The Anyone, Anything, Anytime, Anywhere Education
Whether educational institutions like it or not, education is changing and walled gardens are evaporating. New ideas in education are emerging…or, probably better to say, old ideas are finally able to be technologically implemented. Whichever the case, the change is no longer bound by old ideas like nationality, income, time, or location. ANYONE: The One […]
Stop Making Parents the Punchline and Include Them in the EdTech Conversation
Digitally ignorant parents find themselves once again the punchline of a new website dutifully called MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com. The site was created by a daughter after her dad joined Facebook and his social networking activity quickly became obnoxious to her. With a swift gain in popularity, MyParentsJoinedFacebook.com joins others in exploiting (right or wrong) parents’ naivete as […]
School Website Design is Part of the Student Engagement Problem
In the first version of Red Rover’s navigation bar, we included a ‘Live Help’ button (pictured below) that generated 5-8 sessions with students per day. As more students joined Red Rover, we realized the ‘Help’ section needed to include more options other than just ‘Live Help’. So we created a new ‘Help’ section (pictured below) […]
Facebook and The Adolescent Brain – The Emerging Employers’ Dilemma
Two weeks ago, I asked my Facebook followers if they’d post differently knowing that 60% of employers search the web when considering potential employees. Several students came back with strongly worded annoyances about not wanting to change their online behavior: Then my adult friends chimed in: Though we were talking about online behavior, the difference […]
The Tech of Student Success: Comparing Facebook, Ning and Red Rover
John Jay College of Criminal Justice was reviewing a number of different social tools, trying to figure out where they wanted to invest their time and money. They asked me to help clarify how they fit together. I did it with a little video and I thought it came out pretty well – if just […]
Tech Tip – Using Twitter as your Free Campus, Group Text Messaging Service
There are many group/campus text messaging companies that offer an array of services for a fee, but if you are just looking to communicate with a group via text, then Twitter might be your best free option. Mike Richwalsky over at HighEdWebTech demos how he uses Twitter as Allegheny College’s free text messaging service for […]
Speaker, Edtech and Peanut Butter – The Case for Reengineering Student Activities
In college, I tried to start an Entrepreneur Club but never got past the paperwork. The Student Activities office manager handed me three pages of clearly defined step-by-step guidelines she created on how to start a new group. It was evident she had spent a long time creating the document and was proud of the […]
Embracing Hierarchy in Groups to Increase Engagement in Education
Two overlapping foundational concepts for this post: 1) Hierarchy Matters In his best lecture submission to “Big Ideas,” Mark Fournier opens by stating he will convince the audience that hierarchy formation in humans is natural, predictable, and consequential: “It is natural in that hierarchies will form wherever people congregate. It is predictable in that where […]
Let’s Make Education Feel More Like Cocaine
Think of your college’s orientation process.
Ask a few students how they felt during the orientation days, when they went through them.
Then spend two minutes with this slide deck, with your orientation and intake process in mind.
Andre Malan: What Education Will Look Like
One of my favorite quotes comes at 20:30: Andre tells the story of John Beasley Murray assigning a Wikipedia change as an assignment. He is criticized for outsourcing the grading to Wikipedia editors, but his students came to his defense: Easy Money Cash Advance “It was harder [for the students] to get those grades from […]