Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day I was reading a recent post by Jenny Mackness on questions about being open. Jenny had attended the recent ALT-C conference and was responding to a fellow ALT-C participant's questions on openness.  Specifically Viv Rofle ponders: I’m questioning not just openness by my motives behind wanting to contribute to it. What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?  Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?  Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?  What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’? These are good questions, and I think that the fact that I, a non-participant in ALT-C, am able to view, ponder, and engage with such questions and discussions is really the reason why you'd want to be open. E...

I was reading this post on InsideHigherEd the other day by Joshua Kim.  The post, A plague of directors, which was a bit comical; the mental image that came to mind was one of plague carrying zombies with name tags that said "director" - yeah, I know, sometimes my imagination runs wild and comical video games like Plants vs. Zombies  get mixed in with titles like Josh's. Joshua wonders if titles mean anything anymore with this inflation of titles.   This reminded me of two scenarios over the summer that I came across.  First was discussing with someone, a professional staff member, that their supervisor wanted to promote them from 'coordinators' to 'directors'.  Of course the supervisor did not want to give them a pay increase, just a title boost. The job would be the same, but the title would be different.  This change would essentially be meaningless, other than the momentary ego boost of being a 'director'.  However, if everyone is a dire...

I was thinking of CLMOOC, and more specifically my participation in it this past summer.  I still see some posts in the Facebook group for clmooc, which draw my attention to the MOOC that I really didn't participate in, and I have a look at the posting from time to time. CLMOOC  (2015) in theory had all the raw ingedients for me to be active in a MOOC.  There were people there I knew from previous MOOCs, noticeably rhizo14 and rhizo15; it had/has a Make Bank , which is similar to the bank items  in DS106 where a participant can choose projects in various media and pursue them, so you can scaffold yourself with projects that are "easier" for you and move on to more challenging things, and it had a way to notify me of new things, namely the facebook group notifications and the blog hub , which would allow me see what's new, and perhaps get inspired by others - considering that I don't consider myself a "maker" an my general feeling toward raw materia...

If I think about it long enough... I would say that rubber has met the road, with week 2 of EDDE803 almost over. People have started being active in the course forums, interesting perspectives and illustrative stories are shared and discussed, and projects are in progress! This semester we are joined by two members of Cohort 6, who I think will be added to our cohort, and thus adding to the diversity of our small EdD group. Metacognition and reflection seem to be big in this course, so as inspiration strikes I think I will keep some notes and thoughts as blog posts, in addition to whatever I keep in evernote. They might come in handy at the end of the semester. 803 Ponderings and News The first assignment has us going into teams to develop a competency profile for a distance education instructor.  Once our teams develop a competency profile, we collaborate with other teams to develop one of the entire course.  This seems to be part delphi process, part a way to be m...

Last week I was reading this article about abandoned campuses on Second Life - you know the virtual world that took the educational world by storm back in 2008(ish) and is now more or less synonymous with major flops and misdirects in educational technology. For the past few days I've been looking like a madman through old backups of screenshots I had taken when I was more active in second life; to be able to showcase my tall, skiny, blasé, goth avatar with black wings (specifically sitting with his feet on a conference room table).  After looking through my computers, and through some backup hard drives, I ended up with nothing.  There probably is something there, but I didn't really want to invest too much time in finding that specific picture of Milo Vuckovic (the avatar). Luckily I had one photo of my Flickr account with his name tagged.  For a brief moment  I did entertain the thought of downloading the SL client and seeing if my university's Island is s...

I think  my interactions with Autumm in virtual connecting made me want to create  a little trailer with dramatized highlights from my doctoral studies thus far.  Alas, no budget for extras, scripts, sets, and green screens, so I guess I'll leave it to plain text for now ;-) This week marks the beginning of my second year at Athabasca's EdD program (survived year 1!), and I just began EDDE 803: Teaching and Learning in Distance Education . At the risk of sounding like an overachiever, when I received my textbooks for in June I ended up reading through them while I had some free time in the summer.  Luckily (it seems) that the bulk of the reading for EDDE803 is those two textbooks, so (with any luck) I won't be buried under a ton of additional articles to read.  This course seems to focus a lot on distance education teaching and instructional design, both areas that I am familiar with already due to my background in instructional design and my own teaching ...

One of my resolutions, just before this new semester starts, is to not neglect periodicals that come in from time to time and at least thumb through them.  Don't let too much work, of any sort, detract from the professional development of looking through work related periodicals (sounds oxymoronic, doesn't it?).  Well, at least this way they won't pile up in the office ;-). Anyway, in keepting with this goal (let's see how long I last), I went through the July/August issue of Training Magazine.  This is something I signed up for last year when I wanted to keep more abreast of what was happening in the corporate instructional designing sector.  One of the things that caught my eye was this tidbit at the beginning titled Conflicting Perceptions on Education , which reported on a University of Phoenix and EdAssist report titled Are we playing the same game?: Employee vs. Manager Perception of Education and Career Development . From the report itself: Nearly ha...

Yesterday another faculty member took on the role and responsibilities of department chair.  This is quite exciting for a variety of reasons, but one of them that comes to mind is that I get to experience things anew.  "Training" a new department chair, even though my colleague and I report to them, provides an opportunity to explain to someone new what the operating rules of the university are, from HR and Procurement to new staff hiring.  It's also a great opportunity to really problematize current policies and ways of doing things at the university. Reading Audrey Watters' keynote from #DigPed also contributed (a lot) I think to this mental gear churning. The thing that perturbed me these past few days has to do with teaching, and the increasing 'accountability' that instructors, teachers, and professors are expected to have in this new working environment.  The problem, however, as I see it is that no one is connecting the dots.  One of these HUGE d...