Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day I was reading an article on Hybrid Pedagogy titled  Plagiarism is Dead; Long Live the Retweet: Unpacking an Identity Crisis in Digital Content.  I was an interesting article, which had me nodding in agreement in some areas, and induced an eyebrow raising expressions of curiosity in other parts.  I thought I would pull out some quotes, as I've done in other readings, and react to them, and in some cases respond.  It's an interesting article, and it's food for thought.  I would say that it also pairs well with the Times Higher Education article that Peer Review is not as old you think. One of the first things that jumped out to me what the following. It should be noted that any emphasis in these quotes is my own: It is long since time for academic publishers and tenure and promotion boards to re-examine our “business as usual” in the light of ubiquitous knowledge sources and publication tools. Given a multiplicity of wikipedias, what const...

Well, we've made it to Week 4 of #rhizo14, a full two-thirds done with this rhizomatic thing. But wait, if rhizomes are all middle with no beginning and end, what does two-thirds actually mean? I guess the topic of the week is the printed medium, and the overall question of "is Books making us stupid?"  The question brought up immediately the mental image of Homer Simpson, from the show The Simpsons , pondering one such question. Dave, in his opening salvo this week tells us that there is something in Books that he distrusts, in that books encourages objectivity, distance, a feeling of being removed from the audience. Something less participatory.  This is quite an interesting thought, considering that many (of a certain generation) would claim that Google (and the Internet) is making us stupid and we are losing out literacy skills because we aren't reading as much.  Just like those concerns over Google are unfounded, so is this concern about Books (in general)....

So, week 3 is done, week 4 is upon us in #Rhizo14, and the topic for week 4 is undeclared. So, this is a good opportunity to maybe do a summation of last week.  However, as I was thinking about this topic I was a bit uncertain on how to proceed.  There were many things discussed, and many topics approached in facebook, P2PU and the various blogs.  I guess Jenny and I had the same issue with which thread to pick up and unfold. Then Jenny brought together the aspect of uncertainty and jobs: Nowadays, many people, if not most, will have a number of jobs during their career. There is no certainty that they will be able to stay in the same job or even in their own country throughout their working lives. And we know that in many aspects of society, change is coming at us much faster than it ever has in the past. This got me thinking of something Maha wrote: Now if only I could convince my students that this is actually a good thing in formal (and informal) learning! The...

Another interesting post by Jaap in this week's (final week) of CCK11 made me think. Jaap writes: As a connectivist (CCK11) I do not like the words “acquisition of knowledge”, I like to that to be “connecting to information”. This made me think of the philosophy behind knowledge, how one sees knowledge and information (and ultimately wisdom?), and the semantics behind the words we use. Take for instance this phrase: Acquisition of Knowledge What does Acquisition of Knowledge imply? Well, we acquire something that in concrete, something already pre-made, ready for us to pick up and consume, use, or put it on a mantle. This view of knowledge is very behaviorist in its connotation. I don't necessarily subscribe to this idea. I think information can be given (example: don't touch the stove, it's hot) but there is no necessary knowledge of what happens if you touch a hot stove. As a kid I was told this time and time again, and I never touched a hot stove. A few m...

There was an article that I saw a few weeks ago called Expert Predicts 6 Future Trends in Training . Being a sucker for predictions I went right ahead and I read it. I have to say that the six predictions were quite good - because we are already there, and we have been there for a while now. We covered all of these issues when I took courses in my MBA program about three years ago in topics such as Knowledge Management. I have also experienced all of these points personally by being part of communities of practice such as MacOSX.com , HowardForums.com , and many, many other communities. The big thing here is the how . How does one effectively bring these into the corporation and into academia? How does one attain buy-in to get people to use the systems? There are many more hows here than I care to point a stick at. The main point is that these predictions are not predictions at all, but rather statements of where we're going (given proper leadership of course). The main thin...

I was reading a blog recently ( click here for source ) where the blogger had a presentation from the Mzinga crew about objections to social learning. I went through the presentation, and it was actually quite interesting, but I had heard it all before :-) The objections to social learning (as much as I cringe when I say social learning ) are the same objections that I examined when I was learning about Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems. I do love both proprietary knowledge management systems, and more open networks like twitter (although for work I would prefer Yammer), facebook and so on. The problem that I have is that people experience an all or nothing type of situation. You are either all against it, or all for it. And if you are all for it (institutionally I mean), you don't make appropriate use of your limited resources. This is an interesting presentation, and if you don't know much about knowledge management...or social learning, have a look. The...

I was reading an article called Knowledge Overload over at Inside Higher Ed about a month ago. It was quite an interesting article. I've personally experienced information overload in the last few years by discovering new blogs and information sources and it was interesting to see an academic perspective. I won't really go into the whole article, you should head over and read it if academia and academic publishing interests you. However this quote was quite interesting: The irony in all of this is that it is academic career and advancement requirements, more than faculty preferences, which are driving the current pattern of academic dissemination. New doctorates, eager for a place on the tenure track, work like crazy to get into the right conferences and journals. Recently hired faculty know that tenure rests on getting the right hits in the right journals and, maybe, getting their dissertation published as a book. Tenured faculty know that merit and final promotion – indeed, ...

Recently I came across and article called the right to read It's not long, and it's a short sci-fi story. With all the talk about ebooks this year being the in thing for 2009, and my own experiences with ebooks, I think that it's worth while to read. Now while this story is rather bleak and it points to a possibility, an unintended consequence of DRM on our media and its effects on education. Excerpt: For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan. This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—so...

The issue of a PhD (or EdD, or D.B.A.) has come up many times in recent years. After I graduated with an M.B.A. and I applied for the M.Sc. program the question was "why don't you go for a PhD?" I thought about it, but I didn't really find something that satisfied my intellectual curiosity. Once I got my M.S., and I applied for an M.A. and an M.Ed. the same question became even louder from friends, family, and faculty members who really wanted me to strive for something larger. I decided to apply for the M.A. and M.Ed. programs anyway, satisfy my intellectual curiosity in those subject matters (and while at it apply what I learned to my day job) and I made myself a promise to look into a doctorate. Truth be told, I would love to get a doctorate, but there are two issues at hand. First there is the obvious economic issue. Most doctorates are full time ventures. If you are a family person, with regular expenses such as a mortgage or a car payment, you can't just qui...

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 ...