Ed tech on speed. Ed tech at speed.

FASTER NYAN CAT

One of the more1 overlooked aspects of working with faculty around technology integration is speed- that is moving quickly from an idea/dream to working functional reality. Joy/playfulness is high on that list as well (and probably plays into speed) but I’ll focus on speed for the moment. It’s essential that working with a faculty development/ed tech group be the antithesis of the many monumentally lethargic interactions that characterize other institutional engagements. It ought to be agile. It has to be energizing.

“If we have an idea, 10 minutes later we’re trying it out,” Mika says. “It’s like improv.”

From a from an interesting WIRED article h/t to Enoch.

I think that’s why WordPress has been so successful- it’s a flexible (but not overwhelming) platform that gets you 90% of the way to most destinations really quickly. It’s been interesting to see the possibilities around speed and flexibility keep moving. Talking to Tim Owens the other day about Sandstorm and the ability to spin up virtual just-about-everythings in the blink of an eye and maybe only for the moment. This is the opposite of the pattern of movement that has typically occurred in institutions.

To that end, I’m playing with this NMC session description that focuses on the things we’ve been using to get things done quickly.

A campy, meme-ified, high-speed exploration focused on building all kinds of interactive web content with (rather than for) faculty and doing it FAST. Ed tech on speed. Ed tech at speed. Turn ideas into functioning sites in an hour or less. We’ll go heavy on WordPress and explore flexible and reusable design patterns, magical plugins, and look at lots of example sites we’ve released into the wild. Beauty, power, data, and towering majesty are at your beck and call. FERPA questions will not be entertained.


1 Many?

5 thoughts on “Ed tech on speed. Ed tech at speed.

  1. Check out Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s “Personal Dynamic Media.” They’re right there with you. Why play a musical instrument that lags three seconds from key press to sound? Thoughtfulness is good. Latency is not.

  2. You are on a pretty sick tear on your blog these days. The SPLOT vision is a really compelling one, and I love the idea of quick, micro-instances of the open web for edtech more generally. So much potential gold there. We are at the brink of getting it so any department can get AWS space, and I am interested in how quickly we can even start spinning up applications that don’t necessarily depend on LAMP. It’s like a whole new world of sandbox—and the idea of speed and flexibility becomes pretty awe-inspiring. And the idea that trips me about the micro-instances, which I associate with this stuff, scale. Many small servers hosting just one thing for one person may actually scale better when we think about visions of personal cyberinfrastructure. This is the headspace I get most excited about, all this shit I don;t understand 🙂

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