Multilitteratus Incognitus

I came across Charles Jennings's piece the other day titled " Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises ." It's quite a fascinating read and I encourage all of you to read through it and think about it. This piece reminded me of my Knowledge Management days as an MBA student, and as an Instructional Design student in thinking about corporate learning. A few nights ago however this piece had relevance in the academia context as well in the form of a discussion about plagiarism/academic honesty (pick whichever term you see fit - glass half-empty/glass half-full - same thing) Charles writes: Firstly, let’s clear something up. We shouldn’t confuse what L&D/Training departments spend a lot of their time on with real learning. Learning professionals spend a significant amount of their time (maybe even the majority) designing and delivering content and then evaluating completions and short-term memory outputs from structured mandatory...

Last weekend I finished reading the book Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation . It was an interesting book, recommended for both Instructional Designers and Language Teachers alike. Some chapters as admittedly better than others, but as a whole the book was quite good (related note: follow me on GoodReads ). Hot on the heels of this I came across a post on ProfHacker called " How are you going to grade this? Evaluating classroom blogs ". Instructors in our Instructional Design program drilled into us the, by now, infamous WIIFM (What's In It For Me) - learners are going to ask this before they take any course (or learning event) that you design. Well, the question that I (and my fellow students) were asking once we were in the course was "How is this assignment going to be graded?" Learning is all nice and dandy but in the end we need to achieve a certain grade and knowing the grading rubric helps us focus our work. In any case, thi...

So here is a library related post :-) A while back (a long while back according the date!) I came across this article on LIS news - a short essay on the utility of the Dewey Decimal System in public libraries. For as long as I can remember there has been debate in the public library sphere as to whether to continue to use the Dewey Decimal System (henceforth: DDC) or if they should switch to something called BISAC. If you've ever walked into a bookstore in the US (and probably in Canada as well) the shelves are organized by the BISAC system. The argument for BISAC is that it's easy for people to find books, whereas in DDC (or in LC numberings) it's not as easy. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that Dewey is infallible, it is after all a man-made system and as such it has flaws, however I could not really put my finger on why I would not like my public library to switch to BISAC. And then I read this: “Customers often comment that when they visit books...

A while back this posting came out from the Chief Security guru at the UMass Boston campus regarding the information you post on Facebook and how, by using it, you may potentially self-sabbotage future opportunities at jobs (or ever higher education). While there is some good advice given in the article, namely: Make sure that you allow only people that you know for sure as friends and give them the access you want them to have. You never know when some stranger is looking at your personal information. the blog post, in my opinion, fails to demonstrate that this is not just a shortcoming of facebook, but rather something that every web user has to know. Before facebook (and a lot of other Web 2.0 types of applications) only a few knowledgeable people were able to put stuff on the web. They knew that what they posted was public, and eventually what they found out was that someone was archiving it! If you know a URL and want to see what a website looked like in the past, go to t...

One of the articles lingering in my Google Reader for a while has been this blog post . The topic piqued my interest since I've written (or talked a lot about) the role of research in practice in the ID field over the past few years while I was a student in ID (graduation today - yay!). One of my criticisms has been that professionals in the field (based on my observations) don't pay much attention to research being done and how that research can benefit your organization. Of course research itself does have caveats and certain conditions that were true in the research study that may not be true in your organization, thus it is unwise to actually take research on face value and implement it wholesale without doing some critical analysis of what the research environment was like, how that environment compares to your environment and without doing your own experiments before you implement something throughout the organization. I do agree with the author that the gap between...