Steve's blog

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interesting article on November 9 about a class that received a full refund and grades of "A" at The George Washington University School of Medicine. The reason:  the instructor was a no-show.

A company called Ambient Insight Research recently announced the results of their analysis of the ELearning industry, stating that they expect overall industry revenues to reach $50 billion per year by 2015, according to the British website Virtual College.

Online "how-to" videos are among those with the greatest growth potential.

What do Massachusetts and South Carolina have in common? If you're a political junkie, you might think "nothing". But both states have recently made moves to seek waivers to the "No Child Left Behind" requirements.

New software from Adobe supports the creation of a "wide variety of interactive quizzes" and tracks the results.  It's called Captivate, and the latest release is version 5.5.

Billed as "ELearning Authoring Software", Captivate interoperates with a number of other systems.  It's compliant with SCORM and AICC. It ingests Microsoft PowerPoint slides for content creation, and delivers to multiple platforms, including mobile devices and tablets.

It's 11 PM on Wednesday night, April 6, 2011, as I type this, and I've just watched President Obama give a speech on live TV from the White House about the ongoing discussions regarding attempts on the part of the Congress and the White House to reach a resolution on the issue of funding resolutions.  At issue: the risk of a government shutdown Friday night.  While the President sounded optimistic about the chance of a resolution in the next 48 hours, and emphasized the sense of urgency about it, he offered nothing new to indicate that it will be avoided.

I swear I am not making this up, but apparently Charlie Sheen filmed an educational video for at-risk children a few weeks ago.  Read all about it here: Charlie Sheen Films Educational Video For At Risk Kids.
Wow.

There's a great article at the US News and World Report website titled Can Facebook Posts Lead to College Rejections? The bottom line is what you would expect:  if you post something reckless, you get a reckless reputation.  So use your good sense, assuming you have any.  And for a guideline,

With all the focus on government budgets for education and the need for reducing government spending overall, I found one particular article from S. Fred Singer interesting, it was published on March 11, 2011, at the American Thinker website, and it's titled Adventures in Federal Budget Cutting.

Singer's closing point:

Have you ever seen a "SMART Board"? I have, and they are impressive. Here's a great video presentation of the way one teacher uses the SMART Board to teach physics - although really, the video isn't specific to physics, and is fascinating for anyone who teaches in an instructor-led classroom environment.

Out of Australia comes the news that the digital revolution is triggering an effort to re-train educators.

An article in Techworld's Australia edition quotes Raju Varanasi: "At the beginning, many teachers were unsure what to do with the equipment they received. So we aimed to quickly provide a set of digital materials with strong links to the existing classroom curriculum to get each year group accustomed to using digital resources."