Multilitteratus Incognitus

Derby Wharf, Salem, MA - Jan 2015 (Storm: Juno) I am sure that last one is a word I just made up on the spot. It's been a slow week in 802.  I was reading Lisa's reflection on Lurking in 802 (she is in last year's cohort, so she is two courses ahead of us in Cohort 7), and how she viewed 802 at the time as a make or break experience for the Ed.D. program.  While 801 last semester was a whirlwind tour of Online and Distance Education , this semester is a whirlwind tour (or boot-camp perhaps) on the topic of Research and how to go about doing it.  The textbook, by Cohen and the gang , is something that I have read before (a few year ago), but this doesn't help a ton ;-)  There is a lot to unpack, and this book is dense.  Even if one could memorize everything (not a good way to learn, by the way), it's like going to philosophy course - you are there essentially to argue for and support your stance. You are also called upon to explain your underlying fra...

Well, in a week I will be in Edmonton starting off my EdD in distance education at Athabasca University.  I know that most North American doctoral students probably don't think of their dissertation topic this early (I haven't even completed my first course), but I want to be pro-active and work on the thing while taking courses.  So, Rebecca's post on Educational Design Research (EDR) was quite timely.  This isn't my first go around at a dissertation topic, my current topic has evolved over the past couple of years as I was thinking about what I want to do (and which university is best to pursue this). My initial idea was to blend my background in Instructional Design and MOOCs to teach a language, specifically designing a MOOC to teach Greek as a foreign language to novices. This actually came out of making a MOOC out of my MEd capstone .  This was circa 2011-2012 after my experiences with MobiMOOC, LAK11, CCK11 and before the xMOOCs invaded the scene.  ...

Welcome back to the last part (for now) of the discussion on learning and theory inspired by a video blog that I saw recently (more on that in part 1). In the aforementioned video blog, the blogger (Steve Kaufman of "The Linguist on Language") said that Language learning depends on learner, not research. I suppose that when it comes down to it he is correct. Language learning (or any learning for that matter) does depend on the motivation of the learner. That motivation may vary. Some people like the challenge, others want to converse with long lost relatives, and other may want to seek employment opportunities abroad (or one of a myriad of other reasons). Research findings aren't geared toward the learner but rather toward the teacher. If you are one of those lucky teachers that has super-motivated learners in front of them you are very lucky! Your job is much easier! The fact of the matter is that many people take classes because they have to, not because they wa...

Alright, so here is part 2 of my little examination of learning and the role of theory plays on learning and teaching. This was fueled by Steve Kaufmann's semi-recent video blog (see part 1 of this series for link). This part has to do with Research, Politics and the role of linguistics in language learning. First off the bat, we have a comment that research can project just about anything depending on the parameters of the study . Well, I am not really sure how to approach this other than to look at statistics as a parallel. An old professor of mine used to say that: there are three types of liars: Liars, Damned Liars and Statisticians. Of course this was a bit tongue-in-cheek as he was a math professor. The way you determine if a study has any bearing on what you do, or if it indeed is a credible study, is to look at the instrumentation, the methodology, the participants, the sociocultural settings and so on. No study is absolute because they can't test for everything. ...

I guess here's a small blogging arch that deals with linguistics. I was viewing Kaufman's semi-recent video blog on how theory muddles education and I was getting the vibe that he just doesn't think that we should be doing any research into how people learn languages, or if we do we should keep it to ourselves. That's just all a bunch of hogwash, because theory divorced from practice is useless, and practice devoid of theory (why we do what we do) is dangerous! (or at the very least bad pedagogy). I was going to write just one blog post as a response to this video blog, but as I was taking notes to myself on the things that I disagreed with, I saw that there were a lot! So, I've broken them up. One of the issues was that research on second language acquisition is taking place in English speaking countries (or maybe it's predominantly English speaking countries). OK, I would agree with this to some extent, there is a lot of research done in English but there ...