Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I get a lot of energy from seeing students in 620 participating the forums! That said, I am feeling pretty tired! I don't know it it's just "hump-week"  - you know, that week in the middle of the semester when you feel that you are climbing a steep hill and you just want to sit down, but you gotta keep moving - or just that I really need a vacation (or this damned cold that doesn't want to go... ) :-).  Either way, I hope that once the current project is done that I will feel like I am on a skateboard rolling down hill to the finish line - i.e. lots of fun, and a rush, and not ...

Time seems to be on fast forward these days.  Either that or I have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them in.  When did week 5 just end?  Time flies when you're having fun, and when you have a ton of your plate I guess.  The past couple of weeks on EDDE 803 have been relatively 'quiet'.  We haven't had discussion forums, and our live session was cancelled due to unforeseen events.  The internship is fast and furious with a lot of discussion forum posts, and I assume that the short gradeable assignments will start to come in at some point soon in that course. In the internship I actually ended up partly grading the first of the papers that came in. I grade it first, and the instructor of record looks it over does the final actual grading, this way the learner gets feedback and I get feedback as well. Since I've been teaching for a few years I am approaching this as an opportunity for peer review, so I am approaching my role as an intern...

I think  my interactions with Autumm in virtual connecting made me want to create  a little trailer with dramatized highlights from my doctoral studies thus far.  Alas, no budget for extras, scripts, sets, and green screens, so I guess I'll leave it to plain text for now ;-) This week marks the beginning of my second year at Athabasca's EdD program (survived year 1!), and I just began EDDE 803: Teaching and Learning in Distance Education . At the risk of sounding like an overachiever, when I received my textbooks for in June I ended up reading through them while I had some free time in the summer.  Luckily (it seems) that the bulk of the reading for EDDE803 is those two textbooks, so (with any luck) I won't be buried under a ton of additional articles to read.  This course seems to focus a lot on distance education teaching and instructional design, both areas that I am familiar with already due to my background in instructional design and my own teaching ...

Another story I had in my Pocket account (for what seems like forever) is this story from campus technology talking about how nano-degrees are disrupting higher education .  I don't know about you, but it seems to me that people just love the word disrupt , or the pairing disruptive innovation .  I have a feeling that in 10-15 years when we're past this fad we will look back at this time period with the same sense of nostalgia that we look upon movies made in the 80s (you know, all of the movies that have synth-music playing). Regardless of where you call it a nanodegree, an x-series set of courses, or a certificate this concept isn't new, and the article points to this fact that this isn't new. Certificates have been around for quite some time, and both higher education institutions and professional associations offer a wide variety of certification options for learners.  The professional associations, such as ATD or SHRM for example,  in theory, should have th...

I saw this article over at the NEA journal. ( click here for the full PDF ) Having recently visited my dad, a person who is very intelligent but, who like the dad in the article, didn't go to college (heck my dad didn't even go to middle school). This story reminded me of a conversation I had with him about his work and salary versus mine (i.e. being the same) despite my education. I've heard a lot of banter over at blogs like the brazen careerist about not learning concrete skills in college. My undergrad experience has been more of a "learn how to think" lesson. Learn to be critical, and analytical, and calculating, and have that rounded learning that everyone covets. When I first graduated I felt like the early-20-somethings on brazen careerist, like my college education was almost a waste of time because I did not learn concrete skills. I kinda learned java, and kinda learned C, but I wouldn't be readily employable by a company. In recent years though my u...