Multilitteratus Incognitus

Greetings fellow three-point-oh'ers (or is it just fellow eLearners?) This past week in eLearning 3.0 (Week 2, aka 'the cloud'). This week's guest was Tony Hirsch, and what was discussed was the cloud, and specifically Docker.  Before I get into my (riveting) thoughts on the cloud, let me go back  to Week 0 (two weeks ago) and reflect a little on the thoughts I jotted down on my retrieved post-it note. So, in the live session a couple of weeks ago (it's recorded if you want to go back and see it), Siemens said something along the lines of "what information abundance consumes is attention". This really struck me as both a big "aha!" as well as a "well, d'uh! why hadn't it occurred to me already? D'oh!". There has been a lot said over the past few years about how people don't read anymore (they skim), and how bad that is.  This ties into "what learners want" (a phrase I've heard countless times on-cam...

One of the presentations this week in EDDE 803 was from a fellow classmate that talked a bit about simulations.  In the ensuing discussion I was reminded of a course I took as part of my MBA which used simulations.  I thought that this would be a worthwhile post for here (as well as class) - at the very least it's one chronicle of my learning journey prior to the EdD. Queue flashback visuals and music When I was doing my MBA, one of my courses was a supply chain management course (fun with math and probability). One of the course activities was for us to break up into groups of 4 (so we had 4-5 groups in the course) and we were manager of a widget making factory. We needed to pick production size, route to retail, and predict demand (given certain finite factors) in different stores. The goals was (of course) to maximize profit. The game sort of looked like SimCity - sort of-, so for some of us it was also a bit of nostalgia (having grown up with that game). The game...

Life and Death Screenshot This week is gaming and simulation week (if you haven't guessed from the posts that I've been posting and responding to) on Change11 with guest Clark Aldrich . As usual, I've skipped the live session since there is more than enough content on the blogs and what's been provided by the guest facilitators. The reading matter for this week is a short book by Clark titled Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich way . The book was quite succinct and on the small side, perhaps an abbreviated version of  The Complete guide to Simulations and Serious Games , in other words a good quick read to get you situated in what one needs to do in order to get simulations off the ground for instructional purposes.  This book, for me, was quite interesting because it bridged my computer science and UI design backgrounds, with my management background, and my instructional design background - it was pretty cool to see all of these converge in an area (simulations) t...

The other day, while I was on the train and on my way home I was reading the most recent Change11 blog posts. I was going to comment on each one of these blog posts individually, but I realized that there as a thread developing in each one that made them fit together pretty nicely. First, I read brainysmurf's " if you don't like messy learning don't play in the snow " post.  Brainysmurf comments on Jon Dron's comment that MOOCs are "not easy, this [therefore] will be demotivating and inefficient." Brainy says the following: Wow, that scares me because I think he’s right! If learning (in a mooc or elsewhere) is not easy, it seems that a number of learners will lose motivation. What does that say about the willingness of an individual or group to risk, to fail, to learn from failure, to get up and try again? Does *everything* in our world have to be faster, more efficient and require less effort now? To what degree do we actually learn from an...