Desperately Seeking Solitude

You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you.

Somehow this passage hit home for me as I read The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz in a recent edition of the Chonicle Review.   Lately, I’ve experienced a sort of yearning to be alone, with my own thoughts, without interruption or interference, to go on [...]

Seeing the forest or just the trees?

At least a part of every day, I seem to get so caught up in the details that I lose sight of the big picture.  Apparently, there is a term for this – at least as it relates to visual perception. It’s called inattentional blindness.  I’m making the loose connection with what happens when I [...]

Crisis, Change and Economics

Crisis opens the door to change and often forces us to reflect on our most fundamental values. While I’ve experienced many moments of personal “crisis” in my life,  economics has never been at the root of any of them.  Maybe it’s because I don’t have investments (barely a savings account actually) – maybe it’s because [...]

Musing on Boot Camp

On my way to work this morning, I found myself thinking about the concept of “boot camp.” It’s everywhere: get fit bootcamps; software training bootcamps – at UBC, we even have a Vista Bootcamp for Faculty new to the CMS. Boot camps are wildly popular – despite their decidedly militaristic roots. [...]

Multi-tasking Revisited

Found an interesting and entertaining article on multitasking today by way of George Siemens’ blog . I’ve been thinking about multi-tasking for a while now and I’ve come to the opinion that we have trapped ourselves in the illusion that we can do more in less time and that all we need are more [...]

Learners Owning Learning

Who owns learning? The simple answer to that question is “learners do.” Yet, to realize the level of ownership talked about at the recent ELI Annual Meeting, learners also need to be able to evaluate and assess and demonstrate their learning. And not only the learning that is valued by the Faculty, but learning that [...]

Privacy Policies and Social Software

We know that students are using a variety of social software tools in their daily lives: Facebook, Del.icio.us and IM to name a few. Faculty are beginning to experiment with many of these tools in their courses. In OLT, we work with Faculty and students to help them understand the various applications of some of [...]

Slidespace: re-thinking PPT

Will the Real Net-Geners Please Stand Up ?

Memory, Mind and Making Connections

There is a virtual smorgasboard of video resources related to learning and technology on the web. I like CommonCraft for basic how to’s related to social software; TEDTalks for inspiration and Blip.tv for the Zefrank show (mostly just insightful good fun).
Ignoring the fact that this little clip from Zefrank on Blip.tv is tied [...]