Multilitteratus Incognitus

A week or so ago...well...maybe two weeks by now♣, the topic of eLearning 3.0 was identity , and the video guest of the week was Maha Bali .  I finally managed to view all of it, even though it was in 10 minute increments. My Pocket's save-for-later is getting rather lengthy now that I am saving articles on the daily to read at some other future time. This time of the semester is rather busy, so I guess that's my disclaimer for this post: I am only commenting on the video and points that were brought up. In looking at the notes I took during the vConnecting session during week 4 (mid-way through the MOOC!) there are a few organizing factors that sort of came to me, so I've organized the post in this manner. What's in a name? At the beginning of the conversation Stephen had a bit of a hard time getting the native pronunciation of Maha's name. It's interesting to kick off a discussion about identity in such a mundane way, but I think that the concept of a n

Attempt at witty title probably failed :-) I guess I am a little rusty  with creating meaningful blog titles since I have not been blogging frequently recently.  Oh well. I will get back into the swing of things once I finish my EdD...or not... ;-) In any case, I am catching up with #el30, more specifically last week's guest Ben Werdmuller ( see recording here ). Interesting fun fact - Ben is the creator of Elgg, which is the platform that Athabasca University's " Landing " runs on. There were quite a few interesting things that came out of the conversation but there were two that really stuck out to me.  The first is that there was a strand of the conversation that dealt with taking back control of your online identity from the various platform providers, such as facebook, google, yahoo/verizon, twitter, and so on.  A lot of what we do, this blog inclusive, rests no someone else's platform.  If the platform decides to cease operation you lose not just y

Greetings fellow three-point-oh'ers (or is it just fellow eLearners?) This past week in eLearning 3.0 (Week 2, aka 'the cloud'). This week's guest was Tony Hirsch, and what was discussed was the cloud, and specifically Docker.  Before I get into my (riveting) thoughts on the cloud, let me go back  to Week 0 (two weeks ago) and reflect a little on the thoughts I jotted down on my retrieved post-it note. So, in the live session a couple of weeks ago (it's recorded if you want to go back and see it), Siemens said something along the lines of "what information abundance consumes is attention". This really struck me as both a big "aha!" as well as a "well, d'uh! why hadn't it occurred to me already? D'oh!". There has been a lot said over the past few years about how people don't read anymore (they skim), and how bad that is.  This ties into "what learners want" (a phrase I've heard countless times on-cam

With my dissertation proposal in the hands of my committee and off for review, I thought I'd participate in a MOOC while I wait to hear back.  Yes, I do have some articles that have piled up (which may be of use to my dissertation), but I thought I'd be a little more social (lurk a little, post a little).  The funny thing is that as soon as I lamented the lack of cMOOCs...there it was, eLearning 3.0 popped up on my twitter feed...and a few Greek colleagues invited me to one in a Moodle. I guess the universe provided for me. Anyway - I had listened to both the intro video (week 0?) as well at the Downes & Siemens chat (Week 1 & 2) and I had jotted down a few things that piqued my interest...but of course I left them in the office. I guess I'll be blogging about those next week.  The freshest thing in my mind is the chat about xAPI and the LRS (Learning Records Store). In all honesty this went a little over my head. I think I need to read a little more about t

Well, my proposal (basically half my dissertation) is off to the internal members of my committee. Many thanks go to the help of my doctoral supervisors who've asked a lot of questions of my previous drafts and helped me refine my writing :-) Now the next step (assuming the committee likes my submitted draft) is to both find an external reviewer for this, and also defend it so that I can move onto the next phase: data collection and analysis. Where do you come in? I need recommendations for an external member to my committee :-) If we've worked together in the past 5 years you would not be eligible to be on the committee, but if you know people who might be good, let me know :-) Requirements for external committee member Retrieved from:  http://fgs.athabascau.ca/handbook/doctoral/candidacy.ph p Also committee member criteria:  http://fgs.athabascau.ca/handbook/doctoral/supervisors_and_committee_members.php At least one of the new members must be at arm’s length fr

Hey there blogger audience! Well, I assume someone is still there despite not having blogged in a great while. It's hard to believe that July is almost over, and there is only one more month of summer left (😢). Things have been fairly busy, between teaching INSDSG 684, doing a much (much) deeper dive into the CoI, and rewriting my intro chapter for the dissertation proposal†, there has been little time to blog.  Or rather, I guess I could have blogged, but due to my disconnect from my regular communities of practice, nothing really seemed worthwhile writing about.  Until now! So, back when I was initially contemplating my dissertation topic I thought I'd do a mixed methods research study, possibly with the CoI instrument as that quantitative component.  I nixed that idea early on because I honestly thought that I would get someone who's a stickler for the notion that Quantitative must equal generalizability, and I know that from my sample (even if everyone participates)

It's been quite a while since I last shared a few thoughts.  I guess time flies even if you aren't having fun 😆. In the past few weeks I've been contemplating the direction of my dissertation proposal.  I am not changing topics (now THAT would be silly, and an unnecessary amount of work), but I am considering the framing of my argument.  The topic (just to refresh your mind) is "Why do we collaborate?" and it's an exploration of the emergent groups that formed in Rhizo14 and rhizo15 to conduct some sort of academic work in order to figure out why we did this (after all, everyone hates group work, right??? 😜) This academic work wasn't part of the original Rhizo-course plan†, so why the heck did we band together to do this type of work? The question, I should point out (again) wasn't originally mine - I just took an interest in it.  Rebecca H. had originally asked this question of our MobiMOOC team back in 2011/2012 - but we all went (sort of) ou

The other day Paul Prinsloo posted this Guardian article on Facebook , and it seems like a popular article because Shyam Sharma (among others in my online educational social network and PLN posted it). As usual my PLN got me thinking (and, as is evidenced by this blog post, creatively procrastinating and not really working on my dissertation proposal...D'oh! 😜).  This blog post started life as a comment back to Paul, but it got too long, so here it is - migrated to the blog!  I should say that two of my master's degrees are from a business school (B-School hereafter) and my views are framed from an emic and etic perspective (hey, why is my dissertation proposal leaking into my blog? get out! 😏) From my own personal experience I think that B-Schools are in part complicit with what's going on, they are after part of the business landscape, but I think that they are only one part of the picture .  I am making my way through Ken Bruffee's book on Collaborative Learn

I tried to come up with a witty title for this post, but I guess maybe it's didn't work out ;-).  Anyway...yesterday as I was working on my proposal I thought "hey...I haven't seen George Siemens blog recently ..." which also made  me wonder when the last time I blogged was. Not as long as George (that's for sure ;-) ) but long enough.  So I thought I'd pull together some random streams that have been whirling around as disconnected strands. First, one exciting thing that transpired between the last blog post and how is that not one, but two, members of Cohort 6 have completed their EdDs!  Both Lisa (@merryspaniel) and Viviane (@vvladi) successfully defended their work and are one step away from commencement and official conferral of the degree :-).  Lisa's Dissertation is already available at the institutional repository ( click here ) if you'd like to read it.  For Lisa and Viviane it's a major victory completing their doctoral work, bu

There must be some cosmic signals that have gone off line the bat-signal indicating that I am 'free' because I am waiting for feedback from my dissertation committee.  How do I know this?  Well, the requests for me to peer review articles has increased!   Not wanting to disappoint, if the article is within my field of "expertise" (whatever that means... the more I learn, the more Socrates whispers at me "the more you know, you know that you know nothing" ;-) ) One thing I don't like doing is outwardly rejecting an article.  I don't just approve articles, but if an article has some  merit (even if authors have to do a ton of work to rehab it), I reject but keep the door open for reconsideration.  I have outwardly rejected articles in the past, but I'd estimate that it's only 25% rejection (another 50% needs major revision, and 25% minor revisions).  Despite trying to be a caring reviewer, and honestly striving to give good feedback, the

 Alfonso Bedoya in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Dissertation proposal, draft number...I don't know - lost count - has been submitted.  Things look good, well at least in my humble view, so I hope I am ready to defend this proposal within the coming month and become a "candidate" soon‡. With the draft submitted I can now focus on the other pile of academic work that needs attending to, and is more collaborative than my dissertation. In any case, a recent incident (incident sound too austere...happening? occurrence?) I was reminded, for the umpteenth time that what we, as educational researchers, are expected to have a purpose in our research. What is the rationale for the study?  people ask. Why undertake this study?  Who benefits? What is the problem you are trying to solve? As you can tell from the title of this blog post I hold the position that I don't need no stinkin' rationale. I could make something up like "by examining population X,

From PhD Comics It's been a while since I've had the bandwidth to think about something other than my dissertation proposal.  When I started this process four years ago (starting with matriculation in March 2014) I thought I'd be the first or second person in my cohort to be done (ha!), but like most marathoners I guess I am part of the pack looking at the fast folks ahead of me 😏.  Being part of the pack does have its benefits, such as getting an idea of how long the process takes (having friends in other cohorts also helps with this).  I thought, initially, when someone submitted their draft (be it proposal or final dissertation) that you would get feedback and signs of life from your various committees soonish, but seeing Lisa's journey (currently at 5 weeks and counting) gave me a reality check. Waiting isn't bad per se (we wait for a ton of things in life), but I think it is the expectation of things to come that makes this type waiting much more anxiou

From wikipedia: 1779 illustration of a Catholic Armenian monk of the Order of St Gregory the Illuminator,   Happy New Year! Yeah... it's the fourth of January, but I figure I can get away with it since we're still in the first week of 2018, and this is my first post for the year 😉 Things have been a little quiet here on the blog as of late. Not a lot of MOOCing, not a lot of virtual connecting, not a lot of collaborative or cooperative learning as was the case in previous years.  There has been a lot of reading, mostly in monastic form - you know, lock yourself in a room and read until your inner teenager starts screaming at you "are we done yeeeeeet????" - I guess I am really in the thick of dissertation prep "stuff" (reading and sorting mostly) which I hope I'll get through in 2018 (for the most part anyway) I thought I would take a break from the monastic lifestyle to put together a few things that really struck me in 2017, at least as far as