I suspect that over the next 10 weeks or so I’ll be writing quite a bit about the course I’m teaching this semester, so let me provide a little bit of background. The class is an elective graduate class in the Educational Policy, Planning and Leadership program at William and Mary. The title is Adult…
Category: General Technology
Lessons from the WordPress Worm
After reading the news about the WordPress hacking attacks of such as Andy Ihnatko and Robert Scoble, I spent more time than usual cleaning up my hosted account and trying to figure out if I were one of the folks John Gruber had in mind when he questioned the wisdom of amateur system administrators running…
Beginning Digital Rehab
This summer, just before I headed out on my vacation, I finally hit bottom. My digital life was out of control, and I was powerless over my my RSS’s, my API’s, Yammers, Twitters and the rest of my life stream. The initial high that came from registering for yet another microblogging site, bookmark sharing tool,…
Starting with the Big Questions
Saint Richard (Dick) Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute and founder of the concept of “life-work designing” suggests that one key step in preparing for an uncertain future is to sit down at the end of each week and answer one fundamental question: “what have I done this week that added more value…
Yammering Away
We’ve started a an impromptu experiment with a new application to foster additional communication and awareness within our group. During one of my Arc Trainer sessions last week, I was listening to a TWIT podcast and heard that a program called Yammer was the winner of the “Techcrunch 50”. Later that afternoon, I began my…
Starting Though The Dogpile
One of the notes that I found in my dogpile was a folded index card from the now-defunct Seminars in Academic Computing. I participated in a discussion with a group of colleagues on the topic of What Do Faculty Expect From Higher Ed. IT? The discussion was described in the program: Traditionally faculty have needed…
Through the Dogpile
Speaking of Scott Nelson….. I was on a task force studying digital imaging with Scott and he often talked about the value of of a “digital dogpile” as a collection of high quality images that could be freely accessible to members of the community who needed them to enhance communications. The reference generally made me…
The Importance of Responsible Computing
Like many academics, I think that many security policies and procedures are a tad draconian and based on superstition rather than evidence. One of my pets that I often rail about is the requirement that individuals change passwords on some fixed schedule; I’m still looking for any evidence that these requirements actually make our institutions…
Surely You Jest: HPC for the Humanities?
Humanities High Performance Computing: “” For the last three weeks I’ve been immersed in the world of HPC–High Performance Computing. HPC is that parallel universe where researchers run programs that take five days of processing, where tiny jobs only require 12-15 processors, where terabyte drives fill up in matters of hours and where shouting at…
I’m Going to the Faculty Academy
Welcome – Faculty Academy 2008 One of the spring events that I’ve come to look forward the most is the Faculty Academy for Teaching and Learning at the University of Mary Washington. This year I’ll be attending as an “esteemed guest presenter” and sucking in all the energy and creativity that event fosters. I’m honored…
