Blog: Evaluation of Software Resources List

"Bringing the Gun to a Knife Fight"  - Electronic Communication and Politeness We are in an age of great innovation and bounding evolution of societal vulgarity. Yes, that may be a debatable point, but we’ve all likely had some discussions about how mobile devices have created a whole new world of less-than-desirable social niceties. Need we mention the tens of thousands of zit-popping Youtube videos? Shall we harken the sloppiness of spelling and grammar our texting troupes have degenerated their writing into? Would we even want to mention the fact that many good folks out there are now choosing to direct their romantic energies into “Camgirls” in some far-off country rather than their soul mate sitting in the room next to them? In Carrie James book, Disconnected: youth, new media and the ethics gap she takes aim at such topics, pointing to those most affected, the youth. She refers to the lack of couth as a kind of “ethical and moral blindness”. That just because t...

Teens, Technology, & Education: Parallels throughout the ages   After reading through some chapters in  It's Complicated,   Boyd's seminal work concerning teens and their relationship with technology, I naturally thought back to my own Gen Y teenage years in high school. I drew personal parallels and anecdotes to those used by Boyd to explain and exemplify the trials, successes, counter-cultures, and issues that mixing teens and technology create. While pinging and ponging my own experiences with those in the book, I came across a reference to Pump Up the Volume  (1990) and decided to watch a few clips. The film, which was about as Gen X as you can get, is about as early 90s as you can get, too... and there is no question, that even though only 0.001% of teens had mobile phones and/or internet during the time of this movie, they were doing the same things teens do today - They were hacking, chatting, flirting, protesting, gaming, cheating, socializ...

Electronic Screen Syndrome - Concerns from an Educational Technologist With each generation, according to a 2017  CBC Marketplace episode, the daily use of mobile devices increases. With Canadian adults ranging from two or three hours a day and rising, their childrens' screen-time is significantly more. When school is in, their use is in the three to four hour range, but when its a day off or a summer break, this number can reach into the double digits. A shocking calculation coming out of this study was that the youngest in the family, who was elementary-school aged, was projected to spend 15 years of his life locked in to his screen, After the numbers hit me, I couldn't help wonder why this was happening, and what the future consequences might look be. As an Education Technologist, the thought of this was worrying to me. Was my push to design, instruct, and manage Ed-tech only adding to this overuse of screens? If screentime is a problem, is the flipped classroom we...

"The Collapse of the Physical World" - Developing a Lexical Resource to Understand Ed Tech  Book Scanner - digitizing the physical world. The collapse of the physical world . When I read this phrase in Boyd's It's Complicated   it struck me. This simple turn of phrase explained so much of what is going on with technology these days. Being an instructor to first year university students and an Educational technologist, it explained so much of what is going on. To give just one example of probably thousands, I'd like to point to the high-speed, page-flipping book scanner. This device literally collapses the physical world. You pop a book in and it flips the pages while scanning them. The scanned file zaps into your memory storage.  Brianstorming more applications of phrase in the world of Education Technology, I can quickly think of quite a few other instances.  "A student's shoulders are hunched over, head hung limp, only the thumb move...