Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading one of the items for this week's CCK11 session, which happens to be on PLEs. The readings was an Educause "7 things you should know about..." type of document. If you don't know what a PLE ( personal learning environment ) is, the abstract gives a good succinct overview: The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.  OK, I agree, but reading the actual document created some cognitive dissonance (you ought to read this document, it's only two pages long). The scenario in this 7things document describes

This past week I listened to the Neil Selwyn presentation (perhaps I am a week behind) and I have to say that I am indeed a Neil Selwyn fan or best rephrased, I am a fan of his critical point of view on technology and the bling use of technology in the classroom. I came across Neil's work a few months back as I was finding academic articles on the subject of the Net Generation (also known as Millenials , Digital Natives , Generation Google, Generation C, etc. etc. etc.) - I was looking for emperical studies that tested the hypotheses that people like Prensky put forth about this generation, and I did find quite a few. An article is in the works based on all this research, but to make a long story short the empirical evidence does not support one unified monolithic generation where everyone is a computer-wiz which requires instructors to use technology (...or else!) A couple of Selwyn's articles brought a critical element into an otherwise uncritical view of these Net Gen

The other day I made an observation on LinkedIn that 8 people had recently left the employment of UMass (LinkedIn told me so). The number seemed rather high, so I wanted, out of curiosity, to know who had left, was it someone I knew? It turns out that most of the people who "left" were teaching assistants, graduate assistants, or like me had added "student" to their profile under job. Back in the day LinkedIn didn't have a way to get recommendations for your student achievements which is why I added a Student "job" under employment, now of course they do so it's not that important. In any case, I remembered that I too had a "job position" as Graduate Student, and since I recently graduated I thought it would be time to update my profile and say that I no longer have that "job". I have to say that while I knew that I was a perpetual student, it really surprised me that I had been a Master's Level student for 7 years! I

OK, so my first MOOC is almost over...so what did I think? I have to say that as an experience LAK11 was actually quite interesting. The subject matter was interesting (even though we tended to go toward the business/finance side of the house quite often) and there were quite a few interesting personalities that were part of the course. The course started out with a bang! There were a ton of people in both the introduction round and in week 1...but then it fizzled! I am not sure why it did, but as the weeks went on, there seemed to be fewer and fewer people participating. Compared to CCK11 (now in its 5th week I think), the participation in LAK11 was mostly distributed at the beginning, while CCK11 seems to have more spread-out participation. I guess one reminds me of a sprint, and the other of a marathon. I think that learning and learner analytics is quite a fascinating topic. I wonder if (and how) a MOOC on this topic (LAK12?) could improve - What can you do to sustain parti

OK, so I finally was able to listen to the digital scholarship podcast for CCK11 the other day (man, I cranked those speakers up quite high in some spots!) and I have to say that it was quite interesting ( click here for MP3 link ). I have to say that the concept of digital scholarship isn't new or alien to me, having listened to Dan, Tom and Mills on digital campus for the last few years (great podcast by the way, you should subscribe to if if you don't already). In any case, what really struck me about the blog posts of fellow CCK participants was the question of "who is a scholar?" I think Weller (the presenter in the elluminate session/MP3 recording) had mentioned that blogging was one of the tools that digital scholars could be used. This seemed to me to bring about the question of who counts as a scholar and who does not. Is Paris Hilton a scholar? Is Sarah Palin a scholar? Well, of course not! Those people aren't scholars, but the important question is n

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?) This week in CCK11 we've got learning theories. luckily most of this stuff is a great review for me since we covered most of these theories quite a lot throughout the applied linguistics curriculum. We didn't much with connectivism though (which is why I am attending CCK11) since that was near the end of the semester. In any case, there is a a nice ten minute video on YouTube that goes over the various major theories of education. If you haven't heard of educational theories, this is quite a good back-of-the-napkin figure to get you started. If you're in instructional design and you haven