September 2007
Nike Missile Bases in NJ →
I recall walking around the missiles in Livingston, NJ - this video looks at a station in Sandy Hook, Nj and Long Island, NY.
Roadmaps
I didn’t attend the conference “Campus Technology 2007: Roadmap to
IT Leadership” but I was able to take a look at the proceedings online.
There are also audio
recordings provided by MediaSite from some of this more popular sessions. With the start of the new school
year only a few weeks old, I have already attended 5 meetings where the term “roadmap” came up...
YouTube Course
Now we know that YouTube has really arrived. Pitzer College in California is offering a course about
YouTube. I know your first reaction may be that here’s another gut course, but you may want to dig a bit deeper
before you dismiss the idea. Alexandra Juhasz is a media studies professor who created the course called
“Learning from YouTube.” Her students control most of the...
Beach Blogging
I’m at the beach this week. I’ll have to
do some Moodling for my course, check email a few times and maybe post here a bit, but I’m pretty much
offline. If the local coffee shop can give me free Internet, why are there still major hotels that can’t throw in
free access with my room charge? So when I can grab someone’s open wireless from my balcony chair (like...
Asking Questions with William Blake
Doubt by William BlakeWhen I was looking in my Norton Anthology for another poem, I came across William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” Almost everyone who has sat through a few years of English literature classes in high school or college has come across this poem.Being that I do not have a good memory for poems, it surprised me that I...
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
If Alan Turing was a kid in an American
school today, he would definitely be classified in some way. Still, he was a genius who is generally credited with
developing some of the basic concepts underlying the computer. Kurt Gödel was a fearful, reclusive kid who
became a paranoid adult. Where were the special services people and child study teams for these two? Gödel was a
mathematical...
Seeing
“We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no
contrivance on earth can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson If you haven’t already guessed, I am a
believer in serendipity and play (and constructivism if you want to take it into my education world). This...
Classroom 2.0
Do we need to start teaching digital citizenship? It’s a question I found being discussed at Classroom 2.0 - a
relatively new social networking site for people interested in the application of Web 2.0 and collaborative
technologies in learning. There’s no shortage of social net or Web 2.0 sites out there, but you won’t find that
many that are devoted to educators. The site...
Fountains of Wayne slideshow
Fountains of Wayne
PowerPoint to Flash
authorPOINT Lite is a free PowerPoint to Flash converter that quickly and easily converts
PowerPoint presentations to Flash. It converts PowerPoint (.ppt and .pps) to Flash (.swf) and the Flash
presentation (look at a sample) plays like your original (with effects, sound, animation, and rehearse
timings etc.) with the advantages of Flash files (reduced file size, secure content, and easy...
Classic Reader
There are a number of public domain
literary sites on the Net. Project Gutenberg is probably the best known and oldest digital library. Classic Reader is a site that
offers free classic books, plays, and short stories by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and others. You can
read, search and also something that may make it ttractive tou you as a teacher or student, add your own...
Traveling Through Books With Google
Take Google Earth and add a Google Book Search
layer and you can do some interesting things with teaching literature. Google Books has a “places mentioned in
this book” feature that uses a map to show you locations referenced in a particular book. Now, with the new Book
Search layer, you can flip that over and use a map of a place and find the books from there.Locations in...
The End of the Essay
We launched a new podcast series in
iTunes U this week called “The End of the Essay.” It’s a project that I’ve been working on with Dr. Norbert Elliot, Professor of English at
NJIT. Norbert had given a presentation last spring for the NJEDge.Net DLAAB group called “The End of the Essay:
Writing in a Mediated Environment.” I thought it was something he...
Yahoo! Teachers
Yahoo! Teachers is a new tool and it’s free for all teachers, administrators, and education specialists. It hasn’t
been released yet, but there’s a sneak peek online. It looks like an interesting platform, and appears to be aimed at K-12 since it was built
in collaboration with some of their Yahoo! Teachers of Merit. I signed up for their email update about the
launch. I...
Yahoo! for Teachers
Yahoo! Teachers is a new tool and it’s free for all teachers, administrators, and education specialists. It hasn’t
been released yet, but there’s a sneak peek online. It looks like an interesting platform, and appears
to be aimed at K-12 since it was built in collaboration with some of their Yahoo! Teachers of Merit. I signed up
for their email update about the launch. I...
A Model for Using Podcasts for Learning
I was pleased to read an article online about a
professor at the University of Connecticut that is approaching podcasting in a way that fits well with our NJIT on iTunes U philosophy for faculty
podcasts. Psychology professor David Miller didn’t want to simply record lectures from his large (315 students) General
Psych course. He wanted to increase student interaction. “As the...
Writing as a Problem-Solving Strategy
I read the introduction to the August 2007 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology by Anita McAnear,
but the short piece had me at the title. Writing as a Problem-Solving Strategy. McAnear is the magazine’s acquisitions
editor and the national program chair for NECC, but more importantly, she was a middle school math and
language arts teacher. Been there, done that, know that...
A Map of Future Forces Affecting Education
A reader suggested I look at this “2006-2016 Map of Future Forces Affecting Education” from the Knowledgeworks Foundation ( a group I
was not familiar with, who have strong connections to education in Ohio) and the Institute for the Future (“founded in 1968 by a group of former
RAND Corporation researchers with
a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge...
Flattening the Net Tower
“When the world starts to move from a primarily vertical value-creation model to
an increasing horizontal creation model, it doesn’t affect just how business gets done. It affects
everything. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat, p.201 Portion of Pieter Breughel’s Tower of Babel As
told in the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a built to reach the heavens by a united humanity. God...
Warren County Poetry Festival 2007
The Fifth Biennial Warren County Poetry Festival FREE event Saturday, September 29th 10 am-10pm Blair Academy, Blairstown, New Jersey Featured Poets Linda Pastan (Poets Online writing prompts featuring Pastan poems prompt#1 prompt#2) Eleanor Wilner Kurtis Lamkin (writing prompt featuring Lamkin) With readings by: Ron Block, Jean LeBlanc, Judith Michaels and Susanna Rich Updated information...
Mary Oliver - poet
Mary Oliver is one of the best-selling poets in America and the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award. Her 15 books of poetry includeNew and Selected Poems: Volume 1 and Volume 2, Winter Hours , and her non-fiction includes Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and...
