Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: role

  • RE 2007: Administering Sakai

    . Timeline: Oct 2006: Faculty committee selected Sakai over Blackboard Vista Jan 2007: Developed a roll-out plan. Jun 2007: Pilot Aug 2007: Production Still: Some classes still running on CE4.1, being phased out of use. Needs – no more than 5% of code custom written by GA Tech or professional services. Integration with Banner. Grade…

  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • Its 10:34 Do You Know Where Your Tracking Files Are?

    One of my co-workers says about tracking, “One of the big selling points to [Blackboard] Vista is the wealth of tracking data for auditing, grade challenges, and catching cheaters.” Certainly, Reports and Tracking in Blackboard’s Vista 3 is one of the more favorite tools. So making sure the data gets there is critically important. The…

  • B for a Be

    Are online students really students? We like to think seeing is believing, but who meets a student who takes a completely online class? Apparently, seeing is also interpolating…. at Stanford, anyway. Is this a single case? How easy is it for someone to take an academic year’s worth of classes without anyone catching on to…

  • Humans 51,749,484,784,784 v. Computers 4

    The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to…

  • Dragons

    This series is my LOTR (the books I have read over and over). From 7th grade through 11th grade I read them at least once a year, usually twice. I replaced my first copy with another as the covers were nearly destroyed. So, now I know how the fanatics feel (not true, . I so…