On Saturday, I’m off to Quito, Ecuador, the home of Guayasamin! I will present at the FLACSO 50th Anniversary Congress and at the Universidad San Francisco. The University of Minnesota-FLACSO Mexico co-seminar I taught with Arthur Harkins and Cristobal Cobo will be the primary focus of my talks. Since I will travel without my laptop [...]

I purchased my third hand-held device on Friday. My first was a Newton MessagePad 2000 (which I later upgraded to the MP2100). The second was a Handspring Visor Platinum. The new device is a Nokia N800 Internet tablet. The N800 is a WiFi device with an 800×480 (!) touchscreen strapped on, and can support up [...]

Folks, when you use new technologies to teach the same old garbage, you’re not going to get the results that you want. The NY Times started to touch on this in their article, Seeing no progress, some schools drop laptops: …the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting [...]

Some troubling news has appeared in media over the past 24 hours. Many news sites and blogs have been citing an Associated Press article that claims that teachers and administrators are dismayed by students’ use of mobile devices to cheat in the classroom. The question is, why not “cheat?” If students will use similar or [...]

Google hosts a “Gapminder” tool that uses Flash technology to turn otherwise tedious or boring data into readable, interactive animations. Gapminder is a foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida, and the data presented are gathered in collaboration with the United Nations Statistic Division. [...]