Multilitteratus Incognitus

 Alright...alright... bad pun 😅 But to be fair, CALL (computer-assisted language learning) does lend itself to some bad puns... And that's before I even get into other acronyms like TELL and MALL😹. I promise to spare students the dad jokes in the fall😅 Anyway, last week I decided to answer my pondering  as to what my course redesign should cover, and I settled on designing an Introduction to CALL course. I decided that the course number (685) doesn't matter all that much considering that our course numbers over the past 30 years have drifted to an extent that they make some sense, but they aren't (as a whole) totally coherent, and that's not my problem to solve. The next part of my mission is to determine learning objectives (which I more or less have) and determine what kinds of assessments and activities I want to include. The universe of possibilities feels rather endless, so I need to find the right size for semester activities and assessments. One of the thin...

New Year, New Projects! I am taking this spring term off from teaching, partly to re-energize my batteries which have been rather low on account that I've been going full speed (🚌) since 2018; the pandemic didn't help because teaching increased around that time (not that I am complaining, the cosmos provided something I needed at the time).  Another reason for the break is partly to work on a new course development for the Fall term. While course development shouldn't take 8 months to complete, with so many other irons in the fire, it's a part-time endeavor. For the first time, in a very long time, I  get to mix edtech with applied linguistics!🥳 The last time I did this was a long (long) time ago. It is rather exciting, but also daunting because, over the past 10 years, I haven't kept up with the CALL (computer-assisted language learning) world.  Before I started my dissertation planning, my thought was to do something CALL-related, so I spent a few years doing a ...

Since I have a captive, in a sense, audience, I thought I would use the power of the crowd to help me identify a suitable PhD program for myself :) Now, over the years I've been thinking about pursuing a PhD, but a sage mentor once told me that I should take at least a year break from school before making any decisions.  Essentially clear the head out, think about what I like to do, and then think about what PhD program might be most appropriate for me.  Well, it's been four years, and I've already made a few excel spreadsheets with potential programs, but they all fall short in some way shape or form, usually the main issue is financial ;-)  So, I thought I would tap into the wisdom of the crowds on the web, on #edcmooc, and people following the Sloan Consortium to see what you all think about my (potentially unreasonable) conditions for the "perfect" PhD program; it can be an EdD too - PhD is just short-hand for the purposes of this post. Program of Study...

Vice Admiral Tolya Kotrolya Well, here we are! The final(ish) week of #edcmooc.  As I wrote in my tweet earlier this week, I think #edcmooc, like #ds106, is probably more of a way of life for some than an actual course.  Sure, there won't be additional prescribed readings or viewings after this week, so the course is technically over, however the hallmark of any good course, as far as I am concerned, is one where the learners keep thinking about the material long after the course is done.  They keep engaging with the provided materials and with any new material that they encounter in critical ways.  In other words, once the course is done we don't shelve and compartmentalize the knowledge gained and leave it to gather dust like an old book on the shelf. In any case, like previous weeks, here are some thoughts on the hangout, readings, and viewings from this week. To be honest, I don't particularly care about a certificate of completion, but I am interested in d...