Multilitteratus Incognitus

The other day I got access to my summer course on Blackboard.  With just under 25 days left to go until the start of courses, it's time to look at my old syllabus (from last summer), see what sorts of innovations my colleague (Rebecca) has in her version of the course, and decide how to update my own course.  I had some ideas last summer, but since then the course has actually received an update by means of course title and course objectives, so I need to make sure that I am covering my bases. Concurrently, in another thread, while I was commuting this past week I was listening to some of my saved items in Pocket, and I was reading (listening to) this article on Hybrid Pedagogy by Sean Michael Morris, Pete Rorabaugh and Jesse Stommel titled Beyond Rigor . This article brought me back to thinking more about academic rigor  and what the heck it really means.  I think it's one of those subjects that will get a different answer depending on who you ask.  The aut...

Wow, hard to believe, but we've reached the final module of Connected Courses (and boy is my brain tired!).  I found out last week that there may be a slim chance of me being able to teach Introduction to Instructional Design (INSDSG 601, a graduate course) at some point in the new future. This is something that was offered to me a couple of summers ago, but being away on vacation at the time (with questionable internet access) it didn't seem like a good idea to be teaching an online course. I've been poking around the course shell, here and there, over the past couple of years (even since teaching this course was a remote possibility) to get ideas about how to teach the course.  The previous instructor, who had been teaching this course for the past 10 years but recently refocused on other things, did a good job with the visual design of the course. It's easy to know what you are are supposed to do each week.  Then again, from the design of the course I can see th...

I was reading Jenny's post the other day on What is Academic Rigor and it got me to question my own conceptions of academic rigor.  I think many academics treat rigor just like supreme court judges treat pornography: They know it when they see it . I too have been guilty of not defining rigor, and just saying "oh that's not rigorous" when I recognize that something isn't rigorous (or at least I mentally categorize it as so). Some of the participants in the synchronous session that I didn't attend had their own conceptions of what rigor is (via Jenny's blog): not for the faint-hearted; takes effort and commitment (Tom Reeves) unchanging, in the sense that ‘rigorous’ means performing the same (type of) study every time, conforming to the same (set of) principles etc. (Stephen Downes) more likely to lead to the truth (but what is truth?) (Stephen Downes) disciplined, measurable, stands up to scrutiny by others (brainysmurf) can replicate the methods (To...