Multilitteratus Incognitus

If you've ever seen the movie Shaun of the Dead , a humorous take on the surviving the zombie apocalypse, you are familiar with the Winchester plan.  The Winchester is a local (to the protagonist) pub, and it key to surviving the zombie apocalypse - according to the protagonist, is taking a short skip-and-a-hop to the local pub (after doing a couple of short tasks) and waiting for help to arrive while imbibing their drink of choice. Surviving the zombie apocalypse is a breeze!  Well, it's not that simple to survive the zombie apocalypse - as the protagonist finds out! The past semester has been a little difficult (mostly due to over-committing on my part) and that has affected my own desired progress through my doctoral program.  The classes and the seminars are done (yay!). The next step is the dissertation proposal (which is in draft form).  In the past few days I've been thinking about my progress in all its wonderful variety which includes slow progress, lack ...

Happy new year to all! I thought I would start my new year with a little (PhD) humor... While I don't think I'll be graduating by the end of 2017 (wouldn't that be nice?) I would like to make considerable headway with my dissertation.  This coming term (in 8 days, in-fact!) my spring semester (or as they call it in Canada "winter term") will begin.  This coming winter term I am doing my final (final! and I mean it!) course/seminar/structured thinking time for my doctoral work.  EDDE 806.  The overview of the course is a little outdated (although I won't ding the web folks for that because I find some outdated verbiage on my work's website too!  Sometime's it's like a game a whack-a-mole). In any case, EDDE 806 is described as: This Doctoral seminar course is designed to provide informal support and opportunities for presentation and peer review of activities associated with completion of the doctoral dissertation.  Completion of ...

Happy winter break to everyone!  Classes are over and I guess I am supposed to start working on my candidacy exam...  This comic seems like it applies ;-)

Back from vacation and I feel like there is so much to do by December 10th ;-) Here is a most recent PhD comic that reminds me a lot of real life...

One of my friends posted this on their facebook wall the other day.  I thought it was quite pertinent for PhD students and other professionals out there :-) In case you don't speak German, it says: "Errors are for beginners.  We produce catastrophes" ;-)

I was catching up on my news comedy yesterday and I was delighted to see this as the subject of last week's "last week tonight"

A little funny-Friday stuff here.  This comic was shared by a cohort-mate this week.  It provided some good levity while we wait for grades for EDDE 804. That said... I do wonder how one can go on the offensive in a Distance Education context where the dissertation is defended via Adobe Connect...

I have a feeling this might be in my dreams in about 12 months ;-)

Note to self - save this for my own dissertation title naming ;-)

The other day I came across this PhD Comics strip on grading rubrics. As a trained instructional designer (and having worked with instructional designers on and off since I started university as an undergraduate student) the concept of rubrics has really stuck with me.  That said,  I generally struggle with rubrics. In theory they are brilliant - a way to objectively measure how well someone has done on whatever assessable assignment. On the other hand, they are not that great and they could be a means for discontent and discord in the classroom (the "why did you indicate that my mark is in category B when it's clearly, in my student mind, in category A?" argument). For this reason I try to create rubrics that are as detailed as I can make them.  That said, it seems that detailed rubrics (like detailed syllabi) are rarely read by students ;-) Another issue arises with inherited courses. When I've inherited courses from other people that's also a source of...

It's funny because there is a chunk of truth in this. The comic is of course from PhDComics.com Food for thought, academia! Food. For. Thought.

I saw this on PhD Comics the other day... Right before New Year's, on Moodle, EDDE 804 opened up and was available to learners...there goes my guild-free break.  Now it's time to get a preview of what I need to do for class... The first two assignments are pretty straight forward (it seems).  The portfolio assignment is a little more nebulous.  A quick google search gives me some ideas of what previous cohorts have done, but I guess I need to start a scrap-book early in the semester to get ready for this last assignment...

I came across this in PhD comics the other day: I am sure that the concept isn't novel  - I've been trying to get my friends and colleagues to do something like this for a few years now...to no avail. ;-)  I wonder if anyone in the AU EDDE cohorts wants to try something like this.  Or, maybe, a Magic the gathering type of card game with academics.  If you draw the George Siemens card you get +5 on network powers for 3 turns.  What do you think? ;-)

HeckI was browsing coursera today and I noticed a course, recommended to me, for underwater basket-weaving.  I was intrigued because I knew it's April 1st, so I am looking out for interesting things on the net (I don't believe anything in my RSS feed today :p). In any case, I clicked on the course  (see screenshot) and it has all the trappings of a joke when looking at the institution's page, you get a 403 error: Heck, even the intro video seems like a hoax: Someone please confirm that this is a joke :-)

Merry Christmas to all! A little holiday fun from PhD comics 😊 - Posted using BlogPress from my Newton 3000 (iPad)

The other day I was thinking of the research methods class that I may be teaching in the spring (as of yet there are only two students signed up) and I was reading a research article for the literature review for the MobiMOOC paper that the MRT is working on.  In this article quite a few things correlated, but I they didn't necessarily cause each other. To be fair, the researchers did not claim that there was causation, but I thought that this article would be a good one to analyze, especially for people new to critical review of research literature.

Yesterday I got a note, presumably for an editor, to ask me to submit any manuscripts I have to the Journal of Strategies & Governance. The first thing that raised the "WTF" flag was that it wasn't just an email, but an email that contained a lot of quoted "Re:" text.  Well, I thought, it may have been an undergraduate student who was asked to send this out and didn't know that they had to delete the other text. Then I went to the, googled it just in case it was a phishing scam, to see this: I felt like a character at the end of a Lab Rats episode (I loved that series...I wish it would come back!) where someone goes "What the f..." (queue music). This is a journal on its fourth volume?  What? It's got flashing logos from the series " the event " (another great series that was cancelled).  Was the journal's website something that was contracted to a high school student using microsoft word?  I don't know if I should ...

I was reading this most recent PhD comic last night and I found it quite funny, partly because I think it's true.  There are quite a few times when I get the same, or similar, reaction when I tell people that I work in academia, or that I am still pursuing my education.  Most Greeks (and any other ethnicity I've come across for that matter) seems to view education as something that should be done  by a certain age. My own experiences are that people think that maybe around 28 you are really pushing it.  Time to reform our views of education and the "you-are-too-old-for-school" mentality ;-)

I know I retweeted this the other day, but it's just too good to not share 

I saw this the other day and it was hilarious! Yes, it's the onion (so don't take it seriously!) but there is a smidgeon of truth in the story (if you know what you are looking for) which makes it really really funny :-) In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?