Happy Fathers’ Day to all the Dad’s out there! Being a Dad has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Having the chance to help shape my two little ones lives is a blessing beyond belief. I’m just blessed in so many ways and I have to say that Father’s Day seems more about them than me. It is very cool. And to my own Father, I know you know how important you’ve been to me! You’re not only an amazing Dad and Grandfather, but have been an amazing role model for me. Thanks so much and I love you! Horsing Around

I’ll be on the road, so who knows what the one post a day for this month will look like during the next week … I’ll try to post something interesting as we travel to Orlando, FL for the week. I know, I know … why the hell am I going to Orlando at the start of Summer? I’m asking myself that question as well. In all seriousness it should be fun, hot, and hopefully relaxing. While I am not ponying up for a new iPhone 3Gs, I have upgraded to 3.0 and plan to take advantage of the newly announced free AT&T hotspots. I love the idea of easy login on my phone for...

ITS PodcastsThe news that people can access iTunes U content on their iPhone and iPod Touches with the 3.0 software is such a great thing! I’ve wanted mobile access since the beginning of iTunes U, so seeing this work on my own iPhone was really very cool. The scenario of students having real mobile access to protected course content while they walk across campus is now a reality. We still don’t have the full suite — mobile recording, posting, and acquisition but we are getting really close. Now that I think about it, with the new voice recorder one may be able to rig up...

It started out really rough. Our daughter did not want to move to a new school and she certainly wasn’t all that into it when she first got there. To tell you the truth my wife and I weren’t all that thrilled either. We loved her pre-school and Kindergarten experiences at the local Montessori school and we really didn’t like the vibe we were getting from the public school administration. In retrospect things have turned out great, but it has been a year filled with tears, learning, growth, tolerance, and new perspectives. Its been hard at times, but I think all of us are...

As we begin to enter into the core of our TLT Faculty Fellowship work for the Summer a whole new line of thinking is emerging about how to continue to expand our network. Two weeks ago I got an email from an instructional designer at one of the other Penn State campuses looking to discuss one of the things I’ve been banging through that was really helpful and particularly insightful. What was great was that it inspired a whole string of discussions that culminated with her submitting a proposal to be part of a Hot Team on mobile learning. I’ve been really excited about the notion...

I read an interesting post by danah boyd this morning titled, “Twitter is for friends; Facebook is for everybody” that lays out an interesting teen use case for Twitter in light of Facebook’s continued growth and popularity. We’ve known for some time that the age demographic on Twitter is skewed much more towards my place on the spectrum than say college kids or teens. We also know that more and more high school (and middle school) kids are adopting either Facebook or MySpace as a place to connect and socialize with friends. It is in that point that danah makes a really...

We’ve been crazy about making tag stickers for all sorts of events. We use moo.com and take images that either we create in house or ones people coming to the events submit to us. Last summer we had some really cool ones made for the Learning Design Summer Camp from personal icons people submitted to the wiki. A few months earlier, we had an amazing set of them made for the 2008 TLT Symposium that became quite the popular item around campus and beyond. I even stuck some to my laptop and the back of my Cinema Display! My Laptop. Credit ghbrett on Flickr. For one reason or another we...

Over the last couple of years most of us have become ultra familiar with link shortening services like tinyurl and bit.ly to save extra characters when using Twitter or for sending out really long URLs in emails. I’ve heard lots of thoughts on how to make them better and have had more than one conversation about why they could lead to the end of the web — I think that is probably greatly exaggerated. The argument goes something like, if everyone uses [insert service name here] to share their links and that service goes away, we have no real record of where we were linking to. I...