Multilitteratus Incognitus

... No seriously! I swear! This will be the last thing I read and then I will start to write my literature review ;-) I am back up for some air.  When I originally made my plans last May to have the fall semester be the semester that I focused on the literature review part of my dissertation proposal I sort of envisioned a lot of reading.  Reading on the train. Reading on the weekends.  Reading while walking (through text to speech), reading while driving (also through TTS).  My goal was to put pen to paper (figuratively speaking) on November 30th.  Well, that date has come and gone and I still haven't put pen to paper yet.  And, I am still reading.  A couple of times I've actually come close to being done reading - having my "to read" folder on dropbox empty and all things read, skimmed, or otherwise evaluated for usefulness for my proposal.   When I've come down to 10 items somehow the folder magically populates again.  Well......

It's been a while since I've blogged, or at least it really feels like it.  I've had my nose stuck in (virtual) books trying to get through my literature review - but more on that on some other blog post. I came across an article on InsideHigherEd this past week asking whether or not letters of recommendation are really necessary . My most immediate context is admissions, given that that's part of my work at the university, but the people who gave their two cents also mentioned something I had not considered: academic jobs. I won't rehash the opinions of the people who wrote for the article, but I will add my own two cents, mostly from a graduate admissions perspective. I don't have a fully formed opinion on letters of recommendation for employment purposes, but I'll add my two cents as a prospective hire (in a few years when I might be done with my EdD :p) For admissions to graduate course of study, be it a masters program, a PhD program, or even a cer...

I think I am going to commission a saint painting (Byzantine style, of course) of Paul Prinsloo (I just need to find a clever Saint Epithet for him).  Here is another though process sparked by something he shared recently on his Facebook.  Paul shared this blog post without comment (I swear, sometimes I feel like this is an online class he's conducting and we're all participating in a massive discussion ;-) ) and it got me thinking... I do recognize the adjunctification (and probably de-profesionalization) of the professoriate, and I see it as a trend that's not new.  If I really think back to my undergraduate days, almost 20 years ago now, I could probably see it back then as well. There is, however, plenty of blame to go around. Academia is (slowly or quickly, depending on your standpoint) becoming a capitalist monster operating on a greedy algorithm. My own university, a state university, seems to be in competition with other state universities in the same state...

The lit-review (lit-review 2.0 as a dub it) has been going from a crawl to, a walk, to hopefully hitting speedwalking pace.  Lit-review 1.0 was last fall, which was a little too broad to be fit for purpose, and it really explored a lot of themes that might be worthwhile keeping in mind as things to discuss in the discussion portion of the dissertation  - you know, after I pass the proposal defense, and collect and analyze data - so it's not all that useful now. Because I am working on collaboration as a topic, and more specifically collaboration borne out of participation in a specific set of MOOCs, I am looking some literature on MOOCs and some literature on collaboration.  After I finished reading a handful of books on collaboration, I've made my way to academic articles on MOOCs (before I go back to collaboration discussed in academic articles).  It's been a couple of years since I've sat down to make a concerted effort to read articles on MOOCs (given th...

...ambivalent?  I am not sure if ambivalence is the word I am going for because I am getting hints of nostalgia too.  Perhaps though I should take a step back, and start from the beginning. This past weekend two things happened: The first thing is that I've completed reading full books as part of my literature review for my dissertation, and I have moved onto academic articles, articles I've been collecting on MOOCs and collaboration in general. While MOOCs aren't really the main focus of my dissertation study, they do form the basis, or rather the campgrounds on which the collaborative activities occurred on, and it's those collaborative activities I want to examine. This review of MOOC articles (while still relatively in the early stages) made me reflect back on  my own MOOC experiences since 2011. The second thing is that I received a message from FutureLearn which was a little jarring and made me ponder.  Here is a screenshot: My usual process, when ...

Yet another post that started as a comment on something that Paul Prinsloo posted on facebook (I guess I should be blaming facebook and Paul for getting me to think of things other than my dissertation :p hahaha). Anyway,  Paul posted an IHE story about a research study which indicates that instructional designers (IDers) think that they would benefit from conducting research in their field (teaching and learning), but they don't necessarily have the tools to do this.  This got me thinking, and it made me ponder a bit about the demographics of IDers in this research. These IDers were  in higher education.  I do wonder if IDers in corporate settings don't value research as much. When I was a student and studying for my MEd in instructional design (about 10 years ago), I was interested in the research aspects and the Whys of the theories I was learning. I guess this is why further education in the field of teaching and learning was appealing to me, and why I a...

I originally posted this as a response in a post that Paul Prinsloo wrote on facebook (in response to this Chronicle Article on Beall's list and why it died ), but it seemed lengthy enough to cross-post as a blog post :-) -------------- So many issues to dissect and analyze is such a (relatively) brief article. It is important to see and analyze predatory journals (and academic publishing) in general systematically with other trends in academia. This includes the fetishization of publish or perish, and the increased research requirements to even get a job in academia ( see recent article on daily noos as an example ) One thing that bugged me was this line --"Good journals are not going to come to you and beg you for your articles. That should be your first clue." There are legitimate journals out there that are new, and hence don't have any current readership because they are new, so they can't necessarily rely on the word of mouth to get submissions for...

It's been a crazy few days!  If it weren't for my brother coming down to hangout for a while I probably would have more in common with Nosferatu than a regular human being😹 (having been stuck indoors for most of the weekend).  When I started off this summer I gave myself a deadline to be done with my methods chapter by August 30th (chapter 3 of my proposal).  After reading...and reading...and reading...and re-reading (select articles form EDDE 802), I reached a point of saturation when it comes to methods.  I really wanted to read all of Lincoln & Guba's 1985 book called  Naturalistic Inquiry during this round, but it seems like I will just need to focus on specific aspects of the book. So, in this whirlwind of activity, I went through the preamble to my methods section, my target participant descriptions, my data collection, my data analysis techniques, and any limitations.  I added to these sections, explicated, went more in-depth in each sec...

Paul Prinsloo has a wealth of thought provoking posts on his facebook ;-)  I wasn't planning on blogging until tomorrow, but this got my mental gears moving and thinking (not about my dissertation, but it's thinking nevertheless).  This blog started as a continuation of a comment I left on Paul's facebook feed. The article that got me thinking is an article on the Daily Nous titled The Publication Emergency . In the article a journal editor (in the field of philosophy) opines (although not with his editor hat on) that graduate students (I guess this means doctoral students) should be barred from publishing until they are done with their degree. He says that this is not a barring of people who don't hold a doctorate, but rather of people who are in process  of earning their doctorate.  So, in theory, some with an MA, but not pursuing a doctorate would be welcome to publish their stuff.  So, even if an article is good and has merit, if its author is in proc...

Found image on Google (not actually a photo of me) Happy Friday dear readers! (umm...anyone still there?  I swear! I am alive! 😆) I've been attempting to write a blog post all week (and trying to do the 10 minutes of writing per day), but I've been failing on that account...I guess Fridays are a better day as things wind down from the week.  In any case, there is an article from the Chronicle that's been on my mind this week titled "Our Hallways are too quiet". Our department chair sent this to us (everyone in the department) as a thought piece, perhaps something to ponder and discuss in the fall - probably because our department is also like the department that is described in the article. I had a variety of cognitive and emotional processes go off, and get gears grinding while I was reading this.  I actually hadn't noticed that the author was from MIT...who only recently "discovered" online learning (like Columbus discovering the New W...

Many years ago, maybe around 16 years ago, I was sitting in the office of my computer science major advisor, getting my academic plan for next semester signed off on.  My computer science program was actually an offshoot of the mathematics department, and until recent years (2003?) they were one and the same.  My advisor, while looking at my transcript, noticed that (on average) I was doing better in language courses rather than my computer science courses; which was technically true, but many courses designated as CS courses (and ones that were required for my degree) were really math courses, so you need to do a deeper dive to see what I was doing better in. I never really forgot what he said next.  He said I should switch major; and it was odd that he didn't offer any suggestions as to how to improve†...  Being a bit stubborn (and relatively close to graduation) I doubled down and completed my major requirements (ha!).  During this chat I told him that...

Last week (or was it two weeks ago?) I did my rounds on coursera, edx, miriadaX, and futurelearn and I signed up for a few new MOOCs.  I had also signed up for a course that a colleague was promoting on Canvas (innovative collaborative learning with ICT), but I've fallen behind  on that one, not making the time commitment to participate.  The list of missed assignments (ones that I can no longer contribute to) actually is demotivating, even if my initial approach was not not do many assignments (or rather, play it by ear, and decide on whether I'd like to do some assignments during the MOOC). Maybe this coming week I'll 'catch up' in some fashion ;-).  The interesting thing is that there is a forum in Greek in that MOOC, which is motivational to see what my fellow Greek are doing in the arena of ICT and collaboration. I guess I still have a few more weeks before the MOOC ends... Anyway,  I digress (probably not good practice for the dissertation). ...

It's been a while since I last just sat down to think  and write about something (like the good old days when I was cMOOCing...).  These past few weeks have been about conferences, and getting back on track with my dissertation proposal (although I think I am the only one who is keeping a score on that at this point). In my attempt to get back to writing, and engaging with friends and colleagues out there in the wild blue yonder which is the internet, I thought I would pick through my accumulated Pocket list until it's almost empty.  One of the ponderings of interest came by means of an article on Inside Higher Ed titled  Academic Identities and Terminal Degrees , where the overall question was:  Does one need an academic terminal degree to identify professionally with that discipline? And, as Josh goes on to explicate Can only someone with a Ph.D. in economics call herself an economist? Do you need a Ph.D. in history to be a historian? How about socio...

It's been a while since I've sat down to blog (with the exception of my brief postings last week).  I guess I've had my nose firmly planted in books (physical and digital) trying to get through the reading components of my dissertation proposal so I can sit down and write. I tend to find (for me anyway) that having a bit more of a complete picture in my head as to what I want to write about cuts down a a ton of edits down the road. Because of this I also haven't really engaged a lot with my learning community (MOOCs and LOOMs alike). That said, a recent work encounter broke my blogging slumber and has pulled me from my dissertation a bit.  In my day job one of my roles is to answer questions about our department's program (what is applied linguistics, anyway? j/k 😆) and that includes questions about admissions. While we prefer  applicants with a background in linguistics or related background  such as languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Gree...

OK, so here is the final session that I was an onsite buddy for from this summer's NMC summer conference.  This session has us join Wendy Shapiro, Judith Erdman, and Carol Sharicz from the UMass Boston Instructional Design Program.

What is the NMC? What is its history?  Well, see the following virtually connecting session from the NMC summer conference and find out :-)

Here is a session with Gardner and Christina.  Their session was one of the few that I got to attend and it was really good! The odd thing is that sessions that I wanted to attend were mostly in the same room, and if you didn't get there in time, the door locked behind you (bug or feature?)

Continuing with my virtually connecting documentation activities this week, here is a session with Jill Leafstead and @brocansky. Hey!  Got to meet another twitter buddy in person! Woohoo! :-) We were also joined by Eden Dahlstrom the new executive director of the NMC.  The thing we learned (too late) was that the Mac defaults to the build-in microphone when turned off, so...the wired microphone is just for show :p  Oh well.  The things you learn!

A bit of personal documenting this week, posting some videos of virtually connecting sessions from last week's NMC 2017 summer conference. This was my second virtually connecting series with me as one of the onsite buddies, and this was a fun talk with Bryan Alexander.  I've been a virtual and an onsite buddy for a while now, and I still haven't gotten the timings right! I guess  I have more to learn.  joining me as onsite buddy for this series is Greg Dillon, a fellow local instructional designer, and vConnecting buddy.

With the summer here, and all of my doctoral coursework behind me, we are firmly in the self-determination area of the game-board.  No external pressures, no external timelines (although there is a statute of limitations on the degree), and interim assignments.  The dissertation proposal is it! That's the next target (which I am hoping to meet by December 2017). I already have a literature review done, but I was really eclectic in putting it together.  The lit-review (albeit incomplete and in need of some tightening) does present facets of what might be happening underneath it all when it comes to c ollaboration amongst self-formed groups in open educational experiences , but it doesn't work all that well when providing a grounding for collaboration amongst learners. In other words, I skipped to the chase even though I haven't formally collected data or spoken to other my study participants yet. I am just theorizing from past observations. In any case, that old li...

If you've ever seen the movie Shaun of the Dead , a humorous take on the surviving the zombie apocalypse, you are familiar with the Winchester plan.  The Winchester is a local (to the protagonist) pub, and it key to surviving the zombie apocalypse - according to the protagonist, is taking a short skip-and-a-hop to the local pub (after doing a couple of short tasks) and waiting for help to arrive while imbibing their drink of choice. Surviving the zombie apocalypse is a breeze!  Well, it's not that simple to survive the zombie apocalypse - as the protagonist finds out! The past semester has been a little difficult (mostly due to over-committing on my part) and that has affected my own desired progress through my doctoral program.  The classes and the seminars are done (yay!). The next step is the dissertation proposal (which is in draft form).  In the past few days I've been thinking about my progress in all its wonderful variety which includes slow progress, lack ...