The CTO Project

Time Inc is allowing you to choose content from 5 of their magazines for your new, “special” personal compilation, to be called Mine. While the magazine selection is pretty boring, and there’s the sense that this is nothing much more than an advertising-strewn mashup of your own RSS reader, I do think this is interesting. Can we get a learning mine where you chose the content area, delivery method, teaching style, and assessment deliverables? Something like, give me: “1st-year college physics taught via traditional lectures by cantankerous geezer with three evenly spaced short-answer tests?” Or how about “intro. … Continue Reading

In March I have performance reviews, the spring budget variance, and the initial draft of next year’s budget to complete. This month, I’m also working on our strategic plan, in addition to the usual project cruft. If it weren’t for this perfect storm, I would be pursuing these two efforts more vigorously:

1. The Teaching Open Source site
2. The Immersive Education Initiative

with a petition from all the residents of a particular dorm. They’re protesting the quality of our wireless. We’re resolving the issues and made a community-writable wiki about the problem and inviting feedback. I’m a little worried that tomorrow a.m. there will be a stream of obscenities but who knows? We will see.

What really irritates me is that one of our staff said “Yes, they’ve been complaining to me a lot,” and I wonder why he never said anything to the rest of us… Either he doesn’t feel it will do any good or it just never occurred to him … Continue Reading

Iowa State University is going to fund its residence hall wireless project by charging students who want telephone landlines. My guess is they’ll raise about fifty bucks because 99.9% of students have cell phones. Still, I like the spirit behind move. If nothing else, it enables them to retire gracefully default installation of telephones.