Multilitteratus Incognitus

Hey!  Blogging two days in a row! Who would have thunk it?  Well, I did tell Dave I'd read his post , and it did move some gears in the ol' noggin' so I guess something is still working upstairs ;-) I think you should go and read Dave's post, since I'm just going to reflect and react on a few select points. Dave introduced me to an article by Schinske and Tanner (2014) where they describe four purposes for assessments, those purposes being feedback, motivation, student ranking, and the objective evaluation of knowledge.  There were two things that jumped out at me: (1) the objective evaluation of a learner's knowledge and (2) ranking learners.   From a philosophical perspective, I don't think that it's the instructor's job to rank learners. As an instructor, I am not there to indicate whether Tom is marginally better at X than Dick. My job is to help learners go get through a particular corpus of knowledge that they should be able to use to do somet...

You don't go to Harvard for the Education. You go to Harvard for the Connections! - someone from my past (I don't remember who). The other day a long-distance friend and colleague posted an interesting blog post pondering (or positing?) that Social and Cultural capital are the main problem in online education . A very engaging twitter thread and discussion ensued (which I am having trouble locating at the moment), but I thought I'd let the dust settle a bit and collect my thoughts on the matter first.  It is a little self-serving too because I wanted to get back into the habit of writing and this seemed like a good opportunity.  As I was thinking about where to start untangling this thread the quote at the beginning of this post came to mind†. As I was thinking about this I interrogated some of my educational experiences, both undergraduate, and graduate, and free-range learning (like MOOCs).  Most of my education was residential in nature. Although I do prefer ...

Moving along in NRC01PL, here are some reflections of what was presented in week 3 of the Personal Learning MOOC.  It's been rather busy at work, and at Athabasca as I am wrapping up my semester, so I haven't really gelled with anyone else in this cMOOC.  I think that the topic would be interesting to discuss in connectivist fashion, but I have not yet (satisfactorily) done any wayfinding . I see some friends from other MOOCs in the twitter stream (like Autumm and Jupidu), but don't see much in the place of discussion.  Maybe once I "catch up" I'll pay more attention to what others are doing?  I am getting a similar vibe now to the one I got in the Wiley MOOC on OpenEd (#ioe12)  - I am in a museum tour, and I am a few rooms behind the group.  Good opportunity for mischief and creative exploration, but it's always fun to have another friend around to share the experience with. In any case, in week 3 the topic was the (curious) case of the cMOOC, wher...

The medium is the message ... The medium is the curriculum ... The community is the medium ... The community is the curriculum! Well, we've made it to Week 5 of Rhizomatic Learning, and this week's topic shares it's title with the course itself!  The Community is The Curriculum .  Odd, to me this would have made a perfect final week (you know every end is a new beginning, circle of life learning type of thing).  Perhaps the end is nigh and this is Dave's subtle way of telling us ;-) Anyone, the community as curriculum poses some interesting questions for me and I'll explore the first two that came to mind (otherwise we'd be here all day). Background of Learners  It seems to me that courses like this one (and other highly engaging OOCs, engaging to me anyway) is that we are relying on two things from the participants of the MOOC.  The background of the learner (i.e. they aren't complete novices in the discipline), and they are self-starters.  We...

I was reading an article on Science Direct on Librarianship Education. I am surprised that there is such a fuss over a name - however in a profession that only accepts individuals who received their degree from an ALA-accredited institution, it makes sense. Personally I think that librarianship, for the purposes of working in a public or academic library, is something that you don't need a Masters degree in Library (or information!) Science. You probably need a degree of some other sort to make you a Subject Matter Expert in something, but things like reference and cataloguing don't require an MLIS. A recent exchange with an MLIS colleague shows this. The comment was that this individual did not want to catalogue because it was mindless - they should hire a paraprofessional for that. If you look at Masters level LIS work in Greece for instance you will see more theoretical work done. Work on international standards, work on theory, work on integrating non-LIS professions and ...