e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Alan-Levine

  • Plus Ca Change: About that ed tech adoption curve

    All the same We take our chances
    Laughed at by Time, Tricked by Circumstances
    Plus ca change, Plus c’est la meme chose
    The more that things change, The more they stay the same

    – Rush, Circumstances

    Over the past few years I have increased my usage of the technology adoption curve – originating from Everett Rogers and extended by Geoffrey Moore – to explain some of the tension faced by ed tech support organizations. In a nutshell, a bigger determination of adoption patterns of pedagogical and technology-enabled changes in education is from social change issues rather than the innovation (whether purely pedagogical or tech-based) itself. It’s not technology, it’s people. One graphic in particular that I use is based on the notion that while Moore presented a chasm in the technology adoption curve describing solutions moving across the chasm to reach majority markets, a bigger issue is that we will always have innovators, early adopters, majority and laggard groups in education, with a constant flux of teaching and learning innovations. Therefore the issue is straddling the chasm, helping both sides.

    When Michael and I gave a keynote at last month’s OpenEd conference, the always interesting Alan Levine pointed out via Twitter (and referencing a blog post of his) that this perspective reminded him of one he read years ago and rediscovered in 2014. I found the article (and the author, I think), and it is a fascinating read that shows just how strong the pattern of innovation in ed tech is. The 1994 article could be written today with just a few changes to examples used. (more…)

  • Web 2.0 for Tracking Web 2.0

    Before I start on this post, I want to note that I am writing it in the Bleezer offline blogging client found via D’Arcy. This little freeware application is just a couple of months old and it already rivals much older for-pay blogging clients.

    Anyway, Alan Levine is asking for a Web 2.0 tools list that is managed using a Web 2.0 tool.

    His wish is my command (created using Lazybase):

    (more…)

  • 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.

  • Faceted Folksonomies

    I’ve been meaning to blog about fac.etio.us but Alan beat me to it. Basically, facetious allows you to create what amounts to a pivot table out of folksonomy-tagged web pages.

    This is a better solution than creating faceted single tags (e.g., “arthistory:france”) that I made a while back because (a) it’s simpler, and (b) it doesn’t require any sort of mechanism for agreeing on a taxonomy of facets. If you want to search Flickr for French art and not get a billion pictures of family vacations in France, you can search for the “France” tag and pivot on the “art” tag, while I was there I found some coolers and these are good camping coolers perfect for summer. (more…)

  • cogdogblog: Chemistry Students Building Delicious Link Collections

    Alan Levine has posted an account of how a chemistry teacher is using del.icio.us tags to have her students gather related resources for her chemistry class.

    This is directly relevant to a recent conversation here on e-Literate.

    Good stuff.

  • More on RSS, the Power Law, and Blogger Sites

    Reader Alan Levine (of MLX and cogdogblog fame) writes in with this tip regarding Blogger sites with no visible syndication links:

    I commented to James, but all of the Blogger.com sites, e.g. http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com actually have fully functional RSS feeds- the problem is that the default templates do not have the link- you can easily access the feed yourself by tacking “atom.xml” on the end:

    http://yanknowwhat.blogspot.com/atom.xml

    Oddly, Blogger does not provide RSS feeds; only Atom. Sadly, my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) doesn’t support Atom feeds yet. (C’mon, Brent, get that Version 2.0 out already…please?!)