Bob Kaehms's blog

Bloom's Taxonomy Digitally

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:31:34 -0700

There are a lot of learning models kicked around in education.
Today, I read a wonderful piece based on Blooms Taxonomy, extended
to consider knowledge management as including network knowledge
integral to traditional personal knowledge.

Definitely worth reading:

http://techlearning.com/article/8670

Jane McGonigal speaks on the skills students are learning from games

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:00:40 -0700

What Colleges Can Learn From Newspapers' Decline

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:46:37 -0700

In Kevin Carey's article, What Colleges Can Learn From Newspapers' Decline, which originally appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a compelling argument that Internet influences similar to those that have impacted the newspaper business may also influence institutions of higher education.

See:
http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=870993

In his article, Carey states:

Some people will argue that the best traditional college courses are superior to any online offering, and they're often right. There is no substitute for a live teacher and student, meeting minds. But remember, that's far from the experience of the lower-division undergraduate sitting in the back row of a lecture hall. All she's getting is a live version of what iTunes University offers free, minus the ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward at a time and place of her choosing.

When Book Readers Aren't Enough

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:31:09 -0700

If schools are going to move to a 1 to 1 model, they will have to find that happy medium between the expensive Apple notebook and the
non-functional Kindle book reader.

This is what I was thinking about. I am glad someone else came up with it.

Table Top Video Display

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:16:51 -0700

Community Earth from piergiu on Vimeo.

Virtual calculator

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:13:51 -0700

I found this site while doing some work for a client. This seems
to be a great alternative to requiring students to buy calculators:

Here's a scientific calculator:

Alice Teaches Programming

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:47:45 -0700

My daughter recently sent me a link to Randy Pausch's last lecture,
a well known and inspiring talk that is circulating the internet.

For those who may not have seen it yet, and don't know about Randy,
he is a wonderful educator that has been involved with Virtual Reality since the early 90s, inspiring a generation of innovation.

While I've linked to the talk below, I think a very interesting project that has been created under his guidance, and should be underscored, is the Alice project, that uses a 3D environment to teach students programming.

See www.alice.org for details.

Moodle Scaling issues and benchmarks

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:42:22 -0800

Recently one of the teachers that I am supporting with moodle wrote me to inform me that moodle had failed miserably during a class quiz.

She enjoys it so much that she has made it central to her classroom management. However, my initial assumptions for supporting Moodle were to use it in a asynchronous mode - mostly for posting class notes, and providing a space for students to work from home.

For those of you that want to skip this article, the general consensus is that for realtime class activity of 30-40 students,
you should consider finding a computer with at least 4 gig of memory. Moodle can be a memory hog. For the rest of you, read on.

Classroom 2.0 Lightening talk slides

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:00:51 -0800

I am writing this from a school 2.0 web conference, where I just gave a simple lightening talk. Literally ran in off the bus (BART), 5 minutes before the talk... ran down the street the wrong way to realize that the front door was right at the BART station.

Not sure how the talk went, but it was fun meeting so many teachers that understand the importance of collaborative learning.

One interesting new tool is a new product for realtime online collaboration that has an interesting use in the classroom... "view", spelled "vyew".... http://vyew.com/content/

Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0 and Open Source

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:22:17 -0800

This is a very insightful interview with Tim O'Reilly
on Web 2.0 and Open Source. His insight is remarkable.

http://audio.edtechlive.com/OReilly.mp3

Solution for todays school?

... smaller class size where students can interact
more fully with adults, and not technology.

In terms of the value shift of commodity software,
his insight is that the shift is towards more valuable
databases. In essence, companies are learning to harness
our collective intelligence.

Final thoughts for teachers... have fun, and do what you have passion for. For students... find those teachers who are passionate about what they teach. Doesn't matter what it is, but you will learn more and enjoy learning, when the instructor brings a passion into the classroom.

CoSN K-12 Open Technologies

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:22:07 -0800

According to CoSN K12:

Open source software, open standards and open hardware are poised to make a profound impact on K-12 education. The convergence of web technologies and a new spirit of collaboration in the education community makes this an exciting time to get involved.

They have set up a web site to help with open source and open content. Information can be found here.

http://k12opentech.org/cosn-k-12-open-technologies

Survey Shows U.S. Teens Confident in Their Inventiveness;More Hands-On, Project-Based Learning May Be Needed

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:59:29 -0800

According to a press release distribted through the ACM,

http://web.mit.edu/invent/n-pressreleases/n-press-08index.html

"The Lemelson-MIT Invention Index found that more than half of American teens (59 percent) do not believe their high school is preparing them adequately for a career in technology and engineering. The disparity is more pronounced among some groups historically under-represented in these fields. Nearly two-thirds of African-American teens (64 percent) and teen girls (67 percent) believe they are not prepared in school for these careers.

Examples - Whirlwind Wheelchair Project

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:09:47 -0800

While this project doesn't directly mention open source, the
model of continual refinement of a project in an ongoing fashion
certainly fits the general design practices associated with
open source. This is a wonderful example.

Examples - Open Source Cars

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:05:18 -0800

I'm presently looking for examples of open source principals
applied to other projects. Here is an open source car project:

Green PCs and the TreeMark...

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:35:27 -0800

While researching those Everex Linux PCs being sold through stores
like WalMart, I found this:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8508116370.html

A very nice article on the low power consumption of the chips used
in the PCs. The company coins a cleaver marketing metric, the
"TreeMark" benchmark.