Multilitteratus Incognitus

This is partly a rant, and partly a reference to an interesting blog piece I read earlier today. I was reading this blog article about the anatomy of an unworkshop . Now the content within the blog post is pretty interested, what I take issue with is the naming convention: the unworkshop . Sometimes I feel like academics have nothing better to do than come up with silly names to describe a slightly different name for a slightly different process and it's just not necessary (unconference and edupunk also fall within this category). His methodology sounds good to me, but I really do not see the need for giving it the 'unworkshops' name. After all when I sign up for workshops I don't sign up for socratic workshops or aristotelian workshops, so in reality the methodology does not matter in the naming convention of the event. Am I making too much of this?

OK, so it's the end of the semester, I've completed two whole classes in applied linguistics and I have spoken to many people about the program - classmates and faculty alike. I've gotten to find out what my classmates' plans are post graduation and so on. Some of my classmates are going into teaching (or remaining in teaching) while others like me are considering a PhD route. Now, the program is structured in this way: 1. You've got 5 core courses that everyone needs to take 2. Then you must specialize in ESL, Foreign Language teaching or Bilingual education (2 courses + 1 practicum) 3. Then you've got your pick of 2 electives. 4. Pass comprehensive exams The program is ten classes for an M.A. which is about normal for a Masters Degree. The department, at least in the course catalogs, has plenty of absolutely GREAT courses which have not been offered for a long time. Why? It's my impression that they don't have enough faculty to teach niche courses (su...

Back to instructional & educational technology during the winter break. Over the past few months a number of things have happened: 1. We've seen IT departments bitten by the budget shortfall bug, and IT departments are looking at how they can be lean and mean . 2. We've seen colleges contemplating stopping services like email that students can get for free and often have prior to entering college. 3. Boston College actually stopped providing new incoming students with email addresses 4. UMass Boston ended its "email for life" for students, so when a student graduates they have some period of time to request a permanent email, or else it goes buh-bye! 5. Finally, UMass Boston announced that it started a blog network (based on the WordPress platform) Now, the one thing that comes to mind is this: if it's free, why provide the service in house? This is of course in reference to the blog network, and to student email to some degree. Many of us have been usi...

Another semester is done! I completed my final and handed it in for grading (I think I did well). With Linguistics (Apling 601) under my belt, I feel confident that things will make more sense from now on ;-) In any case, in retrospect this semester was not bad. I only had one class which I did well in. I did spend a boatload of time working on GIDA (graduate instructional design alumni association) with both the online and face to face component of the organization - and I have to say that it is a lot of work. Our social network, sadly, does not yet support RSS, so people can't get a friendfeed in their RSS reader to see what's going on. Hopefully this will be fixed with future versions of the service. We do have a large number of member (137 as of this writing), but it's hard reaching out to alumni since we don't know who they are. The weird thing is that students are also reluctant to join unless you give them a presentation and explain the benefits. It's not eas...

Paper due in one week. The paper is kind of, sort of done. It just needs two or three rounds of editing. I guess I will be silent on here until next week :-)

I was reading this article on the Register a week or so ago. I think that this is pretty interesting because one of my friends is having problems (technological ones) with his kids' assigned homework and the electronic aspect of things. ‘My dog ate it’, ‘I left it on the bus’, and ‘someone stole it’ – they were the classic excuses in our day for not handing in homework. But modern youth are increasingly blaming absent homework on technology, a survey’s revealed. Online electronics retailer Pixmania surveyed 1000 teachers during the past 12 months and found that of the total 6.5m excuses thought to be have been heard by UK teachers each week, roughly 1.3m - 20 per cent - centred on technological problem. The most popular tech excuse heard from pupils was that they’d done the work, but then the computer crashed and they lost it. Don’t kids learn how to make back-ups these days? ‘I lost my laptop’ and ‘I finished my homework, but then deleted it by accident’ were also used by kids. Pr...