DrThompsen.com

I enjoy taking panoramic photos from time to time. They are especially useful for capturing wide angle images that are difficult to view in a traditional photo. I’ve also experimented with various methods for presenting panoramic photos, including QuickTime VR, which is an excellent tool for navigating panoramas.
Another excellent piece of panoramic photography software [...]

No textbook is perfect, but a good text should at least get people’s names right. I have earlier complained about John Vivian perpetuating mistakes in his text, The Media of Mass Communication, which I use in the large lecture course in mass communication I teach at West Chester University. I like the book, [...]

The GameBoy has been a big hit for youngsters (and oldsters, too), so I’m not surprised that Innovations For Learning’s new Teachermate handheld computer looks a lot like a Nintendo GameBoy. The size, button layout, and color scheme all give the impression that this is a fun gadget that Mario or Sonic would be [...]

The last session I attended at NERCOMP was a presentation on the use of wikis at Bridgewater State College. Eric LePage and Timothy Wenson showed off their “BSCwiki” to a rather large audience (perhaps owing to the fact that the last time slot of the day only offered three breakout sessions).
The BSCwiki was built [...]

Northeastern University (Boston) has developed a CRM (customer resource management) application to help increase student retention, by improving communication with faculty, students and advisors. This session was a demonstration of this application and a discussion of its impact. Kostia Bergman, Director of Undergraduate Education in Biology at Northeastern, began the presentation by presenting [...]

Blended learning, which combines traditional face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning, appears to be growing in popularity at many colleges. This session explores the effort at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth to help faculty develop the skills needed to be effective in a blended learning environment.
Faculty training faculty is one of the strategies [...]

This morning’s general session was a presentation by Scott Kirsner, a columnist and contributing writer to a variety of publications, including Wired, Business Week, Boston Globe, New York Times and Variety. He is also the author of “Inventing the Movies” and “The Future of Web Video.”
Scott showed an 1894 kinetoscope clip (Ciecedo with Pepe) [...]

So it’s day two of the NERCOMP conference, and I began the day by attending a demonstration session of Tegrity. The title of the session was “Recruiting, Retention and Relevance (the 3Rs): Leveraging New Learning Technologies for Competitive Advantage.” The main presenter was Alan MacDougall, Director of Academic Computing at the University of [...]