Multilitteratus Incognitus

  A lot of digital ink has been used up in the past few days with Elon's purchase of the big blue bird , both in blogs and Twitter itself, and news outlets (not that I think of it) To be fair, it is a little concerning when your social network changes hands, but then again other things are concerning in the land of social media (where "you're the product"), like most social media ownership, privacy, uptime, and what companies are doing with user data.  However, is this most recent panic enough of a cause to move over to another platform (or protocol) like Mastodon?🤔 Perhaps...or perhaps not.  Earlier this year I created an account on Scholar.social  (based on where colleagues seemed to be moving)- which took forever to verify - because their servers were kneeling under the weight of the many people who were "leaving" Twitter after the last Elon scare. I see today that Scholar.social no longer accepts new members.  Just for giggles I also created a mastodo...

Last year, around this time of year, I went on a fun little academic detour. A colleague from overseas (Suzan) invited me to work with her on a conference paper for last year's Networked Learning conference.  While we worked on it we came up with the concept of Hybrid Presence which Suzan presented for us (since I could not attend in person) and we worked on an expanded version of the paper which should be coming out in a book soon. Networked Learning was a new concept to me so I thought I would spend some time reading more on the topic. I got as many books on the topic as I could get my hands on last year and I started reading. Now that journey is coming to end having started reading the last book I got my hands on on the subject. I was briefly considering going through and downloading and going through all conference proceedings from the past 10 years, but having each article was a single download and perhaps a better use of my time is to go back to my own dissertation to...

Εύρηκα! (eureka) There is nothing like a deadline to get you going - that's all I have to say!  A while back, like last January or something, a colleague asked me if I would be interested in presenting at an IALLT webinar on a topic of my choosing - it just had to do with technology and education.  I generally don't have a problem with coming up with topic to talk about, but this particular topic gave me pause to ponder.  While I can talk about pedagogy and technology in general, pedagogy and technology in the context of a language classroom is not something I actively think about. I know, it's a bit odd since I have both an MA in Applied Linguistics and I work for a department of applied linguistics!  My own research ponderings have taken me away from the linguistic side of things, although like dark side  it's alluring and I often think about it. Anyway, I couldn't really come up with a topic then and there because EDDE 804 was taking up all of my bra...

Well, after a couple of month of not paying the Ning bill UMassID.com is dead!  Well, the domain is still fine, @cdetorres got that one for 10 years, but the Ning community that it pointed to is pretty much dead. So what is was UMassID.com? Well, back in 2008, when I started my MEd in instructional design, the outgoing class was looking for a new president for the student association (GIDA - Graduate Instructional Design Association).  This association - I later found out, started at some point in the early 90's (the program began in 1984). Since I didn't want to see the hard work of previous officers go to waste, I thought I would step up and take over the presidency.  At the time, someone's final project for a course was to look into communities of practice, and as part of it they created a Ning community , which at the time provided freemium service, so for the student the community was free. Within a few months of taking over I discovered that the network...

The other day I was reading a recent post by Jenny Mackness on questions about being open. Jenny had attended the recent ALT-C conference and was responding to a fellow ALT-C participant's questions on openness.  Specifically Viv Rofle ponders: I’m questioning not just openness by my motives behind wanting to contribute to it. What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?  Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?  Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?  What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’? These are good questions, and I think that the fact that I, a non-participant in ALT-C, am able to view, ponder, and engage with such questions and discussions is really the reason why you'd want to be open. E...

Look for traces of the "social" One of the things I like about Rhizo14, and our collaboration, is that we keep going, exploring our participation, and collaboration post Rhizo14 through a variety of lenses.  This keeps the mind active and exploring new areas.  I've been meaning to get acquainted with Actor Network Theory (ANT), but the time is rarely right. Classes, work, other projects conspire to distract me :-).  That said, with a presentation looming for some of us in the rhizo14 group, it's time to read about ANT.  The book recommended is Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory by Bruno Latour. I am currently 100 pages in (out of 300) and I am getting the sense that Latour likes to write, and likes to give a lot of examples, but doesn't really get to the point - at least quickly enough for my satisfaction.  If one thing can be said about me is that I am stubborn.  I will get through this book.  Now how to segment i...

A week or so ago I had read Terry Anderson 's blog post asking the question on whether it is worth it for aspiring academics to blog (and tweet, and generally be visible on the interwebs). It's an interesting post and I encourage everyone to read it and post their opinions on twitter, here, on Terry's post. I'd love to know what other newer academics think about this. I am new, but not new, to academia.  I've been working in academia now for 17 years (man...when did the time go by!!!), but only in the past few years where I've had an article or two published and have taught a course or two do I consider myself a part-time academic. I've been blogging since around 1998 (more like monthly "updates" than blogging - but the general concept I think carries) and I've been writing on this blog, for academic purposes, since 2008.  Is it worth it? Excluding a few curve-balls that came my way, and some hot-waters I found myself into once or twice o...

Here we are, module 2 of Connected Courses, and the focal topics for these next two weeks are Trust and Network Fluency . This module we have a few webinars to watch, and there are a number of book recommendations. Truthfully I cannot make it through these books, as much as I would love to read some of them at the moment.  Too many other things happening to focus meaningfully on them. I guess I will focus on the (free) audiovisual media provided, and the information posted by other participants (225 connected blogs thus far!). I've decided to break down a (potentially) bigger post to two smaller ones.  This one will focus on Trust, and the subsequent one on network fluency. Trust is an odd concept and it's not easy to pin down. We might think that we  know what trust is, however many of us tend to default to the US Supreme Court's definition of  "I know it when I see it" which is quite subjective.  In the introductory reading for this module, is " my d...

The other day I was reading a CCK11 blog on a way to visualize the connections on your LinkedIn network .  Since this week's topic is "the network" on CCK11, I thought it would be cool to see how my network looks. You always get a notification on your social networks indicating who a particular contact has in common with you, but you don't generally get the full picture. With a few hundred contacts on my LinkedIn network my diagram does look a bit chaotic (I don't even want to know what an Open Networker's diagrams looks like!), but zooming in makes things a bit more clear. The main thing that struck me is that LinkedIn didn't ascribe any specific values to the color-labels.  When I connected with people I usually indicated that I knew them from class, from work, that we did business together or there was some sort of consultation going on. To be honest I'm not really sure how this mapping tool color-coded my contacts.  The low-hanging fruit seemed t...