Multilitteratus Incognitus

I didn't quite expect this, but it seems like everywhere you turn you see "a decade in review" news stories (radio and TV), "the internet" (in general) and blog posts, twitter threads, and Instagram stories (more specifically).  I hadn't really thought about doing one of these posts, but what the hay, why not join in? 😜 . The last decade has certainly been eventful.  I kicked off the decade by completing my last 2 master's programs, changing jobs (3 departments and 4 titles in the last 10 years), starting to teach, and participating in research. I absolutely loved Audrey Watter's 100 debacles of Ed-Tech , so I decided to pick a few and structure my post around this since most of these made an impact on my work-life, and some for my leisure. I am not going to pick through every one of those items, but I'll pick a few (and maybe add some of my own). New Media Consortium (Horizon report #100) This one was a shocker for me. The way the NMC...

Yesterday and the day before, the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) was hosting a spring focus session on learning analytics .  I have to admit that drew me to this talk (in addition to being interested in analytics of course!) was the talk that George Siemens presented at this ELI to kick things off.  The first day was quite productive, but the second day I had too many other commitments to attend to and could not attend for most of it. One of the back-and-forths that I had on twitter my colleagues was about learning analytics and assessment.  A fellow colleague seemed to be very certain that learning analytics could be used for assessment, and I disagreed.  It's hard to carry on a meaningful debate in 140 characters, so I thought I would write a quick blog post about it. And who knows, perhaps I mis-interpreted what my colleague was saying! First I think it's good to start off with a few definitions so that we are all on the same page: Learning An...

On of the themes that has come up time and again in MOOCs is the nature of openness. It's also come up in my twitter stream these past couple of days with Educause 11 underway, and Blackboard announcing that they are now open (I will reserve my cynicism and scoffing for other media ;-)  ). One of the ways in which MOOCs are reported to be open is that MOOCs allow the participants (learners) to define their own learning goals and learning outcomes and what this translates to, generally, is an "everything goes" attitude from MOOC participants. I don't disagree that having learners have their own personally meaningful goals is important. After all many research studies have shown that if a learner has strong internal motivation (as exhibited in MOOC by  having your own set goals), then the learning is much more meaningful to the learner and they take away more.  This is great, but in my opinion it doesn't absolve the instructor, the instructional...

I was reading one of the items for this week's CCK11 session, which happens to be on PLEs. The readings was an Educause "7 things you should know about..." type of document. If you don't know what a PLE ( personal learning environment ) is, the abstract gives a good succinct overview: The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.  OK, I agree, but reading the actual document created some cognitive dissonance (you ought to read this document, it's only two pages long). The scenario in this 7things document describes...