Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

I spent the afternoon working with colleagues on a project involving a learning management system.  We are coming off summer break and most of the participants had not logged in for three months.  A few of them had forgotten their passwords.

Many got right in because they use the same password for this system as for all systems – university email, yahoo email, calendar, online grade book, student course registration, online banking and that account on the server used to send everyone holiday greeting cards. 

With the number of services requiring a password, no one can know how many times a generic password can circle the earth and hit servers that should never be trusted with “secret” information.  On a typical day I use accounts at Protopage, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Google plus all my work related sites.  I use a web-based password generator to create strong passwords and Roboform to keep track of all of them. 

With all the identity theft going on, using an assortment of strong passwords just seems obvious to me.

I am looking through a half dozen recent textbooks for information on newer technologies.  The oldest text in my pile is two years old.

Here are some interesting technologies that I’m having a hard time finding.  Half the books do not have “blogs” listed.  The other three texts have single paragraph listings that define blogs as a “personal journal.” Only one book mentions that blogs can be used as a two-way communication tool.

Only one book has “wiki” listed.  That particular text gives an excellent definition and examples of how wikis can be used in an educational environment.  Unfortunately, five of the books do not even mention the term.

Comparing these books with texts I have from the nineties is almost comical.  One of the books goes on and on about “gopher” and “archie” and how each can be used in education.  There is no mention of Google.

What will our textbooks be talking about in five more years?