Multilitteratus Incognitus

With the US elections now settled, and a second Trump term being a reality, I guess many (most?) of the remaining hold outs on Twitter are finally migrating.  I decided to keep my personal account, for now, and just promote pro-union, pro-education, pro-left, and anti-war messages, while posting my regular content on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.  I am also in the process of shutting down my department's Twitter account for good. This new wave of migration has brought a few people out of the woodwork, both on Mastodon and on the Mastodon subreddit, asking why people are moving to Bluesky (or even threads) and not to Mastodon. They also get on their high horse about it, but let's talk about that later. I think that Mastodon had a major  advantage in 2022 when Musk bought Twitter.  They were really the only game in town. There was no Threads, there was no Bluesky.  There were some weird Crypto-based microblogs, like Nostr; or blasts from the past like Plurk. I'm...

Miseristhenes the Socialmediaite This is part V of my  all the things(!!!)  blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my  professional  hobbies.   In this post, I turn my attention to social media! The topic that connects us, and divides us, and has gotten the "it's complicated" label since Elon Musk bought and fucked up the Twitter sandbox. Yes, while Twitter still eXists, the busting up of Twitter, and the rendering of it useless, has created a bit of an interesting dilemma and has fostered a working reality that is just rather f*cking tiring 🙄. But first thing's first, let's take a step back and examine the current state a bit. A few colleagues and I started pulling some strings and looking at our digital identities and networks in  Lines of Flight: The Digital Fragmenting of Educational Networks . I think a lot more work can be done in this domain,...

  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...

I was reading Twitter the other daaayyy (just picture someone from Letterkenny saying this😜) and I came upon yet another discussion that basically boiled down to online (or remote) versus face-to-face. I made the mistake of reading the replies🙄.   On the one hand, I was hoping that there would be a more nuanced discussion (and to be fair, I did get those types of replies from people I follow), but there were so many more about "online not being for everyone,"  about how people who teach face to face can "see if their points are landing and if learners are confused," or how "face to face is easier for building community" (maybe for you extroverts...🤨), or even "online works great if you love reading information off a screen and taking self-paced tests" (someone's learning like it's 1999...🤣) and other such (insert word/phrase of your choice). Obviously, the quotes are paraphrased. I became upset and irritated reading such non-sense pos...

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...

For as long as I can remember (well...for the last 10 years anyway) I've been able to participate in at least 2 our of 3 virtual conferences that the OLC (formerly Sloan-C) put on.  I've never been able to attend in person (for a variety of reasons), but I've always liked to have the ability to participate, even remotely.   I am often on twitter during the live sessions tweeting away with commentary. It's a lot of fun, and I've "met" a variety of interesting individuals through this. A couple of years ago I was not able to participate in #et4online (now #OLCinnovate) because the school I work for didn't have the funds to "send" me virtually. I have to say that I really missed the opportunity to participate, even remotely, at this professional development conference. I kept an eye on the twitter stream but things didn't make as much sense. The reaction, and #OLCsnark didn't connect with me because I was missing a piece of the puz...

In my continuous quest to go to Pocket-Zero (may be a losing battle since I keep adding interesting stuff to read), I came across a post from a friend and colleague, Rebecca, who was discussing and brainstorming a bit about the ethics of research in twitter communities . As a quick synopsis, of the  hot button issue (at least from what I interpreted), was that in one instance (mature) researchers were researching a more general hashtag on twitter and this seemed to be OK, while in another instance a younger researcher (high school student) was researching a hashtag specific to breast cancer and social media, where a level of trust seemed to have been breached.  So, the question is: what is fair game in social media research? Specifically Rebecca asks What are the ethical obligations of anyone wishing to conduct research/analysis on a twitter community of care? Are the obligations different if the community is not care based? (e.g. #lrnchat) . My initial thinking is tha...

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...

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205135659/What-MOOCs-can-do-for-the-Traditional-Online-Classroom-Part-II Introduction 2014 is upon us! We are now a couple of years from the big MOOC “explosion” in the news, and since we’ve gone to both extremes, too much optimism and too much pessimism, about what MOOCs can and can’t do, it’s now time to have a more refined look at MOOCs and their potential to cross-pollinate with, and positively influence the direction, and practices, of traditional online courses. As with the previous article in this series, I’ll just refer to MOOCs in general.   The reason for this is that MOOCs are experimental, and we’ve seen a lot of experimenting over the lifespan of MOOCs these past six years. These include cMOOCs, xMOOC, pMOOCs, sMOOCs, and other MOOCs that have yet to be named.   It’s now time to start thinking about what can best be borrowed from MOOC practices into traditional online le...

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forum A couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems , you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come up based on your usage pattern of the system. Now, those systems aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they can serve as ways of finding some diamond in the rough that you didn't know exist.  Think about it, both in a shopping or entertainment venue, and a MOOC you have one potentially huge issue: limited time to devote, a large sea of information to go through in order to find what might entertain you, or pique your intellectual interest and  get you engaged with some subject.  Last summer, at the end of Campus Technology 2013, I was having food and dr...