Cooking Robots?

So if there are cooking robots now, what comes next?

I found the most interesting part of this NY Times article the ethnographic study that the woman did to understand what kind of behavior a hot dog vendor would exhibit and then worked to program the robot to replicate it. I wonder if hot dog vendors in Pittsburgh act the same as those in Philadelphia.

Makes me a little confident that it will be a long, long time before robots can even assist teachers! :)

With or Without Technology

I am teaching an online course for UMass Boston on Computers, Technology and Education. It is part of a strand of courses teachers can take to receive a certificate in Instructional Technology for Educators.

For their first blog post, I gave them the following prompt: What is the role of technology in education: the role of the teacher and the role of the student - in relation to this topic.

Today at our local Technology Directors meeting we discussed the challenges of taking "technology" out of the equation for professional development, in other words, embed it, integrate it. It is very hard to do, many people, curriculum folks, districts are just not ready to work towards true integration of technology as a tool.

As an experiment, I took their blog posts and imported them into wordle. With and without the word technology. Here is what came up. What do you conclude from this?