Multilitteratus Incognitus

This week, the main topic of DS106 seems to be personal cyberinfrastucture, and the reading from Gardner Campbell associated with this week is available on Educause . It was an interesting reading, and a short one at that.  The main idea is that instead of giving students a prepackaged webspace where they can only run HTML (or maybe PHP), get them a free virtual server where they can run anything they want (like Apache, wordpress, coldfusion, etc.) so that they can experiment freely. It is through this experimentation that they will learn.  I must say I agree that people learn through experimentation - I must have pulled my old (first) Mac open a few times to peek inside, and I must have corrupted my system volume  quite a lot of times to see what makes a computer work (or not work!). This also fits in with another MOOC that I've been following along (a little less now since it's becoming less and less structured) - change11 and the theme of changing higher education. ...

I was recently reading Jay Cross's article on the Chief Learning Officer on Getting Rid of the Training Department , followed by his post on New Roles for former trainers . The following quote summarizes the whole thing quite nicely: When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors, and performance consultants. I agree that training, old style training, is mostly dead. Old style training was based on the fact that all learners come in with the same basic knowledge. This may still be true when new products are deployed and people need training on those new products, however most types of training that I've seen have been more along the lines of boutique-style-training (I think I invented the term a few years back when I started as a formal trainer). Most people don't start from point A in their knowledge of ...

I came across this article recently on Community Managers. For the past year or so, ever since I created a Ning community for the Instructional Design program, and helped/consulted on the creation of a Community for the Applied Linguistics online program, I've been advocating for a community manager for all online programs. What I've noticed is that there is a void in-between semesters, especially for students who are all over the world, but happen to be a student in our Online Programs. During the semester they've got access to Blackboard and they get to "see" their classmates again, and meet new ones. In between semesters they lose contact, unless they happen to have people on LinkedIn or Facebook (or old school email) or something along those lines. This was an interesting quote: Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal commun...

I meant to comment on this blog post and the associated news story a while back but I didn't get a chance until now. I think that in the blog post Assessment is confused with Grading based on this comment: It was not his job, as he explained later, to rank their skills for future employers, or train them to be “information transfer machines,” regurgitating facts on demand. Released from the pressure to ace the test, they would become “scientists, not automatons,” he reasoned. These concepts are not the same thing! Assessment is what you do to verify that students do indeed have understood and are able to apply what you've been trying to teach them. There are of course different levels of understanding, and this is where there is some attempt to overlap with Grading systems. The instrument used in this process of attempting to match the level of understanding and application to a Grade is a rubric (I dislike this word by the way). Yes, grades can be arbitrary, and trying to b...

I came across this easy to use guide regarding which chart type to use depending on your data type and amount. It's in Spanish, but it's not that difficult to decipher (or shouldn't be anyway). Download the PDF here