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Not infrequently I am asked about my thoughts on AI and the future of technology more generally. Here are some thoughts. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh was 25 years old when he flew solo across the Atlantic. It took him 33.5 hours to fly The Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris. When he returned to the United States, he spent a year travelling the country promoting the wonders of flight. He said that he could envision a time when as many as 15 people could fly on a plane. In 1968 and at the age of 66, he met with the ApolloRead More →

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There is a lot of confusion around copyright. What can you use? What can’t you use? How much can you use? A few years ago, I participated in an excellent Educause course on copyright hosted by Thomas Tobin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and what I learned has been a tremendous help to me. I hope this helps you, too! (Disclaimer: I am not an intellectual property attorney. If I were an intellectual property attorney, well, you’d probably already know that.) To determine whether you can use something without violating copyright, you need to answer four questions. Keep in mind that all four answers are on aRead More →

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One of the advantages of using the Canvas learning management system is that it is built on a platform that makes it easy to make it do things that its inherent programming doesn’t allow it to do. By “easy,” I mean easy for those who know how to write the scripts and easier for us who only need to install the scripts others have written. Using a web browser add-in called Tampermonkey (yes, it is called Tampermonkey; download for Chrome; download for Firefox), we can run scripts in your browser that will change how Canvas behaves. For example, there is a Tampermonkey script that allowsRead More →

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I taught my first online course in the late 1990s. I had done my homework, reading up on everything I could find about teaching online, attending conference sessions about teaching online. While the Internet was out of its infancy, it was still in toddlerhood, so there wasn’t a ton of information out there about teaching online. For that matter, there wasn’t a ton of information about the Internet itself. Some time in the mid-1990s, my wife, who was a reference librarian at the time, had a file folder labeled “Internet.” That pretty much sums up how little information there was. Anyway, I learned everything IRead More →

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Last week, after a student confessed to using a “study guide” site to complete one or more of her homework assignments, I did some Googling. While I think I found what she was using—the words and phrases were changed up—I discovered that another of my students was using the answers in their entirety. That led to more searching. Here are two sites that a few of my students are using. CourseHero.com First, let’s find your college or university. In the top navigation bar, click on “Find Study Resources” and search “by School”—K-12 or higher ed. For my college, here are the “Popular Departments.” Under eachRead More →

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Have you had this experience? You’re reading a student’s paper, and your internal plagiarism detector starts setting off alarms. The prose sounds different than anything else the student has written. You start googling phrases – and nothing comes up. Using Turnitin? That probably won’t catch it either (Rogerson & McCarthy, 2017). Your student may have used one of the many freely available “paraphrasing tools.” Here is the first paragraph from a recent issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, andRead More →

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I’m not a big fan of flashcards, although I have found an interesting use for them. Flashcards take the material you’re learning out of context making it harder to learn, but easier to memorize. Students can use flashcards, for example, to memorize the bones in the body. They will be able to remember that the ulna is in the arm, but without context, they won’t know the ulna’s relationship to, say, the humerus. Having said that, the sheer memorization that flashcards afford does have a place. If you want to just learn new vocabulary words, flashcards can certainly help. Having said that, I have aRead More →

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EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) conducts an annual survey of undergraduate students regarding their use of technology. Read more about the 2013 study. In this post I give some commentary on the data presented by Eden Dahlstrom, Director of Research at EDUCAUSE, in her 11/12/2013 webinar. Want to watch the very well-done, hour-long webinar? Watch it here. Want to just see the slides? They are here. In 2014 EDUCAUSE will include a faculty study. Want to participate? The slides are ECAR’s; the commentary is mine. Here’s the survey methodology for the 2013 student survey. Students see the value of technology, although only 61%Read More →

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Free webinar. November 12, 2013 at 1pm ET (10am PT). “The EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) conducts an annual study about undergraduates’ technology experiences and expectations in higher education. The results of this study provide a unique look at students’ perceptions about technology use, trends, challenges, and opportunities in higher education. In 2013 ECAR partnered with 251 institutions and surveyed more than 112,000 undergraduates about their technology perspectives. Join us for this webinar to learn what students say about their technology experiences and hear ECAR’s plans to expand this work to include faculty perspectives. Participate in polls and backchannel discussions to inform ECARRead More →

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It’s about how you use the technology. I recently read author and commercial pilot Patrick Smith’s book, Cockpit Confidential. His pet peeve: When people say “Planes can practically fly themselves.” He assures us that they cannot. He notes that the claim that technology is all that and a bag of chips is not unique to aviation. Smith quotes author and surgeon Atul Gawande from a New Yorker essay, “Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology… But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well peopleRead More →