On Homeschooling

Tony Woodlief has written a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, opinion piece about why he and his spouse have chosen to homeschool their children. He writes, in part:
The reason we’ve broken with tradition, or perhaps reverted to a deeper tradition, is not because we oppose sex education, or because we think their egos are too tender for […]

Yog on Online Moderation

James D. Macdonald, SF author and exceedingly experienced online moderator (remember Yog Sysop? That’s him) offers some rules for moderation under the heading:
Here’s what moderators need to know:

a) Sure, there’s freedom of speech. Anyone who wants it can go start their own blog. On Yog’s board, Yog’s whim is law.
b) Yog is an […]

How do we find excellent online teachers?

I’ve copied the following, with permission, from a post on an online forum. The original poster is a professional educator and adminstrator in a graduate program which relies on online instruction. I think the post asks some good questions.
It will come as no surprise to anyone here that the biggest challenge I face is not […]

Google No Longer Accepting Termpaper Mill Ads

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Google is no longer accepting AdWords ads from mills:
Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the “sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page.
You can […]

Turnitin Sued

My friend Dawno alerted me to this story about anti-plagiarism service Turnitin.com being sued for copyright violation by four students. Turnitin is a service contracted by universities and schools. Faculty submit student papers for analysis by Turnitin which compares the text to papers stored in an internal database and to text stored on the Web; […]

On Building a User Community

Kathy Sierra, one of the Head First authors, has an extremely useful and thoughtful post on Building a User Community. This is a post from someone who gets community, and the importance of sharing with, rather than feeding from, a community. I’m going to wait until I’ve read the sequel before I post, but you […]

What does Pedagogy Mean in IT?

Way back in January of 2002 I wrote a rationale for this blog. It’s been linked to and quoted a few times, most recently by Shelly McCauley Jugovich and Bruce Reeves in an Educause Quarterly article entitled “IT and Educational Technology: What’s Pedagogy Got to Do with IT?“. They quoted this bit (without the links):

This […]

Tools for Teaching

I’ve been attending the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. On Thursday I attended a panel on “hybrid teaching,” that is, replacing a fair amount of class room instruction with Internet based instruction. It’s not, frankly, a concept that I’m overly fond of; I think face-to-face live instruction is to be preferred, whenever possible. I also don’t […]

On “Serious” Blogging

New Kid on the Hallway drew my attention to this article in Inside Higher Ed by Jeff Rice.

Rice has two central points, I think, in his initial article. I say “I think” because the argument is less than coherent. Rice begins by referring to the “Ivan Tribble” articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education, asserting […]

On Grading and Spreadsheets

I freely confess that numbers and I do not get along as well as, say, letters and I get along. I started using a spreadsheet for grading calculations very early on in my teaching. In a graduate pedagogy class I noticed a lot of concern about the numeric and mathematical aspects of grading. For instance, […]

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