I am delighted to announce that my friends Beth Harris and Steven Zucker will be joining e-Literate as featured bloggers. Beth and Steven are the creators of smARThistory and the first faculty hired by Khan Academy. I have learned a lot from them over the years and am looking forward to learning a lot more from them as they blog here about their adventures as Deans of Art and History at Khan.
Tag: Beth-Harris
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What Are Ed Tech Entrepreneurs Good For?
The recent ASU Education Innovation Summit, which brought together venture capitalists with aspiring ed tech entrepreneurs, created quite a stir in the edublogosphere and the edutwitterverse. A lot of the reaction came from people who were watching from a distance via video. Audrey Watters, for example, wrote an epic rant on her frustrations. There were many angry tweets from a number of quarters. First-hand reporting was relatively scarce, though. George Siemens, who attended the conference live, wrote a thoughtful and nuanced post on the topic. The question of how entrepreneurs can productively play a role in educational progress, innovation, and reform is a topic that I think about a lot. In fact, I already had a post planned in my backblog from an interview I did with the Instructure founders and CEO on this very topic. So now that e-Literate has successfully migrated to a new host, and before Blackboard buying somebody else forces me to write another post series, I’d like to take some time to lay out my thoughts on the topic.
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Khan Academy Contributes to the Google Art Project
My friends Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, formerly of smARThistory, now of smARThistory at Khan Academy, have announced that they contributed 90 art history videos for the newly launched version 2 of the Google Art Project. This idea, of creating virtual versions of important museums around the globe, complete with high-resolution images of the art, is wonderful. Sadly, for me, the interface is a bit confusing and hard to navigate at times. (Frankly, I think Beth and Steven did a terrific job with the visual design of smARThistory; Google should be learning from them.) But still, this is an important effort that I hope Google continues to grow and improve.
I also think it’s interesting to see this kind of partnership between Google and Khan to bring high-quality educational resources together. It may be an early example of what turns out to be a blossoming ecosystem of such partnerships. Let’s hope so.
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Great OER Presentation in Eastern Mass Next Week
My good friends and fellow SUNY escapees Steven Zucker and Beth Harris will be giving a talk about their amazing art history open educational resources website smARThistory on Friday, October 1st at UMassOnline. There are several reasons why this talk is worth attending. First, smARThistory is simply one of the best OER collections I know of, both in terms of the quality of the individual OERs and in terms of the extensive scaffolding on the site to help both teachers and students weave the content together into coherent and personalized curricula. Second, Steven and Beth are both great, highly entertaining presenters. And third, there probably will be food.
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Check Out smARThistory
Just want to give a quick shoutout to my friends Steven Zucker and Beth Harris for their beautiful work on the newly redesigned smARThistory web site. When I think about Open Educational Resources, this is the sort of thing that I want to see. The site is clean and well-organized with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. They also have links out to useful Web 2.0 tools like a Dipity timeline and annotated photos at Flickr. It would be nice to see those sorts of resources even more tightly and pervasively integrated with the main assets of the site going forward, but that would really be icing on the cake.
Good stuff.
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Apple Visit, Day 1
This is part 1 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
We arrived in Cupertino today. I flew JetBlue non-stop from JFK to San Jose for an amazingly low price. I have to say, JetBlue has become far and away my favorite airline.
At any rate, we had an uneventful trip and a nice dinner hosted by Apple. The real meat of the visit comes tomorrow. In the meantime, I had an interesting lunch-time conversation with Steven and Beth about the pros and cons of podcasting as an educational medium. (more…)
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Calling All SUNY Edubloggers
I have often referred to the smARThistory home page by SUNY colleagues Steven Zucker and Beth Harris. I have now added to my blogroll a second SUNY edublog, Learning Curve, written by the dark and mysterious MIDizen X.
I would like to start a SUNY-specific edublogroll, but I need your help. If you are an edublogger at SUNY or know of any edubloggers at SUNY, please let me know.