“No unread messages in conversations or conferences” It was the message, all those years ago, in the world of dialup and text conferencing, that told you it was time to log off and go do something else. “There’s nothing to see here. You’ve already read everything.” There’s no email to read. There are no new posts in the online communities. You’re at the end. No … Continue reading No Unread Messages
I’m pretty old. I was thinking about my first job interview. It was 1993. I was asked what I thought about Microsoft Windows. I told them it wasn’t a real operating system. It was just a shell that sat on top of MS-DOS. It was a resource hog, and it was unreliable. It made computers harder to use rather than easier, and it wasn’t worth … Continue reading Nostalgic Optimism
As I was writing the first part of this, I got to the section on keeping instruction brief and realized I wasn’t doing a very good job of that. So we took a little break. We were talking about how all schools are probably going to be blended to some extent. We need to easily be able to move back and forth between online learning … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 2
Years ago, I asked one of my high school teachers if he would consider teaching a course online. “Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “I come to work because I love being around kids. Online classes would keep all of the annoying parts of the job and get rid of the fun part.” Point taken. Educators are not really drawn to the … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 1
What an unsettling time. In a couple weeks, our world has dramatically shifted. It’s like 9/11. It’s like JFK. It’s not, really. Those were sudden national tragedies when the world changed in an instant. This is slower. Our world changed over the course of a week, not in minutes. And, at least for now, it’s temporary. But it’s like those other events in the sense … Continue reading The Opportunity of Crisis
When I was 25, I believed that the anonymity of online discussions would allow the exchange of ideas without prejudice, and raise the level of human discourse. I’d been communicating online for five or six years. The web was brand new. Most of the forums were text based. There was lots of Usenet and mailing lists. And it didn’t matter who you were or where … Continue reading Beliefs
We are living in an age when information is no longer scarce. The Internet gave everyone access to the information. It was sold to us as an information superhighway. Think of all of the wonderful resources you have right at your fingertips with this fantastic, revolutionary technology. Then, interactive web tools came along and made it really easy for anyone to post content online. We … Continue reading Facts and Feelings
Thirty years ago, when computers were still new, we didn’t know what to do with them. There was a sense — in that half generation between the widespread availability of computers and the advent of the Internet age — that the world was changing in fundamental ways. No one was sure what was really going on, but this was big. Really big. Schools bought computers … Continue reading Coding != Career
One of the problems faced by the designers of the Internet was the ability for computers to find one another. If a global network of computers were to function in a decentralized way, there needed to be a way for any computer to send information to any other. An address scheme was created in the late 1970s called Internet Protocol. With this system, each computer on … Continue reading Address Space
Taste of Tech 