Multilitteratus Incognitus

So, vacation has begun! I've gotten out my movies, video games, and comic books that I want to read, play, or view in the next 20 days until school starts again!  Before that though, I wanted to have a quick look back, a year end review if you will, at this past academic year.  Wow... Now that was a crazy year!  Yes, there was a lot going on in the global and political arenas, but (just to be a tad bit selfish), let's put those aside for now and focus on me (hahaha...typical  millennial , it's all about me, me, me... :p ) The year kicked off with EDDE 804, technically speaking my last course in the doctoral program I am in - but not really.  The course was a course in leadership in distance education (which reminded me a lot of my MBA days actually in terms of some of the discussions we had), and it was facilitated by Marti Cleveland-Innes (of CoI fame).  The course was interesting, challenging, and it definitely moved the doctoral ball forward. It actually got me thi

I was thinking about this the other day...  I was reading the requirements for setting up review committees for my dissertation proposal and for my ultimate dissertation defense. One of the forms that people on committees need to fill out is a statement on conflict of interest.  This isn't unusual since I see it on the peer review side of things, be it in peer review journals, or (more recently) being on a conference program committee. Normally I wouldn't have spend more time thinking about this, but I've been more active on social media as compared to some of my cohortmates.  Over the years I've met academics in my area on twitter, on google+, and even though I make it a point not to 'friend' people on facebook unless they are actually my friend (or family), I've added some academics on there who seem to be more active on facebook than other social media platforms.  And, of course, when I see something of interests on there I try to engage with them.

Another docublog from virtually connecting from a few weeks ago, at OpenEd Berlin with Alec Couros.  This one has the innovation of being the first "pop up" virtually connecting session.  Enjoy!

The last virtually connecting session on my docublogging list.  In this episode we speak to Steve Kossly of Minerva.  This was from OLC Innovate 2016

Coming to your from OLC, this virtually connecting session is the vConnecting/ TOPcast / ResearchInAction crossover!

Happy winter break to everyone!  Classes are over and I guess I am supposed to start working on my candidacy exam...  This comic seems like it applies ;-)

A little more docublogging, this time from a virtually connecting session from the Wearables conference with George Siemens

I've been thinking about Rebecca's post for the past two weeks, the one titled What Trump means for academic conferences .  Now that the semester is over, and homework is off my plate (for another 35 days) it's time to commit some thoughts to (e)paper.  I'll say first that the whole travel advisory cited would carry more weight if it weren't coming from Turkey. There are things happening politically in that country that have nothing to do with Trump being elected (well, as of this writing there are 14 more days until the electoral college votes, so who knows...) In any case, I would say that academic conferences, both those hosted in the USA, and those hosted elsewhere, are a venue for the academic elite, and in some cases those who are lucky enough to have a conference happening locally that they can either crash or find some other free means to attend. I don't think organizers will see the USA as a second tier place to host conferences.  Even if they did,

Trying to get back to blogging, and I'm going back through my backlog - so here is a quick post, documentation post really - from a recent Virtually Connecting session I sat in on on Open Dissertations.

Last evening I joined 806 (which seemed to have a very small group of people attending) for their bi-weekly meetup.  I think that for this post I will write more about my 2 take-aways from the session in general, rather than recap both presentations.: Take-away #1: Small sample sizes aren't necessarily a problem.  Both Tracy and Leslie (presenters of the evening) were taking about their work (well, the work they are gearing up to do), and they both have between 6 and 12 participants for their research.  I am thinking about my own dissertation process, my own "problem" (which isn't a problem, so I hate using that term, but whatever), and how many people can be my informants (at most 16, but most likely 10 or so will agree to be part of it).   I've been thinking that AU might have issues with such small sample sizes. However, considering that I am not aiming at generalization (and neither are the presenters from last night's session), I am encouraged to co

This semester is turning out to be one that is quite busy.  It was a good idea to not teach a graduate this semester so I can focus on my dissertation proposal, however (like that irresistible desert at the end of the meal) various collaborative projects have come in to fill the "void" left in my schedule from not teaching (the one that is supposed to be going into dissertation prep), and these projects have me thinking. First is the aspect of Hybrid Presence.  Suzan and I coined this term to describe something between Teaching Presence and Learner Presence for the most recent Networked learning conference.  We are currently working more on this topic for an upcoming book chapter. Second is gamification.  A term that has come in and out of my list of curiosities that I want to play around more with.  I've done some work on this for school, and for professional organization presentations, but nothing big in terms of an article (in my ALECS proposal it was only par

OK, I am almost 'caught up' with the stuff I missed while I was on vacation (at least as far as 806 goes).  I remember receiving an email from Pearl indicating that Sir John Daniel would be presenting. Too bad the internet wasn't that reliable :-/  Oh well, thank goodness for recordings ;-) Sir John Daniel seemed like a pretty interesting  person, and very knowledgeable (with over 300 publications to his name) and he must be a respectable human being because he wouldn't hold 32 honorary degrees from 17 different countries if people only liked him for his scholarship.  I guess the bar has been set for me (haha! :-) ). The only area where I surpass him is in the amount of MOOCs I've taken vs how many he's taken.  Even as a recording it was great to get to 'meet' such a distance education heavyweight (maybe I can email him and we can go for some coffee and discuss the future of DE next time I am around his neck of the woods in Canada ;-)  ). In any

Now that I am back from vacation (was off to Spain, but spent a little time in Istanbul on the way to and from), it's time to catch up a bit on EDDE 806. On the day that I was flying out to begin my vacation A lec Couros was presenting....D'oh!  I missed the opportunity to be live in that 806.  Not only was Alec on, but there was also a fellow EDDE student who is also Greek.  It would have been glorious to have so many Greeks on on 806 session. Oh well - maybe next time :p In any case, Alec's presentation was titled "The Making of an Open & Connected Educator" which was really interesting.  Parts of what he presented on were familiar to me because I've been following Alec since 2011 when I got into MOOCs, and I learned more about ED&C 831 (his open course). Parts of what he presented were new to me.  For instance I didn't know he was a school teacher before he got into his current career.  Props to anyone who is a school teacher - I don'

Back from vacation and I feel like there is so much to do by December 10th ;-) Here is a most recent PhD comic that reminds me a lot of real life...

This week, one of the discussion forums in my doctoral seminar had this question (well, it was part of the question, but I just pulled out this part): How are you deciding what literature to review for your lit review? What determining factors direct you? I think that my literature review is probably going to be a little challenging. My overall question is “why do people in MOOCs collaborate on non-assigned course projects?” The actual question will need refining, but this encapsulates the spirit of the question.  My thoughts are that I actually don’t know the why (this is why I am researching it), so I can’t really nail down a definitive list of research and researchers that will be all inclusive and ‘canonical’ if you will. This to me seems to indicate that I need to be a bit of a cafeteria researcher with my literature review and formulate some hypotheses as to what might be relevant.  For example internal vs external motivation research from psychology might be usefu

It's amazing how much access to the internet is really woven into our daily lives.  For the past 2 weeks I've been away on vacation in Spain.  Before we left home I tried to be proactive, I scanned some of the book chapters that were due for my class while I was away, I got Assignment 1 done before I left, and I downloaded articles onto my Surface Pro so that I had reading material to go through while I was away.  Despite all this planning I still needed the internet because I had ideas which necessitated the use of Google Scholar and other library databases.  The problem?  Some places I stayed had slow internet. In other cases the internet, in addition to slow, was only accessible in a specific corner of the apartment (AirBnB). Now, I really liked the places we stayed in, but the internet situation impacted my school work. When I had internet I prioritized emailing and Google Docs since those required less bandwidth and I prioritized getting work done (for that hour per

Well, the semester is rockin' and rollin'.  Thanks to @merryspaniel, and the fact that AU posts their syllabi on the web, I knew that I had an assignment early on where I had to critique a couple of dissertations that were already published.  This was also a perfect opportunity to read a dissertation the colleague George M. had send me a while back as an exemplar of a good dissertation in corpus linguistics. Since I had a head start, and I was lucky enough to be able to get one of the two slots in the first presentation week (this week) one assignment is done! Woohoo! Now onward and upward toward the literature review of my dissertation proposal. I've included the presentation componen t (which doesn't seem to want to embed well...) and the brief write-up. The write-up was a little constraining in terms of number of words. It's hard to do a critique in 1 page single space of a dissertation (wonder if this is preparation for doing book reviews).  My main take-

The summer semester is over!  Well, it's been over for several weeks now and the fall semester is in full swing, but I am not teaching this semester (focusing more on projects that have been on the back-burner for a while). Taking a break from teaching actually makes me think more about teaching in an odd way (I guess out of sight, but not out of mind). One of the courses that I teach is an intro course to instructional design and learning technology (INSDSG 601, or just 601).  Since this is a course that introduces students not only to the discipline, but also to the program of study at my university I though that it would be a good idea to give students some foundations in group work since this is something that they will encounter both in the "real" (aka working) world, but also in subsequent courses in the program and they need to be able to work effectively with one another. The way the course assignments work is that there is a big project that last the enti

And so, this week, another school season kicks off!  This week  we had both the kick-off for EDDE 805 (dissertation seminar I) and EDDE 806 (dissertation seminar II). I decided that last to start attending EDDE 806 regularly (or as regularly as I can) so that my final class-based semester (next spring) can be focused more on getting my dissertation proposal done. In this first session of EDDE 806 we mostly had a bit of a check-in (which is sort of what we did in 805 as well). There seemed to be some interesting strands that came came out of 806 last night.  First, Peggy Lynn (Cohort 6) is working on a project to translate the term OER (Open Eaducational Resources) into a variety of languages for a variety of reasons, but one of them is to make it easier to label, and search for, OERs that are in languages other than English.  If you want to help out please check out this page .  I did actually try to coin a term in Greek a number of years ago.  A few colleagues and I worked on a MO

Recently I came across a post by Josh Kim on whether LinkedIn will replace the traditional academic CV . My short answer to that is "no".  This isn't because I think LinkedIn is bad (it's not), or that the CV is awesome (it's not).  I've got a bone to pick with the traditional, paper-based, academic CV. The common wisdom, as Kim alludes to, is that a resume is short and targeted, while a CV is longer and is meant to include everything (and the kitchen sink) in your career.  Resumes, for me, seem constraining. How can you adequately describe yourself in 2 pages, especially for seasoned professionals who are older than I am and have a wealth of knowledge and skills?  At the same time a resume is a creative puzzle to solve.  It's a tool for communicating what you will bring to the team you want to be hired into when you apply for a job. A resume encourages your to look into a company and a department, and tailor it to fit where you want to be. It fits

These past couple of weeks, along with some projects I am working on with colleagues, I am also trying to make some headway for my fall class, EDDE 805, which is the first of two doctoral seminars. From what I can see from the abbreviated syllabus (love that it's just posted on the web!) one of the assignments is an analysis of dissertations of people who are already doctors  in our field.  The assignment is as follows: Short presentations in two-weekly synchronous sessions facilitated by the instructor (schedule to be determined in week 1). In each synchronous session between weeks 3 - 11, two students will present a review and respond to questions on these reviews of two outstanding dissertations relevant to their field of research, for 20 minutes each. Reviews should include consideration of specific points of quality or lack thereof, the good/bad aspects, and what information, research processes, ideas, theoretical approaches or organizational structures could or c

It took a while for me to get this post started.  Conferences are great, but between being physically tired, and having to catch up on other work (that wasn't done while at the conference), it means that some things that require more bandwidth get kicked a little further down the road :-) In any case, I thought I would write a little bit about my first time being an onsite Buddy (sBuddy - "oBuddy" seemed weird as a term) for virtually connecting. I've been a virtual buddy (vBuddy) quite a few times over the past year (or has it been 2? I don't remember), and I thought it would be cool to be an sBuddy at Campus Technology and AAEEBL this year.  I did not expect it to be a lot more work than usual, however I learned that being an sBuddy is actually much more work (or at least I ended up making it much more work, even if it isn't). For quite a few years (7 years by my count) I've been attending Campus Technology and AAEEBL on a press pass.  First, as

From the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at University of Mary Washington this week :-)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with Rebecca Petersen.  Enjoy :)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with Amy Collier, Stephen Downes, And Abby Machson-Carter.  Enjoy :)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with George Station and Bryan Alexander.  Enjoy :)

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology . One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and the other begin in this process?  It's a good question, and like many questions, the answer is "it depends".  The metaphor that I use is the one that calls back to two sides of the same coin.  In order for instruction to ultimately be successful you need both sides to work together.  An excellent design will fail in the hands of a bad instructor, and a bad design will severely hold back a good instructor (assuming that there is an instructor and it's not self-paced learning). There is the other side too: as instructional design students we were told that we would be working with

Εύρηκα! (eureka) There is nothing like a deadline to get you going - that's all I have to say!  A while back, like last January or something, a colleague asked me if I would be interested in presenting at an IALLT webinar on a topic of my choosing - it just had to do with technology and education.  I generally don't have a problem with coming up with topic to talk about, but this particular topic gave me pause to ponder.  While I can talk about pedagogy and technology in general, pedagogy and technology in the context of a language classroom is not something I actively think about. I know, it's a bit odd since I have both an MA in Applied Linguistics and I work for a department of applied linguistics!  My own research ponderings have taken me away from the linguistic side of things, although like dark side  it's alluring and I often think about it. Anyway, I couldn't really come up with a topic then and there because EDDE 804 was taking up all of my brain&#

I wasn't particularly inspired by week 2 of CLMOOC ...at least no muses were speaking to me. So cleared my mind     and went through CLMOOC's timeline on Facebook with an empty mind and submerged myself in the stream. A posting by Stephanie Loomis popped out  - an article on Hybrid Pedagogy . I read it. It was interesting. You should read it. I remixed the image. ;-) Enjoy.

It feels like forever ago that I actually posted something by text on the blog. This summer has been much more action packed than I had anticipated.  Between teaching, virtually connecting, and taking my own course, MDDE 702, there hasn't been a dull moment! I am actually quite happy that I ended up taking the refresher course on qualitative research methods. While the concepts weren't new to me, I did love the opportunity to actually work on part of my dissertation proposal and receive some feedback before I actually start the seminar in which I develop the first good draft of my proposal (EDDE 805). I also liked being the same course as members of other cohorts. This gives me both an opportunity to see what's a little down the road for me, by observing and talking to people in the cohorts ahead of me, and it gives me an opportunity to relive some of the things that I already went through these past few years, via cohorts that started after my own cohort started.

I am not sure why my Surface Pro 3 camera decided to hyper correct the lighting in my home office, but it seems that the only way for me to be properly lit was to look at my secondary monitor, which gives the appearance of sidetalking...  Oh well.  It was a good session nevertheless :)

Just a little documentation of some audio-visual texts that I was part of this past week.  Lots of fun, and mentally stimulating, despite the technical issues I had :-)  Here is a session I buddied for last week with Robin DeRosa and Daniel Lynds  from DigPed Lab PEI

Over the years I've tried out almost every social network I could get my hands on. What can I say, I love tinkering and trying new things :-).  However, on source of irritation these days are networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.  I like listing the few things that I co-author (or author for that matter) in a variety of places because (let's face it), most people aren't going to find you just by looking at your blog or website.  That said, when you're listing your fine work on these sites there is an option to upload the file itself - to make it easier for other members of that community to access your writing. I don't mind putting up a pre-publication version of what I write but I do mind needlessly uploading PDF files of articles that are published in open access journals!   The whole point of publishing in open access journals is so that you don't have to upload copies elsewhere (and for people to be able to find them for free!). Yet, social netw

Just in case you missed it yesterday, here is our Virtually Connecting Session from DigPed PEI, on Digital Storytelling, from yesterday :)

I decided to try something different as an introduction to CLMOOC this year. Wonder how long it will be before I go back to lurking :p

One last session that I was in last week.  Fascinating discussion, and definitely some food for thought on membership-based organizations!

While the DigPedChat on the topic is a month behind us, I am only now getting to it ;-)  So, after reading this post by Sean Micheal Morris on Digital Pedagogy I thought I would tackle some of the questions posed for discussion.  Feel free to leave a response, or link to your own blog post via comment :-) What does it mean to perform teaching? What does it mean to perform learning?  These are some pretty complex questions, which makes then juicy topics for discussion!   Performing Teaching  has looked differently to me depending on where I look at it from, and what my own stage of development has been at a time.  As an undergraduate I would tell you that performing teaching  looked like a sage on the stage. Preferably TED Talk  style where the person is really engaging and he keeps yours attention focused on the subject. In the end, once the experience is complete or concluded you are left with a "wow" feeling.  As I've grown, and have been more and more on