Multilitteratus Incognitus

Happy Friday, to all! This past week  - well, even a few weeks before that, if we're really counting - I've been contemplating my academic work.  Part of it is because I am working on one collaboration with some really awesome folks, and reading proofs for another collab from last summer (that should be published later this year).  However, it's worth noting that all of these academic pursuits are hobbies for me, so it takes time off other hobbies.  They are not things that I can do as part of my regular work (I am not a faculty member). Part of this introspection is because I was updating my Academic CV for a teaching gig I might apply to (another part of the hobby, but this one pays at least), and  I realized that I've done quite a few things in the past couple of years that fit into this particular hobby category, and also fit pretty much in the "life of an academic" category. So, what's changed? To cut to the chase, Trump, and Musk,... and their demen...

  A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is  going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it... Annnyyywhoooo🙄 The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's  Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning.  In his follow up post, Wiley is  open pondering/brainstorming about OELMs, Wiley discusses a separation of form from content, similar to how text on the web is separated from the formatting CSS layer . Wiley's original posts are intersting and do provide some points to ponder. I don't necessarily agree in whole with what  he proposes, but I can see a grain of something interesting there, and certainly worth pondering and discussing. Maybe I've gotten a bit more "get o...

I came across Sarah's post on blogging questions (which I think was something started on the Reclaim Discord, so I thought I'd jump in. I was a bonus opportunity to post this Super Simple Badge , which I also created a while back, but didn't have a place to put it that made sense ;-) I guess this is a "tag you're it" sort of thing that I am just butting into. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Back in high school I had penpals. It was fun to keep in touch with my old town, get to hear about what my old friends were up to, and in turn share my own new adventures in my new city. When we all graduated from high school, many left home to go to University, and people's mailing addresses changed.  Keeping up with where people were those days was too much, and everyone's new adventures meant that there was little time to do the penpal thing.  Some old friends made the transition to email for asynchronous communication and IM for synchronous chat...

Part II of my 2024 academic wayfinding ponderings! 🎓🤔 If you remember my last post of 2023, you probably remember that perhaps the thing that's been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth has been the CIEE journal ( Current Issues in Emerging eLearning ).  This is a journal that I co-founded with my friend and colleague Alan Girelli back in the day (in 2012-2013, if I remember correctly). At the time, Alan was the director for the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning (CIEE), which was part of our College of Advancing and Professional Studies. The idea behind the center was to foster innovation on research (across the UMass Campuses), and to provide venues for the dissemination of knowledge.  The center was the brainchild of the CAPS Dean.  Alan arranged for a variety of events over the years, including events on MOOCs, learning analytics, active learning, and so on. The journal on his end was also a means to this end. At the same time, I had this crazy idea t...

I guess that's me, in the style of Albert Uderzo OK...so it's been a while since I last blogged! ( checks his notes ... December 31, 2023!!! Great Scott!😬🤯) You'd think that I had given up the blogging practice, right? 😅.  Well, you wouldn't be blamed if you thought so!  Contrary to appearances, I'm still around!  It's been a busy Spring semester...and a busy Summer...and now it's looking like it's going to be a busy Fall semester too! It's been so busy that at times I feel like I am running from project to project, and then I am left with little time to ideate, ponder, or react in a form that is longer than 280-500 characters... 🙄, or even just empty my mind and think of nothing. I can't complain though, because I  think it's a calamity of my own making 😅 This might take more than one blog post to collect my thoughts and write about. In fact, to get to a completed post it's taken me a few weeks (this tab has been open in my browser ...

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle.  Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂.   As I was pondering other academic-y things over the start of my winter break, I was looking back at the year to see how things moved along.  I think I've written (or at least said) this before, but before I started my doctorate I felt like I had a rhythm so far as academic communities, activities, and outputs go, and things got disrupted while I was pursuing my EdD.  Coming out of that doctoral process, I felt like I took one exit off the freeway, while many of my other colleagues and friends took another. It feels like the end of a doctoral program is about rediscovering who you are and where things fit.  It s...

Gazing at Learning The other day I was doing some reflecting on my own "return" to being a learner after my doctoral journey ended. Last semester I took a course on negotiation, which I saw relevant to both work and also for my role as a member of our union's contract bargaining team this round.  This course was a graduate-level course, and is typically taken either in the first or second term of a graduate student's journey in the Conflict Resolution program at my university.  While the semester was busy, I rarely broke an (academic) sweat.  The course was challenging, don't get me wrong, but I found the number of readings manageable (since I have my TTS routine), and the number of words that I had to write for papers was 5,000-6,000 cumulatively in the semester (and maybe another 8,000 across the forum posts throughout the term). In the grand scheme of things, this feels normal for a graduate course (from a design point of view), but it feels  easy having gone ...

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue of courses kept getting larger and larger 🤣. So, with the queue so long I decided to do something about it: The total number of courses I went through this fall (August through December was 36.  Some courses were outside of my wheelhouse but seemed interesting, while others are peripheral to what I am doing, so things were not always new.   Unsurprisingly, the courses that were on subject matters that I already knew something about went by rather fast since past information kept coming up, both my own previous knowledge and things that came up in previous FutureLearn courses...

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash Back in December, I had an idea: 2022 is the 10 year anniversary since the "year of the MOOC," so why not write something about it? After all, open education and MOOCs are subjects that interest me a lot, still. MOOCs of course go back before 2012, and the year of the MOOC  in 2012 was really relevant in North America.  I've seen other proclamations for the year of the MOOC being 2013 or 2014, but that's in different contexts. Anyway, since it's 10 years from some  proclamation, and this year is actually one where I am free and clear from the obligations of dissertation writing, I thought it would be fun to revisit my old stomping grounds and do a 10-13 year retrospective research article (I need to get back into publishing somehow, no? 😂). I also have a title:  MOOC post-mortem: A decade(+) of MOOCs .  More on this title later. Anyway, I decided to start this project in a very predictable way.  I already had a treasure trov...

It's a Boston thing... Alright, this blog post has been sitting in my drafts for a while, since I am procrastinating writing that paper on video game preservation (a story for another blog), why no blog?😂. Now that the dissertation is done, and the doctoral degree is completed, I've been spending a little more time observing the ID-sphere on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter and I have seen a fair number of threads that solicit feedback and advice regarding doctoral studies in the field of instructional design or something like educational leadership.  These two things come up often and it's no surprise given that that advertising for PhDs in ID and Ed Leadership come up even for me (including in Instagram where I basically mostly post nature photos!!!). It's usually certain for-profit universities that are responsible for the bulk of this advertising - at least for me, but I see certain names come up in the Facebook and Reddit threads as well. It's never your local st...

  Courtesy of Redbubble After one-too-many "news" posts on IHE about plagiarism and "rigor" I decided to stop subscribing to IHE's RSS feed.  Idiocies that used to be a comment left in an actual news article (one which you could ignore) now have been promoted as opinion pieces on IHE.  To put it quite simply the junk-to-treasure ratio is now completely off on that site and there is no longer value to keep checking it as part of my regular news feed. That said, there was an article back in August (wow, a month went by!) by Ray Schroeder that I wanted to respond to. The article is titled Demise of the Baccalaureate Degree  and it provokes the reader with the following lede "Overpriced, outdated and no longer required by an increasing number of employers, is the baccalaureate in a death spiral?"  Let me just say that this is BS, right now. Go ahead and read it, if you'd like, and come back after that. It's disheartening to see a leader in distance...

It's hard to believe, but the summer is in the rearview mirror.  Next week the fall semester begins and as I look back over the summer  I see some things I learned (or observed) in these coronatimes: The FoMo is still strong! I thought I had beaten back FoMo (fear of missing out) but I guess not :-).  This summer many conferences made the switch to online this summer due to the ongoing pandemic and their registration was free.  This made them accessible both in terms of place (online) and cost (free) for me.  So I registered.  I might have registered for far too many because there weren't enough hours to participate synchronously and attend everything I wanted to.  Luckily most sessions were recorded, so I was able to go back and review recordings of things I missed.  Between the Connected Learning Conference, IABL Conference, OLC Ideate, Bb World, HR.com's conference (and a few more that I can't remember at the moment), I got more Professional...

HyFlex (Hybrid Flexible) is a way of designing courses for (what I call) ultimate flexibility.  It takes both ends of the teaching spectrum, fully face-to-face, and fully online-asynchronous and it bridges the gap.  Back in the day, I learned about this model of course design by taking an OLC workshop with Brian himself, but you can learn more about the model in his free ebook .  I liked the model at the time (and I still do), because it gave more options to learners in the ways they wanted to participate in the course. They could come to class, they could participate online synchronously, and they could just be asynchronous, or a mix of any one of those depending on the week. Quite a few people on twitter, including @karenraycosta, were pondering whether they don't like HyFlex (in general), or the implementations of HyFlex that we are seeing. Heck, It seems like HyFlex has become the white label flex model for universities because some of them are creating their ow...

The other day I had an interesting (but brief exchange) with Kelvin Bentley on twitter about MOOC completion.  This isn't really a topic that I come back to often, given that completion-rates for MOOCs, as a topic, seems to have kind of died down, but it is fun to come back to it. To my knowledge, no one has come up with some sort of taxonomy of the different degrees of completion of a MOOC†. But let me rewind for a second.  How did we get to the topic of MOOC completion?  Well, I've been attempting to make my extended CV more accessible (to me).  In the past, I used a WYSIWYG HTML publishing platform to manage my extended CV‡.  The idea was that I could easily export it and just push it on the web.  In practice, I never did this, and when I changed computers it became a hassle to maintain. So, I moved everything over to google docs for cleanup (and easier updates).  In cleaning up my CV sections (I am not done, btw!), I did make a startling se...