A Wandering Eyre

Dr. McDaniel teaches history at Rice University, which is just a few miles down the road from where I live in the south suburbs of Houston. This semester he is teaching a survey course in American History (I can see some of you are already falling asleep. Wake up!), but he does not want this [...]

I was going to post this yesterday, but the internet went crazy after President Obama got on Reddit for an AMA and I decided to wait. I have another post, the last in this series, over at the ITI Books Blog. I am talking about how to take the idea of mob rule into a [...]

Last week, at Computers in Libraries, I facilitated a session in which the participants defined the direction of our 45 minutes together. It was fun for me and, I think, fun for them as well. After some brainstorming, multi-voting, hand-raising, and discussion, the topic that came to the forefront was “Getting Difficult People to Come [...]

I wrote an article for FUMSI called “An unconference approach can revitalise meetings and training.” FUMSI is an online resource for information professionals. The link above is only for the abstract. The full article is available for FUMSI subscribers only. In the article I discuss some classic unconference facilitation styles, like fishbowl and knowledge cafe, [...]

Here are a couple resources that might be useful to you if you are new to the idea of the wisdom of the crowd or if you need a little inspiration for your own mob: unconference.net – Though the blog on this site is not updated often and much of the information was posted long [...]

There are many ways that the mob can change their organizations and communities. I stopped at Sonic a couple of weeks ago and saw that my cherry limeade had an advertisement for a charity drive that Sonic is conducting this month called Limeades For Learning. For a third year, Sonic is helping teachers and schools [...]

My local NPR station recently started playing talk radio all day (hallelujah!) and I have been wallowing in all the wonderful shows I used to listen to regularly when I lived in Dallas. Last month, I had Talk of the Nation on and Don Tapscott was talking about higher education. My ears perked up immediately [...]

I am presenting at 3:20 in room 205. It is going to be very interesting and FUN! I am going to talk about how to use the concept of an unconference to solve your staff training issues. There will be zombies. Participation is required. But not participating zombies. Sorry, no brains for afternoon snack time. [...]

There is a new post on Library Garden that sums up every reason why filters in our public schools (and often in public libraries) get an epic fail. Epic. Fail. Most of the stories I have heard from school librarians involving filtering have absolutely nothing to do with protecting children against things obscene and everything [...]

I found I new theme which I really like and added some fun plugins. Alas, my page tabs are now broken. I am trying to locate the problem. The latstest WP 2.7.1 is very slick and easy to use. In comparing the .org with the .com versions, I am pleased that the .com version offers [...]