Multilitteratus Incognitus

In a recent posting about doctoral degrees ("academic" versus "professional" ) there was one line of thought that I meant to explore, but I really neglected because it didn't quite fit in with the post the way it was ultimately flowed. In the ACM eLearn article that really got my mental gears going, and to which my post was a response to, the professional doctor "is more likely to consume research" (para. 5). I find this statement  problematic on many levels with regard to to a doctoral degree, and the false differentiation between a PhD and an EdD, but I also find it problematic when I think of Higher Education in general.  My initial thoughts (last week) were that students, at the end of their Masters level studies should "consume" research, they shouldn't have to wait until their complete a doctorate in order to consume research.  After some time pondering the point I started wondering if we've come to a point in Higher Educ...

While on vacation a friend and colleague sent me a small article warning about the end of the professoriate as a viable career . I was quite curious about it so I had a quick look (after all, it was about MOOCs in part, and I had a little spare time in the middle of the day once museums closed). On the surface it seems like an interesting conversation starter, but for me that's all it is: a conversation starter. I would have loved to hear more of Cary Nelson's speech where the blurb of "If we lose this battle for intellectual property, it's over. Being a professor will no longer be a viable career. It will be a service industry. That's it.” It's hard to speak more cogently about this without hearing the entire context. That said, I do think that this is an interesting point to dissect on its own, assuming of course that there isn't any other information that modifies this statement. Personally I think that the battle for IP has been lost for quite some t...

Well, another MOOC is now complete!  I still have a few more readings in Pocket to go through, blogs from fellow bloggers.  I have to say that the materials in this MOOC weren't a revelation for me.  I have encountered these topics before in my professional career, especially more recently when topics like MOOCs and alternative credentialing and badges are hot topics. If I already knew some of these things, why join?  Well, as we've said before, content isn't king.  Content is an important part, but not king.  For me, it's about interacting with other people, and getting to find out other important SMEs and thinkers in the field. To agree, disagree, debate, and write.  In addition to some of the usual suspects, like Serena (which gives me good reasons to practice my Italian :-)  ) and  brainysmurf , this time around I met another interesting MOOCer, Rolin Moe ( blog here ). I don't always agree with what he writes, but his blog was always a...

This past week I listened to the Neil Selwyn presentation (perhaps I am a week behind) and I have to say that I am indeed a Neil Selwyn fan or best rephrased, I am a fan of his critical point of view on technology and the bling use of technology in the classroom. I came across Neil's work a few months back as I was finding academic articles on the subject of the Net Generation (also known as Millenials , Digital Natives , Generation Google, Generation C, etc. etc. etc.) - I was looking for emperical studies that tested the hypotheses that people like Prensky put forth about this generation, and I did find quite a few. An article is in the works based on all this research, but to make a long story short the empirical evidence does not support one unified monolithic generation where everyone is a computer-wiz which requires instructors to use technology (...or else!) A couple of Selwyn's articles brought a critical element into an otherwise uncritical view of these Net Gen ...

One of the articles lingering in my Google Reader for a while has been this blog post . The topic piqued my interest since I've written (or talked a lot about) the role of research in practice in the ID field over the past few years while I was a student in ID (graduation today - yay!). One of my criticisms has been that professionals in the field (based on my observations) don't pay much attention to research being done and how that research can benefit your organization. Of course research itself does have caveats and certain conditions that were true in the research study that may not be true in your organization, thus it is unwise to actually take research on face value and implement it wholesale without doing some critical analysis of what the research environment was like, how that environment compares to your environment and without doing your own experiments before you implement something throughout the organization. I do agree with the author that the gap between...

...well it depends on what you mean by " Education " I was reading the UMassOnlineBlog the other day and I saw this article by a guest blogger. I thought to myself seriously? They are going to tax education? It drew me in, until I read that it wasn't really about Distance Education... The relevant piece of information here is this: The department asserts that an e-course offered by SkillSoft Corporation, a New Hampshire-based company, should be subject to sales tax as “software” purchased by the student. So at this point I stopped being alarmed. It's not distance education, It's SkillSoft! There is no instructor involved in SkillSoft courses (at least not the ones we had at my workplace). NY is not going to tax people taking real online courses with instructors and grades and projects. Now I am not saying that SkillSoft isn't educational. What I am saying is that in my opinion SkillSoft doesn't count as Distance Education . Someone commented back on th...