Multilitteratus Incognitus

This week has been rough in the office.  We learned that our colleague - and my former professor - Pepi Leistyna passed away. Details are scant at the moment and everyone in the department is in a state of shock as his death was quite sudden and unexpected.  I was going to write a blog post about about my history with him, how I knew him as a person when I worked in Media Services (good ol' AV department) where he used to pick up VHS players on carts to show clips of films in his courses; how he influenced my development as a learner and a scholar; and finally as a valued colleague when I started working in the department of Applied Linguistics.  While I think this is valuable, and certainly part of the process, I think there is another area to home in on, thanks to this week on #HumanMOOC: Social Presence! Social Presence is defined as : ...the ability of learners to project their personal characteristics into the community of inquiry, thereby presenting themselves...

You are using it wrong... A little while back I was reading Rebecca's post titled When teaching online doesn’t mean ‘at a distance’ . Quite a few things came to mind, but they were too many for one blog post, so I thought I would do two separate ones.  One from my experiences as a program coordinator (and unofficial instructional designer) for the Applied Linguistics department where I work, and one for my role as an (adjunct) faculty member in the Instructional Design program.  This first post tackles the day job role (program coordinator). In the post, Rebecca writes that she taught a course, online, for a predominantly residential program. The students were thus using online tools to schedule face to face meetings, instead of  using  the tools to facilitate online meetings to get group work done.  This seems like a lost opportunity to us who have been using technology to communicate and work online for a while now, but to a novice the path of least resi...