Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day I was sitting on the train on the way home and reading some research materials I found on Google Scholar for a paper that I am thinking about on social check-ins (you know, foursquare and services like that for an academic environment). I came across a qualifying paper from about a year ago on augmented reality.  It seemed interesting so I though I would give it a quick look - after all, a qualifying paper has been vetted by a tenured or tenure-track professor who has a PhD, so it can't be that off, right? Well...it turns out that I was wrong.  This was merely a 15 page paper but I could not get past page 2 (double spaced) because of the insane amount of references to the digital native  and descriptions of this "generation" of learners as having been born with a keyboard in-hand and a lot of other inaccurate cliches. I guess it was sort of like a gag reflex on my part when I kept reading about the digital native and hoping that it got better (i.e. that th...

I think that Thursday might be my Instructional Design day and Monday will be Linguistics Monday - at least for now. It seems like I am devoting a lot of days on ID and not enough on linguistics ;-) Anyway, a while back there seems to be this big broo-ha-ha over the culture clash between MBAs and Learning Professionals (instructional designers). One post was at Gina's blog - there were many others but I did not really bookmark them since Gina's blog sparked this thought. One thing that I felt that's going on here is that there is a lack of clarity in speech (man linguistics is ingrained in everything!). Many instructional designers talk about learning and human performance professionals or specialists and they don't generally think twice about it, while in the same breath not really getting the Evil MBA speak of ROI (return on investment) and IOB (impact on business). What I find ironic is that it is the MBA that gave us jargon like "human performance professiona...