Thoughts on Thoughts on Thoughts
Our ideas come from a collection of conversations, books, articles, blogs, and videos among many other sources. We are active participants in what is coined the Read/Write Web in which someone takes a little content to produce a little content. We are both consumers and produces at the same time. It’s very gratifying to receive […]
How We See Ourselves
Swift Kick is a laboratory. While there are many layers of experiments underneath (business structure, marketing, virtual company, transparency, etc.) our primary value to education is in the ability to visualize, put together, and sustain experiments in the fields of student engagement and education technology. To be clear, we are not the researchers. We cannot […]
Abilene Christian University’s mLearning (Mobile Learning) Initiative
Oklahoma Christian University partnered with Apple Computers to offer every 1st year student attending an orientation the option of a new Apple MacBook, iPhone, or iPod Touch! While it sounds unique, it’s not the first time as Abilene Christian University (ACU) were the pioneers in offering** a free iPhone or iPod Touch as a bonus […]
Talking vs. Doing
I was complaining to my girlfriend last night about talking vs. doing. That I like talking. It’s much easier than doing. We get paid to talk right now. But it is a small part of the solution. Reconfiguring the system is doing – it’s much harder and a much bigger part of the solution. Red […]
Getting an “Expert” Mentor in 3 Minutes With Delicious
Used to be one had to put long hours of Googling into research. Not so much anymore. Want to get and stay current? Use delicious.com to find the fast-fingered searcher types in any field. I thought this was a known way to use delicious – that of course it was fine for storing things but […]
MacArthur DML Competition – Reading the Tea Leaves
Traveling has me late with this post. Procrastination too. I’ve been worried about “sour grapes” and hoped that with a little time, I might better be able to get the right tone. A while back, when it seemed that we did not win the MacArthur DML grant, I said I was interested in reviewing the […]
Speaking is Just One Piece
Even though right now, the majority of our income is from our trainings for schools, we’ve always believed that speaking was only a piece of the bigger goal of solving student apathy. We speak, but we aren’t speakers. In fact, we think there are speakers out there like, Dave Coleman, who are hands down better […]
APML and Education
A pretty little video: DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo**. At the moment this is a highly fringe technology conversation – solving a problem of only the most involved and finicky mobile networkers. The idea of data portability is great – though the current challenge is twofold: you can’t get […]
Lottery Ticket Strategy (MacArthur’s DML Continued)
A few days ago the MacArthur Foundation announced that they had selected the winners of their Digital Media and Learning Competition. We haven’t heard anything. The blog post says that much legal work needs to be done to “prepare the winners to meet their public on Feb 21st.” Seems like legal work would require participation […]
Trying to Avoid the Advertising on the Horizon
Catching up on my feeds from the weekend, I came across Danah Boyd’s posting about youth, advertising, and social responsibility. by strangeinterlude The short of it is this: marketing necessarily creates ideals, these ideals put substantial pressure on our youth, and the “kids”, in turn, take it out on each other. In her blog, Danah […]