Academic Aesthetic

As is apparently tradition for me, I’m presenting two sessions at this year’s Powering Up With Technology Conference. (My first presentation at PUWT was … 2006? 12 years ago? Wow!) Rather than give long and difficult to type URLS for my presentations, I thought I’d share them here. (Yes, I am aware that “academicaesthetic” is …
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Let’s talk about assessment. … OK, now that I’ve scared off any random students who’ve managed to find my website, let’s have an honest talk about assessment. Grades in one form or another have been a staple of education for a very long time indeed. With the push to quantify school quality through standardized testing …
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I wrote a short time ago about how I really liked Mastodon and thought teachers should give it a try. At the time I’d settled on a home server but lamented that there was no instance (each Mastodon server is called an instance) set up specifically for teachers. Well never fear, because scholar.social has stepped …
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I’m growing more and more certain that everything Adam Savage touches turns to gold, even the things that fail spectacularly. For years, now, Mr. Savage has been giving a  short talk at the annual Maker Faire. They are full of inspiration, encouragement, and awesomeness. This year’s talk is no different. The giant ant he rides …
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Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr (the list goes on…) are (or have been) extremely popular, in part because they’re free, but also because they’ve reached a “critical mass” of users. I know many people who only use Facebook because their friends and family use Facebook, for example. Separate from this is a trend known …
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In the near future, I’m going to be sharing some spam with my students, and not for the reason you’d think I’d do it. While teaching how to tell the difference between actual important emails and unsolicited commercial and/or malicious emails is important, that won’t be the primary goal. In addition to everything else I …
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One of the (many) cool things about NASA is that, as a government-run organization, media created by NASA is  considered public domain. There are a few exceptions to this (mainly when NASA works with a company or university, the resulting works might be copyrighted by the other party…), but it still makes NASA a wonderful …
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I blogged a while back about OpenShot, which is open source, cross-platform, and still not bad for some things. Are you stuck with 32bit computers? Use OpenShot. For everything else… use HitFilm Express. HitFilm Express is a robust, cross-platform, non-linear video editor capable of rendering multiple tracks of audio and video, applying chroma key, moving/cropping …
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“It’s not the camera that takes the photo, it’s the photographer.” This or something like it is said a lot by photographers. Sure, a really expensive camera can help, but give an experienced photog a point-and-click disposable film camera from a bygone era and they’ll still crank out a few shots worth remembering. So I …
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This article on Mashable reads like it was written by a petulant teen. Schools may provide students with a wealth of academic knowledge, but do they really think they have what it takes to outsmart children when it comes to social media? What’s worse is … they’re kind of right. While many educators are more …
Continue reading "I Didn’t Know About The Great Social Media War"