Knowledge as Process and as Distribution
Apr. 3, 2017—In the late 1990s, Ronald Deibert’s Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia was published. As a political scientist and media ecologist, Deibert was interested in the ways that new digital technologies would alter power relationships throughout the world by shifting the ways people thought and processed information, as well as the ways information and political power would...
Solar Eclipse!
Jan. 11, 2017—This fall offers an event of a lifetime for many of us at Vanderbilt and in Nashville. At approximately 1:27 p.m., on Monday, August 21, 2017, the Vanderbilt campus will experience 1 minute and 54 seconds of total solar eclipse. That date is also the Monday following move-in day for our students. Although they will...
Digital Literacy
Dec. 12, 2016—December 12, 2016 I’ve been thinking a lot about digital literacy. While the term “digital literacy” is often employed loosely (and with multiple meanings), I understand digital literacy to be the broadest sense of a person’s ability to consume, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies. If you search any university’s website, you’ll...
Educational Technology Resource Finder
Aug. 16, 2016—Greetings! Over the course of the last academic year, I asked Ole Molvig to work with the students in the Graduate Fellows Program at the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning to develop a web resource that would help faculty and students at Vanderbilt find their way around the dizzying array of educational technology resources. For...
Leading Lines
Jul. 29, 2016—July 29, 2016 Greetings! This Monday, August 1st, will mark the launch of a new podcast – Leading Lines – that will deal with educational technology in higher education. The podcast will be made up of one-on-one interviews with leaders in the field of educational technology and will cover a broad range of topics. The...
Revisiting MOOCs
May. 16, 2016—May 16, 2016 Greetings! While scrolling through my Facebook feed the other day, I saw that one of my friends was making an observation about MOOCs that is not uncommon: “Remember when,” he said, “we were told [that] MOOCs were going to change the entire university system? Turns out that they’ve done nothing and disappeared.”...
Friction Free
Mar. 30, 2016—March 30, 2016 Greetings! In the months before I took on the role as Associate Provost for Digital Learning, I spent some time thinking about the roadblocks that faculty face in attempting to change their research and teaching by integrating the wide variety of digital technologies at their disposal. Let’s face it: it might be...
Innovation Grants
Feb. 25, 2016—February 25, 2016 Greetings! When the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning (VIDL) was established in 2013, one of the ways in which we hoped to encourage inventive digital work on campus was to offer a number of macrogrants to faculty with innovative ideas and large-scale projects. While we were successful with this model, we have...
The Big Picture
Jan. 18, 2016—January 18, 2016 Greetings! On a day-to-day basis in any job, it is easy to get so tied up in the tasks of the everyday that one often forgets to pause, sit back, and focus on the larger picture and on developing strategies to meet a greater vision. Just this week, I called together a...
Platforms
Dec. 17, 2015—December 17, 2015 Greetings! A couple of weeks ago, I attended a conference at George Washington University that focused on the use of OpenEdX as a platform for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course). Like all such conferences, there was an interesting mix of vendors, MOOC instructors, online educators, and administrators from a wide variety of...