DISQUS

EduTechie: The Human ‘Education’ Network

  • John Mayer · 2 years ago
    I went to the Cisco site to dl the podcasts or subcribe to the feed. Could not do either - could only play them in my browser. That's not a podcast. Small point, but Cisco misses it - education should be mobile.
  • Jeff · 2 years ago
    Good Point John. They really aren't podcasts. They are probably just trying to use the term podcast to garner the attention one gets from a podcast. :-) That is ironic that their commercials are all about mobility and yet their information isn't. Good insight. Thanks!!
  • HandsOff43 · 2 years ago
    Excellent post and we at Hands Off the Internet agree with the premise that the internet needs to adapt to the up and coming technologies that are becoming available daily. Netflix just announced that they are making their movies downloadable for members. A great feature indeed but net neutrality could make the download experience unbearable for consumers.

    Hands Off is about ensuring we have an internet background that supports all these innovations. Also, here is a great editorial from famed computer scientist David Farber that you might be interested in.
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ar...
  • Debbi · 2 years ago
    Looking at the way that I grew up and how my children are growing up, there are definite differences. In my house, there was a program to type my reports and print them out with the dot printer, and the occasional game of monopoly or tic-tac-toe. Now my kids are playing all sorts of educational games on Sesame Street’s game site, they are wanting to write letters to dad over email or Google talk, and they even write on their own blogs about their day (with dads help). Our childhoods don’t even compare.

    The resources that are available to me, as a mom, are incredible. I don’t have to wait until the school teacher sends home instructions on some project. We can just look up on the internet how to make paper boats and with just a few clicks, we are creating here at home. When I need an idea for a science project, I can look up some sites and I’ll have more ideas than I can imagine right in front of me.

    The internet has also helped me hone my homemaking skills. If I need inspiration or advice for painting a room, it’s there. When I need a recipe for fondue, I just type in the words. When I needed to know how to get rid of ants, I found out that 409 was a great killer.

    Although there is a lot of bad on the internet, it is also a great resource for the good things of life. I don’t think I could ever go back to the days of dot printers.
  • John Connell · 2 years ago
    Jeff - this is an excellent post, and I am only sorry that I have not come across your blog before now. Although I actually work for Cisco (Iam an education strategist working in the Emerging Markets, covering Latin America, Africa, Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia), it is not the reference to the company that impressed me, but the concise outline of the notion of the web as the learning platform. I speak at many events across the world, and I meet any key education people through my job with Cisco, and these are notions that I come back to again and again in my conversations.

    The questions you ask and the issues you raise are precisely the ones that I pull into those conversations in many parts of the world - and they are issues and questions being raised more and more by thoughtful educators. Thank you, and more power to your elbow!

    [The Human Network videos are nice, aren't they?]