Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading University Diaries on InsideHigherEd the other day and I came across this point-counterpoint Point [C]atalogue copy is prepared yearly (sometimes twice yearly), which means that universities are almost always “lying” about their programs. Let’s say a student applies to a department because it offers a specialty he is interested in, and he arrives to find that the key players — the ones he wanted to study with — departed last month. It’s hard to see why he should have a legal remedy. There is really no one to blame... Counterpoint Has Fish not heard of the computer? Students rarely get course information from slowly prepared print media; everything's online now, including catalogue copy, so there's no reason why it can't be updated rapidly and constantly. Again, I agree with him that legal remedies for complaints about this are absurd; but he's not acknowledging the reality of universities. The problem's not the slow publication of information. I have ...

I love SlideShare! You can find some pretty exciting presentations on there :-) Here is a primer on cognitive overload: Chris Atherton at TCUK09 View more documents from Chris Atherton .

I love the PhD comic strip :-)

OK, I fibbed, I am not going to give you the magic bullet that will make you an uber-student being able to tackle three graduate classes, a family and full time work! Heck, I don't have those answers to give :-) The situations recently where people tried to tap into the "secrets" I have for being able to manage a full graduate course load plus a full time job made me think of a seminar that I had as an undergraduate called "study smarter, not harder". At the time I was overwhelmed with working two part-time jobs (45-55 hours per week) plus a full course load (4 courses). I was tired, I was stressed and I was looking for a magic bullet. When I went to this seminar I thought to myself "whaaaat? Seriously? Your tip is not not leave things 'till the last minute? WOW! Now THAT is a revelation!" My workflow (i.e. "tips" or "magic bullet") works for me, but it is not a guarantee that it works for everyone and in all situations. So ...

I cam across this presentation recently on Moodle and Web 2.0 features Web 2.0 tools and techniques View more presentations from Mark Drechsler . Yes, it is quite interesting, but I think that LMS creators are missing the point. The reason why Web 2.0 is popular is because you are not in a walled garden. The content is open to the greater internet using community, and you've got many, many users creating, posting, remixing, tagging and categorizing this information. In an LMS you've got 30 people - max - and at the end of the semester that work is lost to the student, and it's not accessible to new students. In essence at the end of each semester you have a tabula rasa. Web 2.0 will work for education in some instances if the walled garden approach is taken, however it will really fly if we move beyond the mindset of each semester being a separate island if we want to use Web 2.0 tools effectively.

I've had a couple of interactions with recent grad students - tapping into my knowledge of 'the system'. There is no doubt that in each person's mind they want to be a successful student - however the definition of what a successful student is varies from person to person. Some people want to be a successful student that takes as many courses as possible in order to graduate as soon as possible. They generally seem to look for courses that are low-impact so that they can get that coveted 'easy A' - I guess this would be the grad school equivalent of speed dating, but instead of partners it's courses, and and the end of the night instead of a name and number your get a degree. In my opinion this isn't being a successful student. In many respects it's probably a short term success and a long term failure. So do grades not matter? Should we take the slow path through grad school? Those are silly questions! No, you should not take the slow path through...

File this under random thoughts... So, we've been talking about textbooks in my linguistics classes for the last couple of semesters and how most of them suck when it comes to language learning. My classmates who do teach languages for their day jobs constantly find creative ways of working through the deficiencies of the texts that they are saddled with. On the other side of the fence, in instructional design, we do talk about materials selection, and if there is material that will fit your needs, appropriate it, otherwise make your own (if time and money are not an issue). I happened to read a blog post recently with language learning resources on the web and I was reminded again of wikibooks. This lead me down the path of open source textbooks such as wikibooks and Flat World . The big question here is why don't we do it? Why don't we subject matter experts get together and create language textbooks that don't suck? Get some linguists, some language experts and...

Time to put on the librarian hat ;-) Sooooo, I was reading on Library Journal recently and article called "The Dewey Dilemma". For those of you how haven't stepped foot in a public library recently, most books are categorized according to the Dewey Decimal System ( see this wiki article for more info on the DDC ). Now many libraries are trying to make their collections more accessible to the public and they are thinking of either switching to the BISAC system (the one used in bookstores in the US), or having some sort of hybrid system between Dewey and BISAC. As I was reading this article, and as I have followed along with debates on listservs on the issue, I can say that this is not a Dewey system, it's not even a classification issue (how you organize books). Rather it's an issue of how your customers (or "patrons" in library speak) are looking for information. What is the purpose of the library? and How are are people going about their information ...

In these past couple of weeks I've seen a number of articles where people talk about Instructional Design as something a laySME (layman subject matter expert) can (or can't) do. First I saw Gina's post about whether someone should be doing ID even though they can. Gina makes some pretty interesting points about whether people should do instructional design even though they think they can. This lead straight to blog posts like Instructional design - pah, who needs it? and A “Hello World” Approach to Teaching Instructional Design . Finally, a good post was Do learners really need learning objectives? I urge you to go out an read these posts, they are pretty interesting. Of course you come where for what I think...so...what do I think? Personally I think that anyone can do instructional design because instructional design jobs are poorly described. An Instructional Design job can be an LMS administrator, a WIMBA or Adobe Connect support person, an educational technologist ...

I was reading a linguistics blog recently on diglossia and a cypriot Greek (or is it Greek Cypriot word? - anyway) came up. The word is Καλαμαράς (kalamaras) which in cypriot apparently is penpusher (you know, a bureaucrat). This word is fascinating! The root of the word is Καλαμάρι (Kalamari) - yes as in calamari/squid. Why? Because that's where ink comes from. In new years carols santa claus (saint Basil actually) brings χαρτί (paper) and καλαμάρι (pen). This is the only instance that I know of where καλαμάρι is used as the word for pen in Greek. The suffix of the word is -ας, a person who deals with whatever the prefix is, so in this case, the person that deals with pens. I suppose that it might also mean a squid fisherman, but penpusher sounds like a better use of the word ;-) It's amazing the things you learn!

I was reading an article on Science Direct on Librarianship Education. I am surprised that there is such a fuss over a name - however in a profession that only accepts individuals who received their degree from an ALA-accredited institution, it makes sense. Personally I think that librarianship, for the purposes of working in a public or academic library, is something that you don't need a Masters degree in Library (or information!) Science. You probably need a degree of some other sort to make you a Subject Matter Expert in something, but things like reference and cataloguing don't require an MLIS. A recent exchange with an MLIS colleague shows this. The comment was that this individual did not want to catalogue because it was mindless - they should hire a paraprofessional for that. If you look at Masters level LIS work in Greece for instance you will see more theoretical work done. Work on international standards, work on theory, work on integrating non-LIS professions and ...

A few weeks back I starred this article on my google reader. I actually found it interesting because I have been known to multitask (depending on whom you ask you may find me to be a heavy multitasker or a mild multitasker). I found a few quotes necessitated expansion: Perhaps what we are doing [multitasking] has nothing to do with efficiency. I don't operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused. [...] I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don't know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that...

I was reading this post on Inside Higher Ed , about the findings of Abilene Christian University a year after they started giving an iPod touch or iPhone to each incoming freshman. This was quite an interesting article to read - and partly because of the high success rating from both students and faculty. I wonder how many instructional technologists and how many instructional designers they had on board to prepare for the on-slaught of course conversions (or content additions) to be able to use iPhone as an actual learning tool rather than a gimmick device. One of my favorite tools is ProfCast - which takes PowerPoint and Keynote slides and allows you to narrate them (similar to Adobe's Presenter). The difference is that they are made into podcasts instead of streaming video files. I would take downloadable podcasts over streaming files any day of the week.