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...

Last night I was exploring Flickr a bit and started to look at some really cool tilt-shift photos that make scenes look like models. I’m no Photoshop pro so my results really don’t compare, but I have been having more fun playing around with pictures lately than in a long time. I’ve been doing some fake lomos that I’ve enjoyed, so I decided to give it a shot. I was able to easily find several good tutorials to follow … the best (and simplest one) is what I ended up following. It might be fun to do shots like this from all over campus and put them into a group...

I have to say that I am falling deeper and deeper into the google universe these days. Not sure if it is the right thing to do, but the combination of all the Docs features and their overall simplicity has me spending more and more time using them for everything. One of their tools that I’ve always admired but didn’t use too much is Gmail. My wife lives in it — she constantly has it open on her MacBook. It is her only email client and she swears by its functionality. Between that and a conversation I had today I decided to take another step into the cloud and forward my...

This morning I talked to a large group of Alumni Association staff about ideas related to connecting communities. The talk was titled, Emerging Trends for Connecting Communities, and focused on the emergent opportunities within social environments, content creation spaces, and the rise of mobility. It is always quite a bit of fun getting to talk to people outside my specific area of focus and I always discover that we have far more in common than I expect going in. Another nice thing was that I got to give the talk in my old stomping ground at the IST Building … in the IST Cybertorium...