Multilitteratus Incognitus

I came across this article recently on Community Managers. For the past year or so, ever since I created a Ning community for the Instructional Design program, and helped/consulted on the creation of a Community for the Applied Linguistics online program, I've been advocating for a community manager for all online programs. What I've noticed is that there is a void in-between semesters, especially for students who are all over the world, but happen to be a student in our Online Programs. During the semester they've got access to Blackboard and they get to "see" their classmates again, and meet new ones. In between semesters they lose contact, unless they happen to have people on LinkedIn or Facebook (or old school email) or something along those lines. This was an interesting quote: Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal commun...

I came across this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently . It was an interesting read. I can't really speak to the financial information they give because I am not involved in that area of university management. I did however have a couple of comments on other topics... Millions of workers have lost their jobs in recent months. But tenured professors are hard to fire. And some powerful faculty unions have resisted when colleges asked their members to teach more classes, despite what seemed like reasonable requests. The faculty union at Kean University, for example, balked last year when administrators tried to require professors to teach on Fridays and some Saturdays. The public university, located in New Jersey, was facing a $4.5-million cut in the state's contribution and was trying to get more use out of classroom buildings. Faculty members considered the proposal an assault on their autonomy and a retaliation for a previous squabble with administrators. Since then ...

Here's some PhD humor for all of you out there coming back from Spring Break

This is simply a great video to watch on the hows and the whys to the current credit crisis. The visuals, the setup, and the explanations are great in my opinion. Have a look - it's only 11 minutes. I would say that this is a good intro video for intro to finance classes. The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .

...well it depends on what you mean by " Education " I was reading the UMassOnlineBlog the other day and I saw this article by a guest blogger. I thought to myself seriously? They are going to tax education? It drew me in, until I read that it wasn't really about Distance Education... The relevant piece of information here is this: The department asserts that an e-course offered by SkillSoft Corporation, a New Hampshire-based company, should be subject to sales tax as “software” purchased by the student. So at this point I stopped being alarmed. It's not distance education, It's SkillSoft! There is no instructor involved in SkillSoft courses (at least not the ones we had at my workplace). NY is not going to tax people taking real online courses with instructors and grades and projects. Now I am not saying that SkillSoft isn't educational. What I am saying is that in my opinion SkillSoft doesn't count as Distance Education . Someone commented back on th...

I came across this NERCOMP presentation a week or so ago, but I only got to go through it the other day. All I can say is that I wish that I had been able to attend the NERCOMP conference and this presentation in general because it's a project that I've been involved with at my campus. No, my campus still maintains a separate library and IT group, however as a Management student I've worked on proposals for the Merger of the IT and the Library group and I've been an advocate for this merger for the last three or four years. While I was doing my MBA, my team and I did an analysis of the (then) current conditions in our IT department and in our Library and we came up with a proposal to merge the two departments. The main idea was that it would: (1) Save money; (2) Make information services easier to access; (3) Better reallocate resources on campus. After all, both the IT department and the library deal with Information Resources . It doesn't matter if that informat...

I was catching up on my Omniglot Blog unread posts and I came across this post asking people When is a language dead? This whole discussion come up because Manx was declared as a dead language even though there are still speakers of the language. The range of opinions posted in the comments was quite interesting, and it serves to point out there is not consensus on when a language is dead, or in some cases rather remains dead. View 1: A language is dead when there are are no monolingual speakers of that language. I find this line of logic to be wrong. Back when movement across country lines and continents meant long journeys, often expensive, this may have been a good indicator because a lot of people were monolingual. In these days bilingualism (or multilingualism) is the norm. In areas where there is a common language, or history of subjugation, its common to find the language of the conqueror taught first and then the native language. As we move into a more connected world, monolin...

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group. One of the elements that has come up is that each person, and each culture, are in fact shaped by various socio-economic-political-historical (and more) powers that are in effects in the regions where they grew up, where their parents grew up, their friends, families and coworkers. Within this shaping we have the creation of artifacts that are relevant to that culture. Now snap forward to regular life outside the classroom. I was catching up on my reading of the FAIL blog, and I saw this image (you need to follow the link since it may not be appropriate for work). This is a picture of a road si...

I came across a blog post entitled The Great ID Debate the other day. I actually found it quite interesting to read. I found the last three paragraphs quite poignant : Think about it - these days a good ID needs to be able to write instructional objective. Conduct a content analysis. And an audience analysis. Measure job/performance outcomes. Write a criterion referenced test Create a shared collaborative experience and measure its impact. Script a simulation. Create Camtasia movies. Know a .swf from a .flv. Produce a virtual webinar on any number of web platforms. Develop a website. Administer a blog. Program in Actionscript 3. Administer an LMS or two or three. Metatag your content so that everyone in your organization can find it. Create a video and post it to YouTube. Write a report. Evaluate the impact of a performance support initiative in your workplace. Manage a project. Handle a budget. Fix the copier. Trouble-shoot the network.... With all due respect to the university facu...

I meant to comment on this blog post and the associated news story a while back but I didn't get a chance until now. I think that in the blog post Assessment is confused with Grading based on this comment: It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure to ace the test, they would become “scientists, not automatons,” he reasoned. These concepts are not the same thing! Assessment is what you do to verify that students do indeed have understood and are able to apply what you've been trying to teach them. There are of course different levels of understanding, and this is where there is some attempt to overlap with Grading systems. The instrument used in this process of attempting to match the level of understanding and application to a Grade is a rubric (I dislike this word by the way). Yes, grades can be arbitrary, and trying to b...

Here's and interesting (short) animated documentary on the history of the internet. For most geeks among us this is common knowledge, but it's a good video to get those among us who don't know much about the origins of the internet up to speed :-) I think this would have been useful as an instructional video at the beginning of our class on business networking (a class for MBA student to understand the IT back end of computer networking. It can be used both as an icebreaker and an introduction to the history and concepts before getting into the nitty-gritty of networks and network management.

I came across this article the other day on the issue of Good Writing . While I do believe that most people skim read, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Should we really be teaching people to write for skim readers? In my opinion, good writing in contextual. Good writing for the web, is not necessarily good writing for a business journal, which is not necessarily good writing for a research report in one of the humanities fields. In my personal experience, the Discourse that I use, whether spoken or written, depends on the context. What I used as documentation in my coding days would not pass as good business writing. Good business writing would not cut it in my linguistics classes, and the analytical writing from my linguistics classes does not fit with writing for instruction and training in my Education classes. I think that the one thing that writing manuals teach us (you know APA , MLA , Chicago , etc.) is that it really depends who your audience is that determines if the writ...

It seems odd that you could analyze a blog as a personality type, but I suppose word analysis and construction of ideas could be computed in an algorythm. Typealyzer does an MBTI test for blogs. According to it, this blog is an INTJ (which kinda goes along with my personality). This is their description of this blog. The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things. The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alon...