Category: Uncategorized

In June, year 6 pupils will sit a National Test in spelling, grammar and punctuation. But how good is your knowledge? Take our quiz for students, teachers and grammar fans

Are you an Information Technology (IT) Professional or developer looking for a resource to stay up to date with Microsoft security?  If so, I strongly encourage you to check out our Microsoft Security Newsletter.  This monthly newsletter delivered to your inbox in either HTML or Plain Text covers a wide range of Microsoft security topics from leading experts

San Francisco eBook publishing startup Inkling has released a new set of collaborative online digital publishing tools to try and coax book publishers to fully move their content into the Internet age.

The new software suite, called Inkling Habitat, will be the first online, collaborate, free, and open digital publishing environment for professionals.

Matt McInnis, CEO of Inkling, showed off some of Habitat’s capabilities at an event in New York this week. The online software appears to compete with the likes of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite and even Apple’s iBooks Author. Like Apple’s product, Habitat is free, although it sounds slightly more geared toward professional publishing houses, particularly those in education.

In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages. Well, thirty years later, COBOL is alive and well and living in large companies everywhere.

Yes, most of the smaller COBOL programs written in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s have been replaced with newer systems and newer technologies. However, the big mission critical systems written long ago in COBOL and modified and enhanced for the past thirty to forty years are still driving very large, very prestigious companies around the country and around the world. These companies include banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, retail chains, health care organizations, and every other type of company you can imagine.

Although normally a pretty upbeat and optimistic person, I end a lot of my different talks these days with a pretty scary, even dystopic slide:    “IF WE PROFS CAN BE REPLACED BY A COMPUTER SCREEN, WE SHOULD BE.???

 

That gets people???s attention.   And it makes people mad.   My meaning is often misunderstood at first???and that???s what I want.  I want profs in the audience to be outraged that I???m saying they can be replaced by a computer screen.   And, if they think they are not replaceable by a computer screen, I want them to articulate why. 

 

If they can make a good case for what they add, then my conditional statement is answered negatively:   No, I cannot be replaced by a computer screen because of . . .       Making that case accurately and persuasively (to the public, to legislators, to donors, and mostly to our students)  is the single most important thing any professor can do because, if we don???t, it will be made for us.  And we won’t like the result.

Colleges and University Professors are Improving Learning Outcomes, and Lowering Costs, with Flipped Classroom Techniques.

When you think about it, hoping that a 21st century middle or high school student will obsess over reading like they do. . .say. . .Tumblr or their new iPhone. . . is almost laughable. It is as anachronistic as wishing for an age before freeways or toys before plastic.

Indeed, expecting kids to deeply embrace and read books today whether for independent reading or homework is not a whole lot different than asking them to churn their own butter, carry their favorite music around in their backpack as an LP collection, use a telephone that is wired to the wall, or watch their favorite shows on a black and white tv with rabbit ears. But really ??? have books jumped the shark?

For learners,  and I am one, learning is a lifelong continuum . I still think though that those who deliver learning and the accreditation of learning still live in silos,  worse some of them have stopped learning.