Here it is. I'm dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.

Sending shockwaves through the ed tech establishment, Apple unveiled the iPad LMS at the March 2nd iPad 2 event.

aves th

The Twitterization of our culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended consequence—our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.

Pianopub is a free Pandora internet radio player for OS X.

Jef Raskin, my father, (below) helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh.

After extensive student interviews throughout the Fall 2010 semester, "The bottom line feeling was that the Amazon Kindle DX was not adequate for use in a higher education curricular setting," Chief Technology Officer Martin Ringle tells Fast Company. "The bottom line for the iPad was exactly the opposite."

The silver-medal feature, with only a few strikes against its score, was the highlighting and annotation of text.

With the exception of scanned PDF files, the students found "highlighting was easier on th

Though those circumstances have "rendered higher education impossible to disrupt in the past," the situation is changing, the authors write. Policy makers are demanding that they enroll and successfully educate many more students at a time when their "economic model is already broken" -- with public pressure mounting against increasing tuitions and their ability to use "government dollars, ... endowments and gifts ... to paper over cost increases" waning, Horn said.

The key question the authors pose is whether traditional institutions can adapt themselves enough to fill this role or "whether community colleges, for-profit universities and other entrant organizations aggressively using online learning will do it instead -- and ultimately grow to replace many of today's traditional institutions."

Changing will not be easy for, say, Harvard and the University of Texas; just ask General Motors and America's steel companies, the authors suggest. Altering an institution's educational model (by delivering courses only online, for instance) does not in and of itself transform an institution unless new business models are embraced, too, that allow for lower prices and the shedding of research and other functions that aren't central to teaching and learning.

An open-ended student response system is an electronic service or application that lets students enter text responses during a lecture or class discussion. Open-ended systems give faculty the option of collecting such free-form contributions from students, in addition to asking the true/false or multiple-choice questions that conventional clicker systems allow. Such tools open a channel for the kind of individual, creative student responses that can alter the character of learning. The great strength of open-ended student response systems may be that they create another avenue for discussion, allowing students to join a virtual conversation at those times when speaking out in live discourse might seem inappropriate, intimidating, or difficult.

While I was already familiar with a number of OER websites, I was surprised to learn of a few that were new to me. I have shared the complete list below.