Multilitteratus Incognitus

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

Another session I was in this past week at the New Media Consortium's Summer conference, in case you missed it.  Fun stuff :-)

A session I was part of this week, from the New Media Consortium's Summer 2016 conference :-)

So. It is finally upon me!  The time to put pen to paper (or in my case tap some keys on the keyboard to throw some stuff called text into a Google Doc) in order to start putting together my dissertation proposal.  In some respects I am doing this backwards.  I am taking a Research Methods course this summer as a way of getting re-acquainted with some things, and to get better acquainted with others.  I think that the more you practice something the better you become at it. And, heck, one of the assignments in this course really lends itself to (1) getting at least part of the research methods section done, and (2) getting some feedback on it before I go into my actual dissertation prep seminar in the fall (EDDE 805). So, what am I doing "backward".  Well, typically (as I am told) you are meant to start with an intro chapter which talks a bit about your setup.  This is generally something like 15-20 pages.  Then you have a chapter on the review of the literature on the

One of my friends posted this on their facebook wall the other day.  I thought it was quite pertinent for PhD students and other professionals out there :-) In case you don't speak German, it says: "Errors are for beginners.  We produce catastrophes" ;-)

A long time ago (in technology terms), in an academia very close to us, there were stories of professors who suspended their MOOCs, or decided rant in the class forums and ultimately to walk away because the MOOC wasn't what they expected, and we all (probably) rolled our collective eyes. OK, maybe we didn't all roll our collective eyes, but I remember thinking that the "participate or get the heck out" and "read the fine  textbook" were really incompatible with the MOOC framework. Initially I was somewhat anti-lurker.  I'm not saying I am pro-lurker now, it's just that I don't think that lurkers pose tragedy of the commons issues, so just let them be.  They don't detract from people who want to learn and experiment.  To me, at the time, it seemed like an instructor who wanted to do what many have done in the past. Take a face to face class, and translate it, almost one for one, to online without really thinking about the affordances.

In my quest to finally catch up with everything that I've saved in Pocket for the last month, I came across a post written by Rebecca (luckily not that long ago) where she asks: Should those who study social media communities be required to  inform the community of the research results? I think that this is both an easy, yet a very complicated question!  I believe that the ethical  thing to do is to post to that community once your research is done (if not earlier) to let them know.  If it's on twitter for example I would expect the researcher(s) to post something on that community hashtag to indicate what the research was about and what the results were.  It's fairly easy (and free) to setup a Google Site or a Wikispace, or even a Weebly site to post a few pages about the research, you as researcher, and the findings.   Personally I think that it would be good, for research purposes, to invite  commentary from that community so that they could read what you wrote

The title of this post sounds a little Sisyphean, doesn't it?  After all everyone dreads homework...don't they?  Perhaps if you are Lisa Simpson maybe you do not, but for most people the idea of homework does conjure up the mental image of a chore.  Something that isn't particularly pleasing, yet we have to do it.  It also seems to be other-regulated.  Homework isn't something you make for yourself (usually), but rather it's something given to you!  I think that the best word that describes homework for me is the Greek word αγγαρεία (agga-rhéa).  In English it translates to chore, but as with many translations there is something lost  in the translation.  Αγγαρεία also has the connotation that the task you are given is pointless and lacks pleasure.  So, with this in mind, I was reading Maha's post the other day Academia = Lifetime of homework . After reading the post I was hit by two thoughts.  The first thought is that we might want to reclaim the word h