tech ed.

Loads going on in the academic space using technology that's changing the academic world.

Just read that several universities are participating in a pilot program with Kindle Readers. While this will certainly help students' backs, will reading all their textbooks on a screen hurt their eyes?

VCU stopped giving out university emails this year. Instead students have Gmail accounts. I can see how this would be easier on VCU servers. But I wonder what kind of deal they've had to make with Google?

I also read that Google Wave has been made available to a few universities. I recently started using the Wave and while I think it is a useful chat program, I'm not sure how often uni students will conduct meetings, building documents over it?

Another thing I noticed about the academic space with regards to the Web is the utility of websites created for them. True that most are awful, Blackboard and pretty much every mail server made me want to throw my computer across the room. But, going through the list of entries for the Adobe MAX Awards this year, I noticed that the entries for academic space seemed 10 times more useful than those done for brands. It's pathetic really. I hit on this in another post about brands creating websites that suck. Below are a couple screen shots of academic sites and brand sites, may be hard to judge from these small images.You may want to read the descriptors on the site.

Games by brands:
2 games that involve driving a car around, one involving a digital claw-machine game.

3 educational sites. One that charts a students progress, one that is a network for educators around the world and the third a piano-teaching program.