Multilitteratus Incognitus

Over the past few months I've been working with a dedicated group of people (whom I met at MobiMOOC this past April and May) on doing some collaborative research and publishing on the topics of mLearning and MOOCs (massive online open courses).  Our efforts have produced two papers (accepted) and we're working on several ideas which are on the table now [after a well deserved break!] This has me revising the single author versus the multi-author papers. On campuses all over we seem to pay lip service to collaborative and interdisciplinary research, but in actual practice the reward mechanisms seem to reward single author contributions.  On the one hand I get it, in a multi-author paper how can one tell which is your voice and which is not; and what ideas you brought to the table versus riding on the coat-tails of others. There are valid reasons for single authored papers, a good one being you're the only one interested in some topic and it would take more time to get othe...

A famous movie line goes as follows "if you build it they will come." My experience has taught me, as far as educational technology goes anyway, that if you build it they might or might not come. It just depends on their needs. Sometimes the problem is that students, and the faculty that teach them, don't know their needs and quite a lot of times he tools used transform their practices so much that they wouldn't have even known that they needed a tool when in fact they did! This transformational capability of technology is something that business operations of educational institutions seem to not consider and it came to light in a recent set of emails at work. We just had our Blackboard Vista LMS upgraded to SP5 which enables blackboard mobile. Of course in order use Bb mobile on your device it has to be enabled on the server side and this wasn't done by our provider. The rationale was that there hadn't been a need expresses for mLearming; even though a lot of...

I saw this the other day and it was hilarious! Yes, it's the onion (so don't take it seriously!) but there is a smidgeon of truth in the story (if you know what you are looking for) which makes it really really funny :-) In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

Another MOOC is almost in the can (to borrow terminology from TWiT).  I have to say that even though I was really interested in this MOOC, eduMOOC that is, I really have a hard time finding something that really made it stand out. This was my fourth MOOC this year and I can easily say that MobiMOOC and CCK11 were the two top MOOCs.  LAK11 was good, but it was way, way, too compressed for my liking, not enough time to take stock in what was talked about, and what was read. eduMOOC, in contrast to the other MOOCs this year, was almost like an informal social. There was a google site with information, and a weekly breakdown, but it really didn't feel like a "course," it felt like it was lacking direction. I think that it was a worthwhile experiment, considering that the MOOC format is relatively new and a lot of research is left to be done on this format, but I really didn't consider it much of a course. I wonder if it fails the MOOC litmus test since the C stands for ...

I was just about to give up on eduMOOC when this thread was started (or rather evolved from a previous thread) about what is an isn't a MOOC.  A Similar discussion came up on the Wikieducator list for eduMOOC.  A MOOC is a M assive O nline O pen C ourse, or so says the acronym. The concept of a MOOC was articulated by Cormier and Siemens (2010) in Educause ( free read ). The words Massive, Online and Course seem to pose no problem in defining a MOOC, however the word open  does.  What is  open? The key points that Cormier and Siemens hit upon are Open Curriculum, Open Educators and Open Learners.  Open educators seems to be about the practice of professional reflection (in open environments) and becoming a better educator through such practice. It also seems to have elements of Freirean ( Pedagogy of the Oppressed ) philosophy in that the educator and the learner are on the same level and are working toward the same goals.  Open learners as a conce...

Here's the final word, at least from me, on sessions that I attended at CT2011 this past week The first was the Google talk. You know, for all the hype about the limited audience and such, the talk was really about where Google is going; no specifics, and no marketing talk either, so it was all a bunch of ether as far as I am concerned. Google doesn't confirm or deny that they are working on an LMS, and they want to digitize more of the world's knowledge. Cool! Next! An interesting session on the last day of CT2011 was  Learner Analytics via the Cloud: Sophisticated Statistics Made Eas y (by the same person who presented  Academic Progress Portal: Catching Students Before They Fail )  The idea was that different data provides around campus pooled their data into one central place (data including grades from the LMS) that instructors could run and statistics and see if there is correlation between class attendance and grades, between entrance exams and exit ...

Part ][ of my reportage back from Campus Technology 2011 - the sessions that I couldn't go to but seemed very interesting.  To say that there was a lot of stuff of interest at Campus Tech would be an understatement. The following are sessions that I would have liked to have gone to but didn't have the opportunity to attend because they conflicted with other sessions I wanted to go to. iPads: Applications and Uses in Education   User-Centered Learning Space Design    Online Research Tools for Educators: Collaborate without Jet Lag!   M-Learning on Speed Dial: How to Develop a Nimble Academic Mobile Learning Strategy for Your Campus   Pod Rooms: Faculty Friendly Classroom Technology   ePortfolios Integrating People Life and Learning   Community of Practice in Online Education - Collaborative Curriculum We All Have iPads...Now What?  Walking Ulysses: Collaborative and Mobile Mapping in the Humanities Getting it Right: An Innovative St...

This past week I spent a few days at the Campus Technology conference and Expo (incidentally it was also collocated with the AAEEBL ePortfolio conference) and it was quite illuminating! I wanted to spend some more time with ePortfolios, but I ended up spending most of my time in eLearning (and oddly enough Rubrics, but more on those on another post). Three sessions I went to  dealt with mLearning: Engaging Faculty: Observations from the ACU Mobile Learning Initiative (Scott Perkins & George Saltsman, Abilene Christian University) Using iPads to Produce and Publish in an Educational Reporting Class  (Wendy Chapman & Bill Cells, USC Annenberg School of Communication) Welcome to Class, please take out your cellphones (Mark Frydenberg, Bentley University) There were quite a few interesting things to take away from each session!  The ACU Mobile Learning Initiative (MLI) and the session with Mark Frydenberg had quite a few things in common. In the AC...