Edlightenment

Which you is you to the certain who?

Mister V — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:07:25 +0000

Generally speaking, my online presence (that presence that produces, not necessarily consumes) falls into three categories.

Professional/Academic

These are posts, retweets, reflections that center around education and technology. In short, the realm of misterv.net.

Family

My wife and I maintain an active family blog. The blog started as a way to document our journey as [...]

A Profile on the World Changing

Mister V — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:06:12 +0000

The NYTimes is running a great piece called “How the US lost out on iPhone jobs.” It’s essentially a piece on capitalism, globalization and comparative advantage (sort of…that actually might be the most debatable part of the article…as comparative advantage usually is).

A section that stood out:

At the same time, [...]

Some quick thoughts on SOPA/PIPA

Mister V — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:49:47 +0000

As both a technology guy and a (former) social studies teacher, watching the SOPA/PIPA debate and struggle is fascinates me. These are bad bills. And they deserve to die – for obvious reasons.

Yet it’s the way in which Wikipedia, Google and the like are fighting this bill that intrigues me. I once [...]

Four Stages of Introducing New Technology

Mister V — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:38:23 +0000

Slate is running a great future-tense piece on how society reacts to new technology. Briefly, Brian Johnson qualifies this reaction into four steps:

It will kill us all! It will steal my daughter! I’ll never use it! What are you going on about?

I’m usually on step 4…although I am very suspicious that my [...]

Virtual Office

Mister V — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:27:41 +0000

I do work anywhere in the district. It can get busy sometimes. Here’s my virtual world (screenshot) while having 2 teachers visit at the same time.

I love it.

Student Potential

Mister V — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:47:48 +0000

The quote under the RSS feed reads:

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to crime instead.

Major in the Universe

Mister V — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:27:19 +0000

Visual Data

Mister V — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:16:38 +0000

Numbers tell stories*. The difficulty is in getting them to do so in a way that humans understand.

A side project (feasible?) I’m currently working on for work is a functional, real time data dashboard. In my mind I can picture the end result of a dashboard that serves up relevant and understandable data that [...]

Due Dates

Mister V — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:07:49 +0000

Problem:

In an online class, with middle school and high school students, how do you deal with due dates?

What we’re seeing

In Moodle, you can create due dates for assignments, forums, and quizzes. This has the nice feature that a big fat warning appears in front of students telling them when something is due. [...]

Online Learning: Challenges & Issues

Mister V — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 16:02:55 +0000

This year is the first year we’ve piloted a purely online (developed in-house, sort of) course. The course is health, and currently we have 60+ students in 3 classes.

Because it’s a pilot, it’s obviously a learning experience. This semester I plan to blog about what we learn, what works, what doesn’t work, what challenges [...]