Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day I was reading a recent post by Jenny Mackness on questions about being open. Jenny had attended the recent ALT-C conference and was responding to a fellow ALT-C participant's questions on openness.  Specifically Viv Rofle ponders: I’m questioning not just openness by my motives behind wanting to contribute to it. What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?  Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?  Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?  What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’? These are good questions, and I think that the fact that I, a non-participant in ALT-C, am able to view, ponder, and engage with such questions and discussions is really the reason why you'd want to be open. E...

In my continuous quest to go to Pocket-Zero (may be a losing battle since I keep adding interesting stuff to read), I came across a post from a friend and colleague, Rebecca, who was discussing and brainstorming a bit about the ethics of research in twitter communities . As a quick synopsis, of the  hot button issue (at least from what I interpreted), was that in one instance (mature) researchers were researching a more general hashtag on twitter and this seemed to be OK, while in another instance a younger researcher (high school student) was researching a hashtag specific to breast cancer and social media, where a level of trust seemed to have been breached.  So, the question is: what is fair game in social media research? Specifically Rebecca asks What are the ethical obligations of anyone wishing to conduct research/analysis on a twitter community of care? Are the obligations different if the community is not care based? (e.g. #lrnchat) . My initial thinking is tha...

A report from the field.... Traveling home is a good opportunity to catch up with posts made by fellow #rhizo15  participants. It's also a good time to read books and articles. I thought that for this commute I would go to rhizo because Latour is taking forever to make his point in the Actor-Network Theory book I am reading for another rhizo project. I just read a post, by fellow participation, on blogging for class (darned link won't post in this mobile blogging app...) which for me thinking. For the courses I design I have an activity each week which serves as formative evaluation for the course but also serves as an opportunity for some reflection and introspection on the part of the learner. This is usually done as a quiz at the end of the week, but I am thinking of giving learners the option to blog about thus, this having something more free form. I don't want to give extra points if it's done as a blog (perhaps a special badge for the bloggers could...

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205135659/What-MOOCs-can-do-for-the-Traditional-Online-Classroom-Part-II Introduction 2014 is upon us! We are now a couple of years from the big MOOC “explosion” in the news, and since we’ve gone to both extremes, too much optimism and too much pessimism, about what MOOCs can and can’t do, it’s now time to have a more refined look at MOOCs and their potential to cross-pollinate with, and positively influence the direction, and practices, of traditional online courses. As with the previous article in this series, I’ll just refer to MOOCs in general.   The reason for this is that MOOCs are experimental, and we’ve seen a lot of experimenting over the lifespan of MOOCs these past six years. These include cMOOCs, xMOOC, pMOOCs, sMOOCs, and other MOOCs that have yet to be named.   It’s now time to start thinking about what can best be borrowed from MOOC practices into traditional online le...

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forum A couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems , you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come up based on your usage pattern of the system. Now, those systems aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they can serve as ways of finding some diamond in the rough that you didn't know exist.  Think about it, both in a shopping or entertainment venue, and a MOOC you have one potentially huge issue: limited time to devote, a large sea of information to go through in order to find what might entertain you, or pique your intellectual interest and  get you engaged with some subject.  Last summer, at the end of Campus Technology 2013, I was having food and dr...

I don't often read Inside Higher Education these days. I used to gobble it up, but I've found that a lot of the content seems to be off-base opinion (and when there is real news, the RSS feed doesn't give you anything but the title, so I refuse to take that bait - give me at least some content). In any case, I came across a blog post by Joshua Kim the other day with the topic of 9 Academic Freedoms Of Not Having Tenure , and it piqued my interest.  I have to say that initially I was happy to have a tecchie blog on IHE but over the years it seems to me that Josh just writes for the sake of writing.  This article could have been much more, but I read it more like a sour grapes grapes† ; and one that perpetuates certain observations of academia that we should all be fighting to change (thus the connection with #change11).  So here is my rebuttal of his 9 "freedoms"‡ 1. The Pleasures of Being a Generalist There is a myth in academia that you can't be a gener...

I came across Charles Jennings's piece the other day titled " Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises ." It's quite a fascinating read and I encourage all of you to read through it and think about it. This piece reminded me of my Knowledge Management days as an MBA student, and as an Instructional Design student in thinking about corporate learning. A few nights ago however this piece had relevance in the academia context as well in the form of a discussion about plagiarism/academic honesty (pick whichever term you see fit - glass half-empty/glass half-full - same thing) Charles writes: Firstly, let’s clear something up. We shouldn’t confuse what L&D/Training departments spend a lot of their time on with real learning. Learning professionals spend a significant amount of their time (maybe even the majority) designing and delivering content and then evaluating completions and short-term memory outputs from structured mandatory...

Last weekend I finished reading the book Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation . It was an interesting book, recommended for both Instructional Designers and Language Teachers alike. Some chapters as admittedly better than others, but as a whole the book was quite good (related note: follow me on GoodReads ). Hot on the heels of this I came across a post on ProfHacker called " How are you going to grade this? Evaluating classroom blogs ". Instructors in our Instructional Design program drilled into us the, by now, infamous WIIFM (What's In It For Me) - learners are going to ask this before they take any course (or learning event) that you design. Well, the question that I (and my fellow students) were asking once we were in the course was "How is this assignment going to be graded?" Learning is all nice and dandy but in the end we need to achieve a certain grade and knowing the grading rubric helps us focus our work. In any case, thi...

I was reading Inside Higher Ed earlier this week and there was an interesting list (similar to Educause's 7-things lists) about what define a learning technologists. Out of this list these three points are quite interesting to me, and quite possibly define my weltsanschauung with regard to educational technology and my likes at work. We learning technologists share a healthy skepticism towards the dominant commercial CMS, Blackboard. Put another way, our relationship with Blackboard is often ambivalent. Philosophically, I think many of us are drawn to open and community source platforms and business models. There is an important conversation going on in our profession about the advantages of sticking with Blackboard as our campus CMS (which there are many), versus moving in larger numbers to an open source alternative (with Moodle getting the most traction lately). This conversation will continue to dominate our profession. Personally it's not like I hate Blackboard, it's...

I was reading a post titled Language learning, critical thinking and the role of the teacher on the linguist the other day and I was really surprised. Now granted I am not a member of his list-serv, perhaps I should be to get the whole story, even though ESL isn't my immediate field of interest. Now long story short here, it appears that some people have their feathers ruffled because of the belief that critical thinking should (or should not) be included in the foreign language curriculum. Personally I think that critical thinking activities should be part of the curriculum in any language learning situation because when you are learning a language you are also learning about many other things that influence a language - such as culture, history, popular sayings, predispositions of the natives, and so on. Language is not used in a vacuum and simply learning more vocabulary doesn't mean that you will necessarily be getting more comprehensible input. Yousef writes (in the co...

I came across this post on the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks back about a revolt of sorts that is happening in some pockets of academia. Many people seem sick of Blackboard (and in my opinion its anti-competitive tactics) and seem to want to move to different instructional technology media. I don't blame them. Blackboard has become the Frankenmonster of the LMS world. If a new feature comes out that vaguely competes with its model it either buys it (like it has with other LMS makers) or it tries to replicate it. I have the misfortune of having used the BlackBoard "Blog" which is very unbloglike! Why use it? It looks like an anemic discussion board! I am all for using freely available tools such as wordpress and blogger for student blogs. There are only two issues that come up: FURPA and Academic Honesty. As much as we hate Blackboard (and other LMS?) when something is due, it's due. All discussions are date stamped and time stamped and you can't go bac...

I came across this presentation about blogs in Education a while back (see end of post). I actually think that blogs are a quite useful tool in an educational environment. For the student, if the blog is student-based, it provides an opportunity to start building a portfolio of academic work. The research papers that the student writes can be posted in blog format. Obviously if the paper is 30, 40, 50, 100 pages long there can be sections and subsections submitted to the blog for peer review and review by the professor - or you may opt to no use the blog format for this. There are many mini assignments - like chapter reviews, that can be done in blog format and this gives students the opportunity to properly cite information as well! For adjunct faculty is is a good opportunity to build a portfolio of their work. If they always teach TOPIC101, they can have a class blog, with the students being contributors. While each semester the information may be repeated in some sense, it gives...

I was reading this post on Dangeously Irrelevent . Most of their posts I like, however this one left me with a "WTF?!" grimace. The topic is 5 clever powerpoint tips. Some tips are actually good, like creating a custom slide show and hyperliking to a new presentation. There are two tips that are just not well thought out. The first is to "start creating your presentations in widescreen format" I hadn’t really thought about the fact that most laptops ARE now shipping with wide screens to accommodate widescreen video and movie formats. So why not start creating any new PowerPoint slide decks that you make in widescreen format? Well, yes laptops are in widescreen, but your presentation medium is not! Most projects in classrooms today (including portable ones) are still optimized for a 4:3 aspect ratio. Presentation screens are also 4:3, so why give up on that prime real estate? This makes no sense! Yes in the future these two bottlenecks will be widescreen as well,...

Well OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but it's quite interesting. I thought that for the last post of May it would make sense to close the month with something linguistics related given that this semester was all linguistics all the time :-) I was reading this article on Slate called There's No Klingon Word for Hello . I honestly didn't expect it to be so interesting! For instance I did not know that Klingon was a completely developed language, grammar an all! The following really surpised me: But Klingon uses prefixes rather than suffixes, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most romance languages, it has 29. There are so many because they indicate not only the person and number of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (whom it is being done to). Klingon has 36 verb suffixes and 26 noun suffixes that express everything from negation to causality to possession to how willing a speaker is to vouch for the accuracy of what he says. By piling ...

I don't rant often...or rather I hope I don't rant often, however I think this will be a a ranting post. I was reading Jane's e-learning blog , specifically a post on how the future of e-learning is social . ALL learning is social, at least all the learning had in a school, with an instructor and other students in the room. Recently I keep hearing about Web 2.0 and social learning and it amazes me to no end that social learning is the new cool thing and that is the future of learning. Social Learning is new now just like bell-bottoms and ripped jeans are new now - i.e. they are not new people! Just because YOU did not know about it doesn't mean it did not exist prior to you thinking about it. New technology is just allowing us to expand out social reach outside of the space/time constraint of meeting in class. Now I have to say this, this is not a critique of Jane. I found her presentation quite interesting and useful. The critique is directed toward those individuals ...

Anytime a bozo takes the stage and proclaims something radical it seems to stir up the educational community. In similar vain an article circulated the interwebs a few weeks ago about David Wiley who is getting a ton of publicity over his comments that College will be obsolete by 2020 . I suppose in David's case bad press is good press.... In any case his idea that colleges will be obsolete by 2020 revolve around the idea that technology such as podcasts, videos on services like you tube, e-Learning and m-Learning, communities of practice and freely available content will replace how people gain knowledge. Don't get me wrong. I love technology and all that it can do to help in education, but let's be serious, we won't be replacing colleges with downloadable podcasts any time soon. The reason you go to college is not just to get an information dump. If that were the case colleges would have close down ages ago because people would be going to free public libraries for ...

I was reading a post the other day called Who owns information . It's been quite a few years since my Knowledge Management class, but I think I've read the article that Jane is referring to. I think the question here is not Who owns the information , but rather Why do you share information. In my knowledge management class we went through different ideas a tactics to use to get employees who have a wealth of knowledge in certain areas to write KB (knowledge base) articles so that employees who are not in the know can access this KB and tap into the knowledge that these people have. If you are part of an institution trying to get your members to engage in a community of practice your job is cut out for you. One of the ways to encourage employees contribute is to create a happy and positive environment in which the employees feel like sharing. If the environment is negative employees will most likely not share what they know because it gives them power. The trick here is to def...

I was reading this blog post on Donald Clark's blog on the subject of twitter followers. Luckily the incidents that he describes are not happening to me with as much frequency - because my tweets are private. I follow about 50 people, and 40 people follow me. The people I follow I want to follow , and the people that follow me are people that I think are interesting and I would like to interact with. Of course, I come across some twitter accounts who follow a boat load of people and when I look at their tweets, they are all blog post announcements. Quite honestly if your tweets don't interest me, I am not going to allow you to follow me. There seems to be a rat race on twitter to get the most followers. To me, content is what matters. If I would like to follow you (even if I can't because I am inundated with tons of new info) - you can follow me. I don't care how many people read my tweets (after all they are private), but I do care to read what interesting people are...

I was reading this article on insidehighered.com the other day. All I have to say is BRILLIANT! (OK, maybe I am getting a bit carried away here) While the article doesn't point out much new information (for me anyways - sorry, I don't mean to sound like a snob), it manages to point out that a lecture is not an inherent ability that you are either born with or you are not. It's is a skill, an art dare I say, that you cultivate, and the longer you practice this art, the better you become at it (especially if you are inclined to take constructive critique). This isn't all that different from when I was learning to prepare presentations as a young(er) graduate student. Did my first presentations stink? Of course they did! But as time went by, and I spent more time thinking about content, layout, information outside of my powerpoint deck, and I practiced, I got better at it! Lectures are the same way too :-) I liked this particular quote from the article: Bad lecturers vio...

I had a good laugh when I read this over at the PowerPoint Ninja . The author goes though a list of the different types of bad PowerPoint presenter types (although I find that sometimes these types intermix). It's no surprise that I've survived a number of bad PowerPoint presentations. The most annoying ones are the Reader, the Apologist and the Wanderer. This tells me that they've spent NO time actually preparing for their presentations (well all the types tell me that, but the most egregious ones are the ones I mentioned). There are two blog posts on the topic over at the PowerPoint Ninja. Have at 'em, they are entertaining (unless you suffer from PowerPoint Presentation PTSD). For what it's worth, when I teach people PowerPoint I try to teach them more about presentation technique rather than teach them about flashy bulletpoints flying all over the screen.