Multilitteratus Incognitus

It seems like I am living in a time-warp this semester :)  I had saved an article to read, and respond to, titled " Motivating Faculty to Teach Online " that was published in Inside Higher Education. I could have sworn that I saved this back in the fall at some point, but looking at the date it was earlier this month. I am not sure if time flowing slowly is a good thing or a bad thing.  In any case, my motivation for responding to this article as been like a seesaw.  Some days when I see it in my Pocket reader I am all gung-ho about responding to it...and then there are days where I shrug my shoulders and wonder what the point is to responding to such an article . Just to set the frame here: I work for an institution as a manager of an online MA program.  I love what I do. I've been working with faculty for the past 15 years, in a variety of roles, and throughout these 15 years I've seen faculty, and their various motivations, through a variety of lenses. ...

This past week on the #rhizo14 facebook group my colleague, and co-author, Rebecca Hogue posted a link to this TED talk by Shai Reshef on the Ultra-Low Cost University . This talk really bugged me for a variety of reasons. On the facebook group I wrote that I was angry when I saw this, but it was really more of a "WTF" reaction to the video.  More disbelief that the incredible amount of BS†, and the attempt to place a reality distortion field around this product. With a new cMOOC on the horizon for next week titled " Why Open ," I thought this would be a good chance to elaborate more on why I had such a visceral reaction to this video. As a side note, if you are interested in the whole Open thing, check out Stanford's Open Online Course starting this fall semester online. The topic is interesting, but after #whyopen, Wiley's #ioe12, and being steeped in this culture for the past decade, I don't know what a 13-week course (traditional semester) has ...

Yesterday, while commuting, I had written a longer post about my MOOC-coverage fatigue.  It seems as though MOOC coverage has gotten out of proportion and it's spilled over to other non educational news outlets that I frequent, where I go for non-educational news. In any case, it seems as though the Google Blogger client of my iPhone ate my post.  Maybe for the best, because I feel like I was getting to have a cranky "get off my lawn" slant to it ;-)† In any case, in thinking about re-writing that post, I was skimming some recent MOOC related news on Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle and the non academia blogs that suddenly have picked up and started reporting on MOOCs since they are the subject of venture capital news. Despite being an MBA, I don't get all excited about VC news, I am more interested about the product than figuring out right away how to make money with it. While going through a day's worth of RSS feeds, I just had this crystallize: Many ...

I was recently reading these two articles on ProfHacker, one was on RSS & SMS integration in the (library) catalog , and the most recent one about mobile applications for libraries . This brought me back to my days as an MSIT student.  Back in those days I took many opportunities to work on homework/class projects that dealt directly with library systems - some examples are IT/Library mergers and integration, patron privacy and Project Wormhole - which is what these ProfHacker posts reminded me of! Project Wormhole* (yeah, I used imaginative names), was a project I worked on for an Object Oriented Programming course.  The main idea was that each patron would have a customized library homepage that they would log-onto and they would have a widgetized HUD of all of their information needs.  The patrons already have a library barcode and a student/staff ID number, so there isn't really a need to create yet another log-on! They just need to log on with information tha...