Multilitteratus Incognitus

I didn't quite expect this, but it seems like everywhere you turn you see "a decade in review" news stories (radio and TV), "the internet" (in general) and blog posts, twitter threads, and Instagram stories (more specifically).  I hadn't really thought about doing one of these posts, but what the hay, why not join in? 😜 . The last decade has certainly been eventful.  I kicked off the decade by completing my last 2 master's programs, changing jobs (3 departments and 4 titles in the last 10 years), starting to teach, and participating in research. I absolutely loved Audrey Watter's 100 debacles of Ed-Tech , so I decided to pick a few and structure my post around this since most of these made an impact on my work-life, and some for my leisure. I am not going to pick through every one of those items, but I'll pick a few (and maybe add some of my own). New Media Consortium (Horizon report #100) This one was a shocker for me. The way the NMC...

OK, so here is the final session that I was an onsite buddy for from this summer's NMC summer conference.  This session has us join Wendy Shapiro, Judith Erdman, and Carol Sharicz from the UMass Boston Instructional Design Program.

What is the NMC? What is its history?  Well, see the following virtually connecting session from the NMC summer conference and find out :-)

Here is a session with Gardner and Christina.  Their session was one of the few that I got to attend and it was really good! The odd thing is that sessions that I wanted to attend were mostly in the same room, and if you didn't get there in time, the door locked behind you (bug or feature?)

Continuing with my virtually connecting documentation activities this week, here is a session with Jill Leafstead and @brocansky. Hey!  Got to meet another twitter buddy in person! Woohoo! :-) We were also joined by Eden Dahlstrom the new executive director of the NMC.  The thing we learned (too late) was that the Mac defaults to the build-in microphone when turned off, so...the wired microphone is just for show :p  Oh well.  The things you learn!

A bit of personal documenting this week, posting some videos of virtually connecting sessions from last week's NMC 2017 summer conference. This was my second virtually connecting series with me as one of the onsite buddies, and this was a fun talk with Bryan Alexander.  I've been a virtual and an onsite buddy for a while now, and I still haven't gotten the timings right! I guess  I have more to learn.  joining me as onsite buddy for this series is Greg Dillon, a fellow local instructional designer, and vConnecting buddy.

One last session that I was in last week.  Fascinating discussion, and definitely some food for thought on membership-based organizations!

Another session I was in this past week at the New Media Consortium's Summer conference, in case you missed it.  Fun stuff :-)

A session I was part of this week, from the New Media Consortium's Summer 2016 conference :-)

This past week I also looked at the OCW module of #ioe12. The assigned video was the announcement of the OpenCourseWare project back in 2001 (more than 10 years ago! Who would have thunk it!).  Now, reading about the OCW back then, I got the impression that these were going to be courses  and not just materials. That OCW would be something like what MOOCs are today rather than a publisher or materials. When I first looked at OCW I was really disappointed.  These were not courses!  They were materials, exams, readings and course notes.  Some OCW materials were more "complete"than others, so an interested student (with loads of motivation and resourcefulness)  would be able to  self-study, but some materials were really incomplete and not conducive to self-study.  I saw this as a major #fail. This really colored my perception of OCW. At this year's NMC conference (11 years later!) I did attend a session on OCW and my misconceptions abo...

Here's a quick recap of yesterday's NMC12 breakout sessions. I decided to skip the morning plenary- 2 hours of 15 minute presentations is a little too much for me, and I can get those on iTunesU anyway ;-). Yesterday's breakout sessions were mostly interesting (and I had quite a few interesting side conversations!)   Exploring a Tablet Application for the seminar Classroom With Eric Gordon from: Emerson College And Drew Harry from: MIT   This was the first session the day (and if I am not mistaken I had seen something like his last January at the NERCOMP mobile session). We've seen tablet (or laptop) applications that tap into the backchannel in large lectures to capture the pulse of the classroom, but the idea behind this particular application was to tap into the "backchannel" in small lecture group (15 or fewer, based on the design of the application) and the idea is to be able to propose topics for discussion and to track discussion topic time. There wa...

This blog post might be long...but what the heck, a long post every now and again is OK ;-). These are my thoughts on Sessions that I attended. Some were great...and some not so much (they had potential but did not deliver)     Digital Badges on Campus: More than Just a Game With: Mike Soupios, Danielle Mirliss, Thomas McGee from Seton Hall University   This was my first session of the day, and it did not disappoint! The presenters were all from Seton Hall University and they were describing the initial phases of their campus engagement tool. They implemented an OpenBadge compliant system which they introduced to their incoming freshman population. The initial badges that students got wet fairly easy to get, as with any social system that awards badges, in order to get people used to the idea of the reward. The system debuted this summer when students came to their campus preview activities. They got a badge for attending the preview (week?) as well as participating in ac...

This year the New Media Consortium conference was held in Boston and hosted by MIT, so it was a good opportunity to attend given that it is my own back yard. In this post, I don't plan to recount blow by blow each session, but rather post what seemed most interesting about each. In the welcome keynot was made by Joichi Ito, the MIT media lab director, and the topic was on innovation in open networks ( check out the recording on iTunes U here ) . Even though I missed the first half hour of the talk die to commuting the remaining 45 were inspirational, perhaps because I already ascribe to the principles of open. One of the main takeaways from this talk was to just to it. If you have an idea and it's within your financial means, just do it. Don't conduct (costly) feasibility studies to see if it's worth spending the cash to work on your idea. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work. Thus, don't be afraid to fail, and of course, learn from your mistakes ...