Multilitteratus Incognitus

Just in case you missed it the other day, here is the link for the stream (which was live, but now should be available to stream) for the CIEE and USDLA sponsored event on Sustainability in MOOCs (in which I was a panelist ;-)  ). The event was quite interesting and this was my first panel discussion - where I met quite a few interesting people! In any case, if you see the stream you will see two keynote presentations before the panel, and both were interesting. In the first presentation what I found interesting were the philosophical foundations of MOOCs which include many elements of the Open movement such as Creative Commons, Open Source and Open Courseware; as well as the ethos of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). While the connection was probably there somewhere in my mind, I really hadn't thought about it that much in depth. The one thing that I corrected (tactfully, or not-tactfully, you be the judge :-)  ) is the assertion that the Stanford AI course was ...

I have to say that this week I haven't been as active on the main topic of Change11 but rather following side-threads or catching up with previous weeks.  I think part of it has been my own frustrations with institutionalized information technology, even though I work for "the man" (the man being IT).  As an instructional designer and educational technologist my job is not to be some sort of technology pusher but rather to try to figure out what technology best complements and augments the instructor's learning goals and help them implement this technology in their classroom.  As a corollary to that, if we don't happen to have this technology; if there is a lot of demand; and  if these services need to be campus provided for better access, my job is to lobby, on behalf of these instructors, to get my institution to pony up for these services. What we see however (not all the time, but enough times) is that technocracy takes hold in institutions. The process of ...

The other day I made an observation on LinkedIn that 8 people had recently left the employment of UMass (LinkedIn told me so). The number seemed rather high, so I wanted, out of curiosity, to know who had left, was it someone I knew? It turns out that most of the people who "left" were teaching assistants, graduate assistants, or like me had added "student" to their profile under job. Back in the day LinkedIn didn't have a way to get recommendations for your student achievements which is why I added a Student "job" under employment, now of course they do so it's not that important. In any case, I remembered that I too had a "job position" as Graduate Student, and since I recently graduated I thought it would be time to update my profile and say that I no longer have that "job". I have to say that while I knew that I was a perpetual student, it really surprised me that I had been a Master's Level student for 7 years! I...

I was recently reading these two articles on ProfHacker, one was on RSS & SMS integration in the (library) catalog , and the most recent one about mobile applications for libraries . This brought me back to my days as an MSIT student.  Back in those days I took many opportunities to work on homework/class projects that dealt directly with library systems - some examples are IT/Library mergers and integration, patron privacy and Project Wormhole - which is what these ProfHacker posts reminded me of! Project Wormhole* (yeah, I used imaginative names), was a project I worked on for an Object Oriented Programming course.  The main idea was that each patron would have a customized library homepage that they would log-onto and they would have a widgetized HUD of all of their information needs.  The patrons already have a library barcode and a student/staff ID number, so there isn't really a need to create yet another log-on! They just need to log on with information tha...