Remembering to remember

I often struggle to remember the names of my students, especially in large classes. Like most people, using my visual and spacial memory helps. Classes with fixed seating arrangements are out because you want students to mix partners. Attendance lists are frowned upon at the institution I am currently working for.  This had me in […]

What psychologists are saying about how technology affects us

Speaking about “The Secret Powers of Time”, Stanford professor emeritus Philip Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment) explains how various perspectives of time – past, present and future – influence our actions and relationships. There are six main orientation time zones: Past: Past positive (nostalgic), or past negative (regretful) Present: hedonistic (seeking pleasure, knowledge), […]

iCloud: iUnderstand

This is one of Steve Job’s last presentations, still explaining “his” products with inspired simplicity and clarity. Focus with me for a moment on his metalanguage (often called signposting), that is the language he uses to take us from one point to the next. Metalanguage or signposting varies widely between presentation types, and is generally […]

The sixth sense

MIT’s Pattie Maes presents Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. The geniuses at MIT have turned your hand into a computer interface. Do I want to read the tags from someone’s blog projected onto that person? Well, no, not really. Like […]

Moodle

For over a year now my dear host Christian has put up with my Moodle platform. You’ll remember, I ran a few courses on it and did something for the LMU and for the VHS, and I was intending to run a train-the-trainer session for MELTA. But being hacked has come as a shock and […]

Facebook owns you. Forever.

“Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore. Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. […]

IT and content

It’s very interesting working as an intermediary between the low-tech EFL teaching and writing world and the high-tech IT world. Very different things are important to the people working on either side of that great divide, and they have little understanding or patience with the concerns of the other side. I think the people in […]