Author Archive | David Korfhage
What should educators read that’s not about education?
I've recently become hooked on the Harvard Business Review Twitter feed, @HarvardBiz. There's a lot of stuff about management, a lot of stuff about innovation, lots on various management issues, with the occasional weird factoid thrown in (did you know, for example, that politically conservative shoppers are less likely to buy generics?).
Read More5 Things I Learned from My MOOC experience
As I discussed in an earlier post, the two MOOCs I was involved with, Fundamentals of Online Learning and E-Learning and Digital Cultures, started off very differently. After I wrote that post, they continued their different paths. EDC is still going, while FOE was suspended by the teacher and by Georgia Tech in order to [...]
Read MoreA Tale of Two MOOCs: The Importance of Community in Online Learning
Fundamentals of Online Education (FOE), and E-Learning and Digital Cultures (EDC): two Coursera courses, two courses on e-learning, both MOOCs, both on Coursera, both offered by prestigious universities.
Read MoreOn using technology
As I was driving home from school recently with my kids, who attend the same 1-to-1 school that I teach at, my older son asked me if I use computers in my classroom. I said, no, not really. But after thinking a moment, I added, “no, wait, my students use their computers almost every class.” [...]
Read MoreIFTTT + Evernote = Automated Research
The debate team at my school began using Evernote last year for collaborative research. As students find sources, they dump them into a shared Evernote folder that everyone on the team has access to. Our effort is multiplied, as students collaborate on finding and writing up evidence. This year I’ve discovered a tool that makes [...]
Read MoreLearning through Social Media: Some new options
Summer is here. It’s a time to think about revising courses. One of the things I’m exploring is new ways to bring technology into my classroom. Here are two I’m considering: 1. Piazza. Piazza describes itself as “a place where students can come together to ask, answer, and explore under the guidance of their instructor.” [...]
Read MoreWhy edtech is like organic farming
A few years ago I started buying organic food for environmental reasons. I assumed, when I started, that the main environmental benefits came from the fact that farmers weren’t pumping toxic chemicals into the air, soil and water. And that is certainly a benefit. But as I looked into organic farming, I realized that the [...]
Read MoreOpen space, physical and virtual
The New York Times (which is where I seem to be getting my blog ideas from these days) ran an article this weekend about the difficulty some people have with open offices. Reading over it I was struck by the parallels between open office architecture and the internet. On the one hand, open offices present [...]
Read MoreDisrupting education
The front page of the New York Times last Sunday had the latest story on the current student debt problem. It's really a symptom of an underlying problem, the growing cost of higher education (for a number of good pieces on the issue, you can check out the Times's Economix blog on the topic of college costs). Students, and their parents, see value in having a college education, and in the absence of alternatives, they are willing to pay for it, even if it means taking on $100,000 in debt.
Read MoreUsing social media for student research, part 2: practices and habits of mind
In an earlier post, I discussed how to get students set up to do research using social media. This is the advice I’ll give them on how to actually go about doing the research. The Technical Side of Things Managing social media can be overwhelming, so I’d give my students the following advice: Get the [...]
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