Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading Twitter the other daaayyy (just picture someone from Letterkenny saying this😜) and I came upon yet another discussion that basically boiled down to online (or remote) versus face-to-face. I made the mistake of reading the replies🙄.   On the one hand, I was hoping that there would be a more nuanced discussion (and to be fair, I did get those types of replies from people I follow), but there were so many more about "online not being for everyone,"  about how people who teach face to face can "see if their points are landing and if learners are confused," or how "face to face is easier for building community" (maybe for you extroverts...🤨), or even "online works great if you love reading information off a screen and taking self-paced tests" (someone's learning like it's 1999...🤣) and other such (insert word/phrase of your choice). Obviously, the quotes are paraphrased. I became upset and irritated reading such non-sense pos...

The other day I came across this PhD Comics strip on grading rubrics. As a trained instructional designer (and having worked with instructional designers on and off since I started university as an undergraduate student) the concept of rubrics has really stuck with me.  That said,  I generally struggle with rubrics. In theory they are brilliant - a way to objectively measure how well someone has done on whatever assessable assignment. On the other hand, they are not that great and they could be a means for discontent and discord in the classroom (the "why did you indicate that my mark is in category B when it's clearly, in my student mind, in category A?" argument). For this reason I try to create rubrics that are as detailed as I can make them.  That said, it seems that detailed rubrics (like detailed syllabi) are rarely read by students ;-) Another issue arises with inherited courses. When I've inherited courses from other people that's also a source of...

The other day I was reading a blog posted by Rebecca on marking and getting a sense of that impostor syndrome creeping in . I love reading posts like these because I still consider myself new  to the teaching, even though I've been doing it for a couple of years now.  Some of the things that she describes are things that I have thought or experienced, and some are not. In terms of an impostor syndrome, it hasn't come out for me with grading assignments.  In the past, when I have momentary panics or thoughts that impostor syndrome is setting in, it's usually around content-area knowledge!  Early on, when I started teaching, I wasn't even a doctoral student.  I was a practitioner and life-long learner, with a little research under my belt.  I knew enough, but I didn't consider myself the font of all knowledge - and that was scary.  What would learners think of me?  What if I was in a 'pop quiz' type of situation and the learners asked me some...

In my quest to catch up on Pocket - before the news becomes stale, I came across this post by cogdog on seeking the evidence behind digital badges . The anatomy of the Open Badge include the possibility of including links to evidence for the skill that you are being badged for.    Of course, just because there is an associated metadata field available for people to use,  it doesn't mean that people actually use it! I know that the evidence part of badges is something that is often touted as an improvement over grades in courses, or diplomas, because grades don't indicate what specific skills you've picked up, and this problem is a bit worse with diplomas and graduation certificates because you can't evenly compared one candidate to another (let's say in my case it would be comparing me to some other computer science major from another university - or heck even my own university). Anatomy of badge, by ClassHack So, in theory, badges are superior to th...

Yesterday evening I attended my second formal  EDDE 806 session (formal in the sense that I am doing blog posts for it, as opposed to just attending and being a fly on the wall).  In any case, the session was pretty interesting, and Viviane Vladimirsky, a fellow EdD student, on her work on her dissertation. Just prior to Viviane's presentation, as we were going around introducing ourselves there were two interesting pieces of information shared (and reinforced).  First, when we're working on our dissertation when in doubt ask our committee members what they want to see addressed.  Asking people outside of your committee will just muddy the waters, because in the end, in order to graduate, you only need to satisfy your committee and no one else.  I think this is sage advice because if you ask 10 scholars to give you feedback they will all come back with different points of view (based on their own backgrounds, epistemologies, and biases). The other piece o...

Well, 2015 is done!  Grades are in, courses are complete, and things are in process for next year.  Next spring I am not teaching, so I am thinking about cool (and instructive) things I can implement for the course that I am scheduled to teach this summer (intro to instructional design). I won't work too hard on next summer's course just yet, too many other things to consider first.  That said, I realized late in December that 2015 was an interesting teaching year for me.  I am usually only allowed to teach 2 courses per calendar year, but through some fluke - and departmental needs- I ended up teaching three courses, all of which were at different ends of the spectrum for learners.  One of the courses was for learners around the mid-point of their learner career, one at the beginning, and one at the end.  It was also an interesting year because I handed off  the course that I've taught for a long time to a friend and colleague, and I picked two...

Yesterday another faculty member took on the role and responsibilities of department chair.  This is quite exciting for a variety of reasons, but one of them that comes to mind is that I get to experience things anew.  "Training" a new department chair, even though my colleague and I report to them, provides an opportunity to explain to someone new what the operating rules of the university are, from HR and Procurement to new staff hiring.  It's also a great opportunity to really problematize current policies and ways of doing things at the university. Reading Audrey Watters' keynote from #DigPed also contributed (a lot) I think to this mental gear churning. The thing that perturbed me these past few days has to do with teaching, and the increasing 'accountability' that instructors, teachers, and professors are expected to have in this new working environment.  The problem, however, as I see it is that no one is connecting the dots.  One of these HUGE d...

A few things happened this week which seemed to point to a nexus on grading, grades, and a throwback to Week 3 of Rhizo15 on what counts . The three thing that came together for me were Whitney's post from Week 3 , My own grades from EDDE 802, and me designing (or rather re-designing) the introductory course in instructional design which I will teach/facilitate/rhizolead this summer.  All these things happened independent of one another but in reading Whitney's post I realized that there was some sort of coming together in a nexus, or rather a vortex of grades and assessment. Part I:  A reaction to Whitney's post Whitney writes that she is not a fan of grades and that she has found them motivating at times, and demotivating at other times. This got me thinking about my own connection to grades.  People assume that since I have earned 3 master's degrees I am naturally some sort of smart person and that I care about grades. The reality is that I don't.  I don...

Captain Data (an android) End of another week.  Sometimes when I reach cognitive overload I feel like a stranded sailor - what days is it? where am I?  what did I do this week?  Did I learn this thing this week or last week?  Anyway,  I've taken some notes throughout the week so that I can discuss and summarize a bit things that made me think.  So, I had discovered a MOOC, on the Canvas Network, on Humanizing Online Instruction (or #HumanMOOC). I recognized some familiar names as organizers (which was a big draw), and the topic seemed interesting.  Something I could use in the way I conceptualize the course I teach (The Design and Instruction of Online Courses) so that I can keep materials fresh, re-work, re-frame, re-conceptualize the course.  I wasn't sure if I was going to participate in the course, and if past performance was any indication, I would not be "completing" this course; I haven't completed a course on canvas yet - and I'v...

Worlds have officially collided (either that, or the Rhizome has invaded my mind) ;-) This week is the beginning of Humanizing Online Instruction (or #humanMOOC) on the Canvas Network.  As is usually the case, I tend to lurk in more MOOCs than I can actually "complete†"in any given period.  Given my homework for EDDE 802, and my teaching work on INSDSG 684 (and let's not forget the day-job), I wasn't really going to follow #HumanMOOC that closely.  I still don't know how closely I am going to follow along - but heck, I'll give it the old college try. Even though I am not sure what my activity will look like, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself in case blogposts or tweets with #HumanMOOC started coming up with my name on them. One of the things that my brief interaction in the #HumanMOOC Forums reminded me of is the potentially Rhizomatic nature of knowledge and participation online.  For instance, I might read something on Maha's bl...

Well, here we are, part II of educational assumptions.  That last blog post was getting long, so here we are! These are still some ideas about things I jotted down in the margins, highlighted, or otherwise reacted to when reading a recent research article on Open Praxis by fellow MOOC researchers France and Jenny . Despite my issues and concerns with the article, it's still worth a read so that we can discuss the  things that came up in it.  In this blog post I am wrapping up the responses to some educational assumptions (or myths, depending on where you stand).  Courses are not experimental One of the views that came across in the article was that Cormier, as convener of Rhizo14, was experimenting on us learners. This seems to bring up two mental images.  The first is that we, as learners and participants, were in some sort of experiment, like the ones that IRBs warn you about (see Milgram for example), and that courses, whether MOOC or not, aren't by...

Week 1 of 15, of semester 2 of 8, of doctoral work is about to end!  The course that my cohort is focusing on this semester is a research methods course . Luckily neither I, nor it seems many of my classmates, are that new to research methods.  It's nice to have the group (or at least quite a few members of the group) exposed to the basics so that we can spend some time in critiquing and going deeper (and that's something we did on our cohort's facebook group this week anyway).  I also appreciate the fact the course isn't setup to only allow for one path through the course.  There are certainly foundational materials that we are expected to read and know, but for presentations it seems like we have a ton of choices in terms of what research methods we choose to present. I've been thinking about the assignments and I think I will spend some time exploring research methods that I haven't had a ton of exposure in, or methods that I've been meaning to go muc...

Hey!  We've made it! It's the final blog post about #dalmooc... well... the final blog post with regard to the paced course on Edx anyway :)  Since we're now in vacation territory, I've decided to combine Weeks 9 and 10 of DALMOOC into one week.   These last two weeks have been a little light on the DALMOOC side, at least for me.  Work, and other work-related pursuits, made my experimentation with LightSIDE a little light (no pun intended).  I did go through the videos for these two weeks and I did pick out some interesting things to keep in mind as I move through this field. First, the challenges with this sort of endeavor: First we have data preparation. This part is important since you can't just dump from a database into programs like LightSIDE. Data needs some massaging before we can do anything with it.  I think this was covered in a previous week, but I think it needs to be mentioned again since there is no magic involved, just hard work! T...

What do you get when you mix connected courses, thinking about academia, and cold medicine?  The answer is a blog post (which I hope makes sense) :-) As I was jotting down my initial thoughts on co-learning in the previous post I completely forgot to address some of the initial thinking questions for this module.  Here are some initial thoughts on co-learning and how I would address these questions: What is co-learning and why employ it? For me co-learning is when two or more people are working together to solve a problem and learn something new.  As I wrote in my previous post, the individuals in this community do not all need to start from the same point. There can, and will, be learners that are more advanced in certain areas as compared to others.  This is perfectly fine, and it's realistic to expect this.  This can be a community of practice, it can be a broad network of learning, or a loosely connected network of learning that centers around a hashta...

I've had this app on my iPad, by TechSmith, for the past few years, but I've never really used it.  The App is called ScreenChomp and it allows you to have a digital whiteboard that you can use to write and narrate.  I through that a plain text description of the learning analytics cycle (still catching up on week 2 of DALMOOC) would probably be confusing, and using PowerPoint and Adobe Presenter would be too static.  So, I applied the learning analytics cycle to a course I teach, and I decided to hand-write everything. Heck I attempted to draw as well, but my lack of artistic talent shows ;-) Direct link to the screenchomp (if the embed doesn't work):  http://www.screenchomp.com/t/qE1lplho DALMOOC Week 2, Description of the Data Analytics Cycle from Apostolos K. on Vimeo . How does this cycle apply to your courses?

Back in September Maha Bali's post on Critical Pedagogy: Intentions and Realities hit the interwebs on the Hybrid Pedagogy site. It's something I've been thinking about writing an Online Edition from my own experiences teaching in an online environment.  It seems to be a bit slow on Connected Courses this week (at least as compared to last week, measured in blog posts), so this seems like a good opportunity to write a little about the topic. I should say that I haven't overtly thought about applying critical pedagogy to the classroom†. It is quite odd, if you really think about it because of where my academic foundations lay.  I am a graduate of the Applied Linguistics department at UMass Boston.  A department created and shepherded by Dr. Donaldo Macedo (those who know of Freire's work, also know Macedo). But we don't just have Donaldo in our department, we also have other scholars who move in the same circles as people like Henry Giroux, so to not have ove...