facepalm moment. I have to say that I am one of those people, the people that are turned off from misspelled words and misused words. Yes, I know we've all, by now, seen this: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. The fact of the matter is that it's not really about our brain's ability to decode the mess that we see above.  The brain can do it, provided that we know (or think we know) the words that are there.  If we don't know the words, and we need to look them up to figure out what the sentence says, we are SOL (sh*t-outta-luck). When I see things such as "truely" ...

I came across this brief video on the Harvard Business Review the other day on how knowledge management is moving away from the repository as goal . Here's the transcript of the video: One of the interesting ways of capturing the problems with traditional knowledge management is it came at knowledge from a stocks viewpoint, a stocks of knowledge. The problem is, we have knowledge, it's distributed and dispersed throughout the organization. How do we capture it and make it available to others? Certainly a big challenge, I don't want to diminish that as a value, but I think what people found as they tried to implement the various systems and methodologies to do that is there wasn't really a lot of motivation for people to invest the time and effort to develop and define those stocks and make them available as part of a broader repository. This kind of approach really shifts the attention from stocks of knowledge, what we know today, to defining and developing new k...

I keep reading (and hearing) about the wonder about this supposed Net Generation, or millennial students or...well other terms that mean the same thing: absolutely nothing ;-)  In the past couple of years I've heard and read so much about how these students process things differently and that we need to adapt our ways of teaching to suit their unique learning preferences and technology savvyness.  Now, I am a member of this generation - granted I am from the early stages of this generation having been born in the early 80s, but I am a member of this generation nonetheless. Being a member of this generation I call all this BS. I've actually been thinking about doing research and writing about it (and hopefully getting published). My main line of though is this: just because a certain group of individuals has grown up around technology, it doesn't mean that they know how to use it effectively.  The main comparison that I can make is cars.  I grew up with cars in my...

I was recently reading these two articles on ProfHacker, one was on RSS & SMS integration in the (library) catalog , and the most recent one about mobile applications for libraries . This brought me back to my days as an MSIT student.  Back in those days I took many opportunities to work on homework/class projects that dealt directly with library systems - some examples are IT/Library mergers and integration, patron privacy and Project Wormhole - which is what these ProfHacker posts reminded me of! Project Wormhole* (yeah, I used imaginative names), was a project I worked on for an Object Oriented Programming course.  The main idea was that each patron would have a customized library homepage that they would log-onto and they would have a widgetized HUD of all of their information needs.  The patrons already have a library barcode and a student/staff ID number, so there isn't really a need to create yet another log-on! They just need to log on with information tha...

A month or so ago I came across this this post on Salon via OSNews . I read both the OSNews post and the Salon post and I've wanted to write about it since, but something wasn't sitting right - I just couldn't put my finger on it. Well, yesterday - reading about child development, specifically language development, it hit me! Here's an excerpt: Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?) And yet the thought processes that today's best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizar...

This came across my twitter stream today, pretty interesting what you can do with a Prezi (haven't spent much time on Prezi - I suppose I should once I finish Applied Linguistics and I have some more free time on my hands :-) ) Definition of a PLE on Prezi

Well, last night Blackboard went on the Borg trail again - resistance is futile, you will be acquired! This time around it's WIMBA and Elluminate that are up on the acquisition block.  Some people have rejoiced at news of the acquistion while others have dissenting opinions (same link as the rejoice, just scroll down).  From a business point of view I think that Blackboard did the right thing, they obviously had a deficiency in their product, open source alternatives like Sakai and Moodle were doing what Blackboard is doing with their current LMS product, so they needed a differentiator.  Even if you do use Moodle or Sakai, you still need synchronous capabilities, don't you? So you can be happy with your Open Source LMS and still buy a blackboard product.  Also by buying two products in the same category you're eliminating competition! Of course, there is the side that makes business sense - in the fiscal, competitive sense - and the business side that make...