Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day Paul Prinsloo posted this Guardian article on Facebook , and it seems like a popular article because Shyam Sharma (among others in my online educational social network and PLN posted it). As usual my PLN got me thinking (and, as is evidenced by this blog post, creatively procrastinating and not really working on my dissertation proposal...D'oh! 😜).  This blog post started life as a comment back to Paul, but it got too long, so here it is - migrated to the blog!  I should say that two of my master's degrees are from a business school (B-School hereafter) and my views are framed from an emic and etic perspective (hey, why is my dissertation proposal leaking into my blog? get out! 😏) From my own personal experience I think that B-Schools are in part complicit with what's going on, they are after part of the business landscape, but I think that they are only one part of the picture .  I am making my way through Ken Bruffee's book on Collaborative Le...

This months started off with a "show me the money" theme, both for pre-college and college level kids. First we had a story on NRP, asking whether paying for grades cheapens education , and then we had a story from Indiana University's Pressroom on their "incentive grants" for students who do well in school. I fall somewhere in between the two positions of to pay and not to pay. When I was in school I did not get money from my parents for bringing home a good report card, however I did get certain allowances, like being able to play computer games (on my 68040 Performa - no FPU!) and being in a better bargaining position when it came to buying new video games. When I was in college it was expected that I was an adult and I was responsible enough to value the education that I was paying for. Of course what it comes down to is this: Whether in K-12 or in College, we end up paying for education. Nothing is free. If you want to reward kids for doing well in K-12...

This is simply a great video to watch on the hows and the whys to the current credit crisis. The visuals, the setup, and the explanations are great in my opinion. Have a look - it's only 11 minutes. I would say that this is a good intro video for intro to finance classes. The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .

I started this blog last summer so that I could use it for two of my instructional design classes and it's been dormant since the end of the semester. I thought of integrating the content with my main blog, but what the heck, I may as well just use this! This semester I was not able to afford any instructional design classes. The university pays 45-50% of the tuition for ID classes, and I pay the rest. So what am I doing this semester? Well I anticipated that I would not be able to pay for my ID classes, so I decided to enroll in two Master's degrees. The first of course being an MEd in Instructional Design, and the second being an MA in Applied Linguistics. Applied linguistics is completely free so I can still maintain my active student status and not have to pay those continuance fees that I can't afford anyway. The other benefit of doing two masters concurrently, at least for me, is that Linguistics and ID exercise two different parts of the brain. Instructional Design ...