My life mission: motivating, educating, and inspiring students to be fully engaged in the rapidly globalizing 21st century. In our increasingly connected and complex world, personal (and even our country's) success depends upon a global awareness and global engagement to meet the challenges of our time. Utilizing a variety of topics, technologies, and graphic mediums, I am absolutely passionate about providing the highest quality learning experience that will produce global citizens and leaders prepared to positively shape the future of the the US, and the world.
Disintegrating Syrian Situation: A Sunni-Shia Showdown?
Here we are 2 years in to the Syrian Civil War that was sparked by the Arab Spring…70,000 dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and no end in site to the suffering. Instead of trying to make any grand predictions about the future of this mess, or to try and...
Our Chinese and Korean friends are once again up in arms about some top Japanese officials paying their respects to their war dead at a place called the Yasukuni Shrine. Current Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe did not actually himself visit…but lots of others...
Any faculty member who wants to produce a video needs to really think about how they are coming across to their audience and what harm they may be doing to the image of academics with a poor production. In sharp contrast to Khan’s cool and matter-of-fact demeanor...
Now the Plaid Avenger has taken on another mission, one that may bequest a dollar or two from your bank account, but is well worth the donation: an iPad application for his Plaid Avenger graphic novel series.
Virginia Tech professor John Boyer has been called the Bill Nye of geography. He prefers his lecture classes to be massive — 3,000 students massive — and connects with students outside of class via technology. So when Boyer set about inviting President Obama to stop...
Why were stories on the flipped university classroom so rare this past year? With our upcoming course on Social Media and Technology Tools for Research in mind, we wanted to find a model that was actually leveraging tech tools in a way that was improving higher...
Today, we’d like to introduce you to John Boyer of Virginia Tech. Skype is one of the many tools Professor Boyer uses to teach a class of nearly 3,000 students! In addition to Skype, Boyer employs tools like uStream, Twitter, Facebook, Turntable, podcasts, his own...
In October, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his "World Regions" geography class at Virginia Tech.
The digital classroom is inevitable. That may have been the one point of agreement between all parties during last week's SXSWedu technology and education conference – but the consensus stopped there.
Ask and you will receive. It’s an old adage, but new technology is helping to prove it true, at least in the case of one college professor whose YouTube request to Aung San Suu Kyi garnered him a Skype interview with the Burmese leader. Professor John Boyer teaches a...
January 03, 2012
Twitter newbie Rupert Murdoch following fake account
As of Monday, the oft-controversial Murdoch was following a grand total of four people on the social networking site. One of them, at first glance, appears to be Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page. Except that it's not Larry Page but a parody account that's part of...
At a special screening at Virginia Tech of Bouncing Cats -- the inspiring documentary of one man's attempt to use the power of hip-hop for positive social change in Uganda -- Crazy Legs from the Rock Steady Crew and Abramz from Breakdance Project Uganda are reunited...
First two Hollywood actors, now a Nobel Peace Prize-winning heroine. From half a world away,Aung San Suu Kyi spoke with a class of Virginia Tech students...
Do you know who Julia Gillard is? What about Robert Mugabe or David Cameron? Did you hear about the cholera outbreak in Haiti or the erupting volcano in Indonesia?
If you didn’t recognize any of the names or events mentioned above and can’t be bothered with a...
The Plaid Avenger is back. The brainchild of John Boyer, a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., and graphic designer Klaus Shmidheiser, The Plaid Avenger is an international fighter for freedom. He is a superhero combining the basics of the masked hero,...
I always enjoy getting free stuff. It’s always an adventure, to say the least, and often I am treated to something to something so original and enjoyable, it makes me feel my feeble attempts at comic book journalism are not in vain. Such is the case several weeks...
Time was when solid-color theme heroes like Green Lantern and Green Arrow would expose social ills and confront personified menaces of the military-industrial complex. The world has gotten less simple, so today we need the Plaid Avenger to explore the tangled...
This restricting challenge presented by film is similar to another medium: The graphic novel. John Boyer, who teaches both World Regions and Geography of Wine, has recently released a comic book featuring the hero The Plaid Avenger, a familiar looking college...
Superheroes, secret missions and international mysteries — one Virginia Tech professor is finding a creative way to teach his students through a textbook he wrote that reads like a comic book.
John Boyer, geography instructor, wrote a new textbook called “The Plaid...
