Category: Grad

My Friend MAET

This degree has taken me a long time. I started in 2014 and thought I would get it finished right away. Life changes brought that to a stop, which ... Read more

Conditioning and Learning

I don't think there's a question in my mind about the stages we go through as we learn new things. Much learning seems to be rooted in habits and r... Read more

Potential Action Research

I'm taking a graduate course this semester on action research, part of which is defining and designing a question to tackle. Most of the coursework... Read more

My Space

(No, not that myspace.) I’m on my computer a lot. Having been a remote worker for 18 months and taking classes online, I needed somewhere to focus.... Read more

Shape Games

Featured image creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-ND ) flickr photo shared by Jonas Tana Shape is immensely important in science. The shape of a mol... Read more

Timing is Everything

When you touch something hot, the nerves in your hand will immediately fire a signal up toward your head to make a decision about what to do about ... Read more

Functional Patterns

Structural patterns exist all around us, especially in living systems. A common example in the biology classroom is bone structures which show evol... Read more

Grim Pictures

Since early this year, the WHO has been calling for international aid in response to a burgeoning crisis in west Africa. There had been a confirmed... Read more

A Second Look is Often More Revealing

Sometimes the simple challenge to think concretely about abstract concepts can be effective. Sparks of Genius, p. 64 Perception is how our mind int... Read more

Perception

We cannot focus our attention unless we know what to look at and how to look at it. Sparks of Genius, p. 42 There's a concept in biology which says... Read more

Game Theory and Computational Thinking

Game Theory Games and learning go hand in hand. Children learn social interaction, communication, and even motor skills through playing. Remember, ... Read more

Veja Du

Trying to represent a familiar object in abstract ways is harder than you’d think. The goal of this particular assignment was to take three photos ... Read more

Computational Thinking, Revisited

This is a follow up to my first post on Computational Thinking. For a background, go check it out before reading further. I’m often victim to my ow... Read more

There Are 10 Kinds of People in This World

Those who can read binary and those who can’t. Te first activity we ran through for my Computational Thinking course was learning how to translate ... Read more

Computational Thinking

I’m a scientist. I think in terms of what I can see and manipulate. Part of my training included a large amount of time making changes in systems, ... Read more

Asking the Questions

Short post tonight. For the final assignment this semester, we were asked to read Thomas Friedman’s OpEd on Passion Quotient and Curiosity Quotient... Read more

Wicked Problem

Post Updated 4/27/14 9:15PM – Since writing this post, my group has finished our project. Rather than adding a separate post, I’ve updated the link... Read more

Tech and PD – Survey Results

Survey Analysis Last week, I distributed a short survey on technology and professional development. I’ve typed up some brief analysis, looking at m... Read more

Survey Time (again)

Blog readers, I come to you again asking for help with a survey. As many of you know, I’m working on a masters degree in education technology throu... Read more

Tin Can Phones, Windows, and Horizons

Tin Cans Twitter chats are often the first point of entry for developing a PLN. It was where I began. I randomly followed some people who had “Educ... Read more

Nine Skills

I’ve done a lot of writing this past week. I mean, a lot. Many late nights, cups of coffee, and pints of beer went into my body and magically flowe... Read more

Speech-to-Text to the Rescue

Have you ever tried to read an article or paper but gotten so bogged down with the vocabulary that you didn’t understand what was going on? This ha... Read more

Changing Institutions

I’ve been reading James Paul Gee’s book, The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning. Without diving too deep into h... Read more

The Problem With Evolution…

…is that it’s kind of hard to teach. Sorry for the click bait…I couldn’t resist. This is an update for my master’s class on finding solutions to in... Read more

Help! Another Survey!

This Sunday, I’m jetting off to Germany for a one week, three city, two-conference tour with fellow TechSmithie, Anton Bollen. Part of my trip is s... Read more

Thought Traps

Another cross post, somewhat edited, from a recent MAET assignment. Below is a short reflection (slightly adapted for the post) I wrote comparing M... Read more

On Student Achievement

The following is the text from an assignment I did for my current grad class. We were asked to read the Introduction and chapters 1 and 2 from Larr... Read more

The Future Is What You Make It

See what I did there? That took a significant amount of brain power tonight. It must be the end of the semester. CEP811 is closing this week and fo... Read more

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Week seven of CEP811 is waning, and this has been a very busy week for me. I was in San Antonio Tuesday through Friday for a conference and then ca... Read more

I’ll Take it to Go

CEP 811 is steaming forward at full speed and we’re now getting close to finishing week four of the course. This week, we’ve been tasked with creat... Read more

Maker Experiment #1

Another post in the series for CEP811, we’re really getting serious now as we begin to develop potential plans for our maker kits. Last week, I wro... Read more

Thrifting Brainstorms

I went to Goodwill this evening with Lindsey and Meredith. I had wanted to go for a while, and after not finding much in the clothing, I turned tow... Read more

Bring on the MOOC

The eight weeks of remixing have kicked off for CEP811 at MSU. Right off the bat, our first task was to pick an edtech buzzword and use Mozilla’s P... Read more

Get in touch

Comments are always open. You can get in touch by sending me an email at brian@ohheybrian.com