[This is Post 3 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.] Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.� This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this ne...

Here’s my favorite quotation from Clive Thompson’s February 2009 article for Wired magazine, “The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time.” Netbooks prove that the “cloud” is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outs...

Telecommunications convergence is a topic with which I’ve grown increasingly familiar over the past few years, and I address frequently in blog posts, workshops, and conference keynote presentations. Convergence has BIG implications for learning. As digital devices become increasingly ubiquito...

This is Minnie, our Dell Inspiron 910 Mini “netbook� that’s the newest addition to our computer family. As the pictures show, she’s a lot smaller than my ThinkPad X61 Tablet. She shipped with 1 GB of RAM and a 16 GB Flash hard drive. She’s running Windows XP Home, Microsoft Office 2007, S...

[Like most churches throughout the world, the congregation I serve as pastor, Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, follows a proscribed set of Bible lessons arranged in a three-year cycle. This arrangement is known as a lectionary and it follows the Church Year. I try to write something eac...

I’m a strong believer in the concept of customer engagement — as it relates to measuring relationship strength, that is. But the term is no longer meaningful in today’s business world. It was inevitable. Back in the early ’90s, the term “reengineering� devolved from a strategic approach ...

These are my notes from Idit Caperton’s closing keynote at NECC 2008, “The Transformational Power of Social Media Technology in Learning: Inspiring Stories from the Classroom and Beyond!” MY THOUGHTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. THIS WAS A FANTASTIC KEYNOTE AND ONE OF THE BEST I’VE EVER ...

These are my notes from David Thornburg’s NECC 2008 presentation “Open Minds: Open Education and Open Culture” on June 30, 2008. David has granted me permission to non-commercially record and share this presentation subsequently. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. dthornb...

The June 5, 2008, BusinessWeek article “One Laptop Meets Big Business: The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child” includes a variety of updates about OLPC, which I regard as the most i...

Thanks to the generosity of Colin Davitt, my dreams and those of my family to have our own XO laptop have come true! (I interviewed Colin last December right before Christmas about his first impressions of the XO.) The XO arrived this afternoon in the mail, and by the time I got home after six my 10...