Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading a recent article on First Monday the other day (abstract and link bellow) that seems to point out the obvious. In my early days on the internet in the late 90s I spent a lot of time on IRC chat rooms, Yahoo chat rooms, meeting people on ICQ and other related services. It was pretty cool to meet people from other countries and get to talk to them about their daily lives. Many times we also exchanged photographs much like old-school pen pals. In some occasions people looked better online, and in other cases people looked better in a face-to-face meeting. It all depended on the photograph. While the article was interesting, I really don't get why people feel deceived by profile photos. Yes there is the stylistic element, but in our society I've noticed that we try to be picture perfect (aka photoshop perfect) and that just isn't reality. In a society where people feel pressured to look like supermodels, the photographic style will reflect that tendency. I thin...

Well here's some near-the-end-of-the-month humor for you. One of the things that I remember doing in my Introduction to Instructional Design class was looking at products (mostly toys) and without instructions figuring out what they do, and designing instruction for them. We would design instruction that would let the parent know in simple terms how to operate the toy so that they could show their kid. This image came through my RSS reader a few days ago and reminded me of those early days in Instructional Design.

Not much to say today. I just came across this presentation which looked rather interesting. Since I am taking a course this fall that deals with Kirkpatrick and his levels, I thought I should post this presentation on the topic that looked rather interesting.

I had a chuckle when I read this comic strip the other day. It brought back memories of my undergraduate mathematical logic class. The weird thing was that most things that I found logical seemed to not be valid mathematic proofs of logic. Oh well...

I posted this on my Google shared items about a month ago, but I found it so powerful that it deserves a separate posting here as well. I was reading this blog post about a researcher that was recording the language of a people. This language is going the way of the dodo so the researcher wanted to preserve it. In showing the natives what he intends to do, and giving them examples of languages no longer spoken because the last speaker of a language died, it energized the locals to probably revitalize their language. I know that I am probably losing a lot of the essence here, but for me this was quite a powerful story!

I came across this article (or blog post?) from a fellow Greek a while back. The topic is "Why Tablet PCs are better". Of course the natural questions is: better than what? When it comes to instructional technology I think that a lot of people go for what's new and shiny and forget that there is existing (or old school as I like to call it) technology that does the job right, and work without electricity! (Good for those instances that you want to go all Socratic on your students and teach class in the open Green!) In any case, while I do agree with the author that there are some definite advantages to working with newer tech in the classroom, it's important to diversify your materials and not focus on one technology. One thing that stood out is this: I can archive and share my presentation after class - Many teachers report that they create a "master file" of their lesson plans, and present from a copy so they can annotate and save it for post-class distr...

Now you've probably seen this already, but in case you have not here's another great commonCraft video.

I came across this presentation a while back, but I did not have the opportunity until recently to go through it. It's a great presentation and I wish that they also had the audio of the presentation to go with it because it seems like a great topic. I particularly liked slides 100 to 109 where institutions of higher education are likened to the recording instutry ;-) I also liked slide 95 with the character classes - a little D&D humor there :-) When you have a moment, and you are a higher education profession, have a look at it, if you haven't already The Disaggregation of Higher Education View more Microsoft Word documents from David Wiley .

Well OK, not really. I don't know if this story transpired on a Monday - it was just a catchy title :-) Anyway, I had heard of this story about a student accused of copyright infringement and possibly academic dishonesty for posting his own code online! I did not know much of the story until I read the whole story on Inside Higher Ed . If you haven't seen it, go have a quick read - it IS pretty ridiculous. Basically there is a student in a data structures class (aaaahh, brings back fond memories) and after an assignment was due and everyone had submitted their answers to the professor he posted his answers to the web. The professor went bananas and tried to assert that he had copyright over the answers and that the student was committing academic dishonesty for posting the answers. This guy is pretty stupid (too many years in front of a CRT?) If I write my own code - you don't have copyright. If I post the answers after the assignement is due, I am not helping anyone ch...

One of the "in" things today is to try to use social networks for everything including marketing, advertising, social mobilization and yes even teaching. I came across this graphic a while back showing which social networks are prevalent in which countries. This is quite interesting, but it only gives you which networks are most popular based on goodle trends and alexa at one point in time. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice visualization, but I think that some people might use this as sure proof that they should use one network over another when the better approach, in my opinion, is diversification :-)

I came across this presentation a while back - pretty interesting. If you've never taken any instructional design courses before, it's work the attention. If you have, it's a nice review :-) Theories Of Instructional Design View more Microsoft Word documents from Jordan .

ROFL. OK, maybe I am a bit cynical here but this story on NRP about the MBA Oath that some Harvard MBAs took made me laugh out loud. They have a website (who doesn't?) and here's the oath: As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone. Therefore I will seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term. I recognize my decisions can have far-reaching consequences that affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside my enterprise, today and in the future. As I reconcile the interests of different constituencies, I will face choices that are not easy for me and others. Therefore I promise: I will act with utmost integrity and pursue my work in an ethical manner. I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate. I will manage my enterprise in good faith, guarding ...

I must admit that I was skeptical before I first saw this, but when I thought about it more, the idea of using hashtags in a survey class (an intro class that a lot of people have to take) is interesting.