Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading Jenny's post the other day on What is Academic Rigor and it got me to question my own conceptions of academic rigor.  I think many academics treat rigor just like supreme court judges treat pornography: They know it when they see it . I too have been guilty of not defining rigor, and just saying "oh that's not rigorous" when I recognize that something isn't rigorous (or at least I mentally categorize it as so). Some of the participants in the synchronous session that I didn't attend had their own conceptions of what rigor is (via Jenny's blog): not for the faint-hearted; takes effort and commitment (Tom Reeves) unchanging, in the sense that ‘rigorous’ means performing the same (type of) study every time, conforming to the same (set of) principles etc. (Stephen Downes) more likely to lead to the truth (but what is truth?) (Stephen Downes) disciplined, measurable, stands up to scrutiny by others (brainysmurf) can replicate the methods (To...

This week on Change11 our host facilitator is Clark Quinn author of Designing mLearning  and of  Mobile Academy . It's interesting. My initial exposure to Clark has been through twitter  and through these two books.  I read Designing of mLearning as a potential text for a college level mLearning course (I like it for what it's worth) and I currently have the Mobile Academy on to to-read list on GoodReads *.  In any case the topic for this week is Slow Learning , read his seed post for the week here . Even though Clark writes about corporate training (or so it seems from the blog post) I think that the ideas are good for both K-12 an Higher Education. There seems to be a race to cram as much information as possible in as little time as possible. In higher education there have been calls for a 3 year Bachelors degree, which is achievable, but it could be done poorly (i.e. through a banking model of education ) or it might be done in an good way w...