Recent Media Coverage

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Mike

BYU recently published a press release on the work we have been doing in the lab I direct at BYU, the ARCLITE Lab. ARCLITE stands for Advanced Research in Curriculum for Language Instruction and Technology in Education. For sure, that is a mouthful but it is usefully descriptive.

A few days later a writer at KSL.com interviewed me on the phone, played with the software a bit, and then wrote up a nice piece that appears here. The reporter had been an LDS missionary in Japan and actually spent some time trying out the system.

Posted in Current Events | Leave a comment

MOOCs?

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Mike

Udacity is throwing in the towel on MOOCs with the company’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, declaring that they don’t work for higher education.

I described in a recent column in Educational Technology how the primary advantage of MOOCs is that they can bring educational opportunities to learners who have no other opportunities. Unfortunately, they fail to deal with individual needs for learning in ways possible with other means. Check out this article to learn more about Thrun’s reservations: What Will Happen to MOOCs Now that Udacity Is Leaving Higher Ed? — Campus Technology.

Posted in Online Learning | Leave a comment

LTI is Helping

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Mike

We are working with with the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Specification in the ARCLITE Lab I direct at Brigham Young University (BYU). This article addresses the future of this specification from the IMS Global Learning Consortium: LTI Standard Promises a Kinder, Gentler LMS — Campus Technology.

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Bill Gates Talks Tech

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Mike

I have been a fan of Bill Gates for many years now, every since I met and chatted with him on a couple of occasions in 1986 and 1987 at the First Microsoft International Conference on CD-ROM. Work I did at a company that friends and I started, as well as some of my writing from 20 years ago wound up with Microsoft’s lawyers bringing me to New York to be deposed by in one of the large anti-trust court cases that opponents brought against the company.

In any case it is fun to see Gates talking once again about technology: Microsoft’s Tech Advisor Bill Gates is talking about tech (again) | ZDNet.

That piece references an interview he did with Rolling Stone: Bill Gates: The Rolling Stone Interview | Culture News | Rolling Stone.

Posted in Geeky Stuff | Leave a comment