Rick’s Café Canadien

Happy Canada Day, everyone. Great day for picnics and fireworks, and to celebrate our very special country.
Bon anniversaire, le Canada!

Reminder: Summer Graduate Program Advisement
I’ll repeat this notice as a reminder. We’re up to our ears in summer projects now, so our Wednesday evening sessions are the best times to find us at our desks if you’re looking for some good advice or a bad cup of coffee.

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Now that it is summer, we are getting into the “Where’s my prof?” time of year. Once again this year, we will be available for graduate program advisement on Wednesday evenings from June 18 through August 13. At least one of our faculty will be in the office on Wednesday evenings at 6 pm, so you don’t need to make an appointment–just drop in and go door-to-door or phone-to-phone to find out who is “on call.” If no students show up on a particular evening and we get lonely, we will probably leave by 8pm, so do try to let us know if you’re going to be dropping by later than that. We will stay until the halls are clear.

Contact info for each of us can be found at:

Barry Brown
Dirk Morrison
Len Proctor
Rick Schwier
Jay Wilson

N.B. This only applies to Educational Communications and Technology students — Curriculum Studies doesn’t have the same arrangement.

Happy birthday, dude.

I’ve thought a lot over the years, as you no doubt have too, about the nature of information and how we make sense of it in a digital world. I’d never once thought of how we have, particularly in the past, objectified information. It is a thing, in a bounded place, that is to be stored and retrieved as an object. Well, maybe not so much in a digital world–the very corporeal nature of information is challenged. I thought this video did a nice job of demonstrating a few older and newer ways to think about information.

Dean Shareski just announced the lineup of keynotes for the K12 Online Conference 2008.

This is looking like a whale of a conference–a can’t-miss event for 2008.

Dr. Clayton R. Wright has once again offered up his list of upcoming conferences that are related to educational technology. This is a very large undertaking, and one that saves me a lot of time. I print out Clayton’s list and post it next to my lamp. Every time I turn on the lamp, I dream of traveling to some exotic, or not-so-exotic, conference site.

I’ve been interested in “other kinds of design” and how they might inform instructional design for a long time. Some colleagues and I, notably Katy Campbell, Elizabeth Boling and Andy Gibbons are deeply engaged in the questions, and have done a little bit of work together on them. We’ve considered how engineers, artists, architects, stage directors, set designers in television and film, interior designers, and landscape designers approach their craft.

But what about people who design social protest? I’d never thought about it until I saw this little video about how an artist protested the lack of garbage collection in Italy. Now Italy is special; I love it and I’ve only been there once. But I noticed a distinct sense of humour, less vitriol, a dramatic flair and even less fear of litigation (climb the Tower of Pisa and you’ll understand what I mean). Well, if you are part of that culture, how might you design a protest for more garbage collection?

It made me think about how there are so many design factors in a good protest. Should the tone be self-righteous? Angry? Concerned? Self-indulgent? Gob-smacked at the stupidity of society? Well, here’s how one Italian artist approached his design problem.

When a university administration does something that is in the service of something that doesn’t have immediate payoffs for its revenues or prestige, I think it is worth noting, and maybe even applauding. I’d like to do that for my home institution today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ask yourself a simple question: What do you do that gets in the way of learning? Then read this terrific post by Jennifer Jones, and see where you fit. It’s inspiring and humbling, all at the same time.

Rob Wall, Dean Shareski and I got together this afternoon for a relatively impromptu podcast. Heather Ross and Alec Couros were busy working for a living, so we did our best to carry on without them.

TLt reflections and edupunk - http://tinyurl.com/5lbmxh

Shownotes available at http://edtechposse.wikispaces.com/4.3