EduGeek Journal

“Why should we have to pay for chapters we don’t use in textbooks?”  We have all had this problem with textbooks.  There only seems to be two options for instructors when it comes to choosing textbooks for class: get a large book with 20-something chapters and only use 14 or 15, or get several smaller [...]

One conference down, one more to go.  I’ll be heading out to NUTN 2009 next week.  But this past week I was at the Sloan-C International Symposium on Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning.  Quite a mouthful.  I saw some interesting sessions on some new products that I plan on blogging about in the future.  [...]

Okay… scratch my last post.  What if the browser was your LMS?  Think about it – what is the biggest problems with most social networking sites?  Privacy and ownership of content.  Huge battles are being fought over who owns what when you upload it and issues like “how private is your stuff anyways?”  Opera released [...]

I was a little shocked to see how little I could find about “slugging” in online learning when I searched recently.  Maybe I was doing a bad search.  Slugging is basically a way students can cheat by extending their deadline.  All you do is take a non-text file… an image, flash file, whatever… and change [...]

I guess it was inevitable. As much negative press as Blackboard garnered over recent legal actions (in addition to the negative experiences some of their customers are always complaining about), they had to do something abut it.  I can see the board meeting now: “We’re taking a beating over this lawsuit. What can we do [...]

Some of the EduGeeks will be traveling to conferences in the near future, even doing some presentations.  Come hang out with us over a meal or something and talk geek stuff if you are at any of these.  Of course, the economy could change our plans for these, but we’re still planning to go as [...]

Educators are grappling with how to deal with some of the problems that arise when students and teachers use online social networks such as FaceBook. No one is going to get it perfect to start with. So, while we are shaking these tools out and trying to learn what is good and what is wrong, [...]

Recently, 20/20 had a segment on College education.  It was looking at how so many people get an education and then have a hard getting a job (“College: Worth the Price of admission?” January 16, 2008).  I usually agree with John Stossel on everything he reports, but this report was just misleading in my opinion. [...]

Every time I talk about using Web2.0 in education with someone, or even being a do-it-yourself EduPunk in general, I always throw in a little disclaimer at the end: “just be careful what you use, because one of those sites that you base your entire class on could be gone tomorrow.”  I usually get this [...]

If you don’t know what EduPunks are – well, you probably are one if you are reading this blog. Or, at least one at heart. We’re all probably EduPunks here at EGJ (even though I personally hate the label). We want to bring change to the online education world, and some of us are even [...]