Stuff about using computers to help people teach and learn better.

Thorbama

Posted Sun, 2009-01-18 22:29 by pfaffman

First Post!

Posted Thu, 2009-01-15 20:58 by pfaffman

OK. Learn.occ.utk.edu and ubiquity.utk.edu were inaccessible because my machine had crashed.

I set up my blog and here it is.

Training Quest 1

Posted Mon, 2009-01-12 18:18 by pfaffman

Since I use Ubuntu every day, this wasn't much of a challenge for me. Here you can see that there is no software updates icon (it went away when I clicked it and did the updates), the syllabus I prepared for the course (my homework), and my printers. The printer configuration, like most other system-wide stuff, is on the "system" menu.

On the right side of the image you can also see my Google calendar, Twitux (twitter client) and music playing in Amarok.

Artists ship and Lies we Tell Children

Posted Tue, 2008-12-02 09:53 by pfaffman

I really like the stuff that Paul Graham writes. Recently, he's written a piece called The other half of the "Artists Ship" in which he talks about the hidden costs of checks before making purchases or other decisions. Another Lies We Tell Kids talks about how kids are lied to all the time and how that's dangerous.

On the Joys of Not Knowing APA formatting

Posted Mon, 2008-12-01 10:45 by pfaffman

I stumbled on a piece called EZ Bibilographies over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The tag line is "Do Web sites that format citations for students negate the need to teach them how to create a proper source list?"

Buy Trees

Posted Mon, 2008-11-10 11:54 by pfaffman
One dollar, one tree, one planet.

Where do they find the time?

Posted Thu, 2008-09-18 16:04 by pfaffman

I'm doing some reading and thinking about a class that I'm planning to offer next semester. One of the books I'm thinking that the course will include is Here Comes Everybody. It's about how the Internet has made it easy for groups to form to solve problems together.

Internet Savvy Kids

Posted Fri, 2008-08-29 17:00 by pfaffman

Something I read linked to an article called Do Kids Have the Right Internet Skills?. The first paragraph reads:

Earlier this year, a Midwest bank manager told me about a youth market survey the bank had conducted on youngsters and technology. The survey revealed that while youngsters were “Internet-savvy” and attracted to mobile banking, when it came to making critical decisions about finance, they weren't so savvy. They relied on word of mouth from their parents and friends—and limited their Internet searches to well-known search engines like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) or Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)

The article seems to go on to talk about how this isn't sufficient. I couldn't really read the rest because of my knee jerk reaction to this much of it. It's probably not fair to the author and may just be because I was in a meeting all day with my University Senate hearing about budget reductions (so we know that we won't get that money next year either) and "impoundments" (where they take back what they said they would give us, but just once). But I digress.

How do you know?

Posted Thu, 2008-08-21 17:01 by pfaffman
I am regularly asked questions to which I do not know the answer. As a rule, I answer them. Correctly.

I haven't taken a class on anything about computers in over twenty years. I have never received any training on MacOS, Windows, or Linux. I quit using Windows on a regular basis at least 10 years ago. I have never used a Mac for much more than a music machine. Still, I seem to be better at using them than most everyone I know, and I am surrounded by people who are generally pretty smart.

50 OSS Alternatives List

Posted Wed, 2008-02-13 10:55 by pfaffman

My student Debbie Lee sent me this list of 50 OSS alternatives to proprietary programs entitled The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives.