e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: From the Editors

These posts provide updates about our editorial policies as well as changes to the site itself.

  • A Couple of More Speaking Gigs

    I’ll be presenting at a couple of SUNY conferences during the first week of October. Both of them are Conferences on Computing in the Disciplines (COCIDs) sponsored by the SUNY Faculty Access to Computing Technology (FACT) Council.

    The first one, on Monday, October 3rd, is called Application of Mobile Technology Tools in the Online Learning Experience and will be at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. My particular talk will be called “A Movable Feast: Teaching and Learning When the World is Your Classroom.” I honestly don’t know much about the conference details beyond what is on the web site, but the speaker list looks interesting.

    The second one, on Friday, October 7th, is called Small Tools/Big Ideas and will be at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in lower Manhattan. I know a bit more about this one. The focus is on teaching with digital images, and the structure is to look at digital content/image repositories in the morning (hence the “big ideas”) and specialized content tools that sit on top of those repositories in the afternoon (hence the “small tools”), with a session of case studies and general conversation to wrap up the day. I’ll be moderating the “small tools” session in the afternoon. The speaker list looks absolutely stellar (pun intended; one of the speakers is Ben Brophy, a programmer who works on MIT’s STELLAR, the DSpace content repository, and Sakai , and who occasionally comments here on e-Literate). The panels will be covering some extremely interesting projects; I expect to learn a lot from the day.

    It’s possible that one or both of the conferences will be webcast. If I find out that they will, I’ll post the URL(s) here.

  • I'm Giving a Webinar on e-Learning Usability

    Just to let you know, I’ll be presenting in a webinar this Thursday on e-Learning usability.

  • Happy Birthday, e-Literate

    One year ago today, I posted my first entry in this blog. At the time, I was mainly just trying to think out loud about what interests me as I thought through my options regarding what I wanted to do next in my career. What has happened since has exceeded my wildest hopes. I have written over 250 posts, so just in terms of stimulating my thinking, it’s been incredibly fertile. But more importantly, there are signs that other people have also found the blog to be useful, or at least entertaining. e-Literate has had nearly 17,000 visitors to the site from across all six of Earth’s inhabited continents and has achieved a Technorati ranking of 21,717. It has motivated more than 150 comments and trackbacks. It has been nominated for several edublogger awards. This all is incredibly gratifying and motivating; if I had just been talking to myself, I’m sure I would have stopped blogging a long time ago. Even more gratifying has been the opportunity to meet many wonderful and fascinating people through the blog–many of them virtually and a few face-to-face. I have new friends and colleagues now.

    I want to thank each and every person who is reading this post. I started this blog for me, but I continue it for us. The knowledge that you are out there is the magic that keeps blogging a gratifying and fulfilling exercise for me.

    Rock on.

  • IE Browser Share For e-Literate Below 50 Percent

    For the first time since I started this blog, the browser share for IE has dropped below 50%. Here are the numbers:

    • Various versions of Internet Explorer 5.x and 6.x combined: 46.51%
    • Firefox 1.x: 37.18%
    • Safari 1.x: 6.99%
    • Everything else: 9ish%

    When I started this blog about a year ago, IE had upwards of 70% browser share, so this a pretty big slide over a 12-month period.

  • I'm Baaaack!

    After several months of being absolutely buried in SUNY work that I couldn’t yet talk about publicly, I am finally re-emerging. Over the next couple of months (starting on this coming Wednesday), I will be able to start talking about the stuff we’ve been working on. And some of it is pretty exciting. I’m also going to get back to blogging more regularly.

    It’s good to be (virtually) home again.

  • Still Alive

    I met somebody at a MERLOT meeting recently who asked me whether I was the Michael Feldstein who runs the e-Literate weblog. And I thought to myself, “Hmm…e-Literate…why does that name ring a bell?”

    Seriously I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. Work has been extra-ordinarily busy, and much of what I’m working on is stuff I can’t talk about in public…yet. But I promise that I will be have lots of interesting stuff to post about soon. And in the meantime, I’ll make more of an effort to put up an occasional thought or two here.

  • I've Been Skyped

    Alan Levine, Eric Feinblatt and I were talking over Skype recently about a project that Eric and I are working on (the details of which are soon to be announced) when Alan decided to do an impromptu interview of us regarding how we use our iPods. I’m not sure whether what we had to say was very interesting, but at the very least, it’s a good demonstration of Skype’s fidelity. Check it out if you’re interested.