Author: Mark Morton

As Senior Instructional Developer, Mark Morton helps instructors implement new educational technologies such as clickers, wikis, concept mapping tools, question facilitation tools, screencasting, and more. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Mark taught for twelve years in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg. He received his PhD in 1992 from the University of Toronto, and is the author of four books: Cupboard Love; The End; The Lover's Tongue; and Cooking with Shakespeare.

New Educational Technologies: eHere Today and eGone Tomorrow? – Mark Morton

A question that I’m often asked when I give a workshop on a new educational technology (or what I like to call “NETs”) is this: “How can I be sure that this technology is here to stay?” Well, no technology is really here to stay. Clay tablets had a pretty good run of about three thousand years, but they were eventually supplanted by paper scrolls. And scrolls gave way to books. And now books are being challenged by ebooks and ebook readers. The anxiety behind the question, though, is legitimate, and it arises from the fear of investing a lot of time and energy into learning or implementing a new technology only to have that technology become obsolete a short time later. Occasionally, this has happened to me. For example, a couple years ago I began using an online “to do list” program called Todoist. I loved the program because it was a boon to be able to access my task list from anywhere — including from my Blackberry. But then I discovered Toodledo, another “to do list” program that does everything that Todist does and more. So I decided to switch. The change, though, was painful. There was no way of exporting my tasks and categories from Todoist into Toodledo. I had to move everything over manually, by re-typing or cutting and pasting.

Hopefully, though, I won’t have to go through that tedious process again, if and when I decide to switch to yet another online task management program. That’s because one of the features of Toodledo is that it allows you to export your tasks and categories in a variety of formats, including iCal, XML, and CSV. The same thing is happening with ebooks: early products tended to be based on proprietary formats, meaning that an ebook purchased for one ebook platform couldn’t be read on a different ebook platform. Since the middle of 2008, though, there has been a movement to adopt an open standard (known as epub).As a result, ebooks published in the epub format can now be read on a variety of platforms such as Adobe Digital Editions, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton and the Firefox plugin OpenBerg Lector. Several hand-held ebook devices, too, now support the epub standard format, including the Sony PRS 700.

The trend with digital technologies, then, is toward open standards. Does this mean that in the near future you’ll never again have to worry about transitioning from one product or platform to another product or platform? Well, no, there will continue to be some growing pains as technologies continue to evolve and supplant one another. But for the most part, the transition will be eased by open standards, and by widgets that will help you convert your data configurations from one format to another when you decide to upgrade. In the long term, of course, everything will change dramatically: in twenty years, finding a hand-held device that will play MP3s will probably be as challenging as it is now to find a computer that accepts the old 5 ¼-inch floppy disks.

Blog: A four-letter word – Mark Morton

The word ‘blog’ was invented in 1999 as a shortened form of ‘web log.’ Since then, blogs have increased exponentially in number. Many blogs are created and abandoned after a few weeks while others have thrived for years. Most blogs are read by a small number of people but a few — such as the Huffington Post, a political blog — is read by more than a million people each month. In higher education, blogs have also come into their own: blogs by Stephen Downes and Will Richardson are read by thousands of educators around the world.

So, if there are so many blogs — good ones and bad ones — out there already, why create another one? Well, here at the Centre for Teaching Excellence, we think that a blog will help us communicate ideas and issues pertaining to teaching in a timely and (dare I hope) lively manner, ideas and issues that will be of special interest to the University of Waterloo instructors who make up our target audience. Our centre already has a newsletter that does an excellent job of presenting a round-up of news and events pertaining to teaching, but it only comes out once a term. This blog, as we see it, will be more dynamic, responsive, opinionated, and colourful — a kind of crazy uncle to our more sober newsletter. We hope to share new research and best practices pertaining to teaching, but we also hope to inspire engaged debate — because that, surely, is at the heart of all learning.

By the way, here’s a link to an interesting post on another blog entitled “The Arrogance of Blogging.”