Multilitteratus Incognitus

Derby Wharf, Salem, MA - Jan 2015 (Storm: Juno) I am sure that last one is a word I just made up on the spot. It's been a slow week in 802.  I was reading Lisa's reflection on Lurking in 802 (she is in last year's cohort, so she is two courses ahead of us in Cohort 7), and how she viewed 802 at the time as a make or break experience for the Ed.D. program.  While 801 last semester was a whirlwind tour of Online and Distance Education , this semester is a whirlwind tour (or boot-camp perhaps) on the topic of Research and how to go about doing it.  The textbook, by Cohen and the gang , is something that I have read before (a few year ago), but this doesn't help a ton ;-)  There is a lot to unpack, and this book is dense.  Even if one could memorize everything (not a good way to learn, by the way), it's like going to philosophy course - you are there essentially to argue for and support your stance. You are also called upon to explain your underlying fra...

One of the nice things about being a language geek and an academic is that you get access to research that has been published in other languages.  In addition to English I fare quite well with research written in French, Italian, and Greek. Even though I don't have any formal experience with learning Spanish I could probably get the gist of Spanish articles based on my familiarity of French and Italian.  When it comes to writing (producing language), the process is a bit painful.  My academic vocabulary isn't as developed in the other languages and the necessary stylistics of research publications in other languages is a skill that I don't yet have. I am actually quite interested in developing that competency just for my own edification, but I would love to be able to publish research in other languages, with practice comes more familiarity and ability to use those languages anyway, and that's a goal that I strive toward.  That said, I started pondering the ...

Alright, I made that last one up (probably).  This week (Week 2/14) in EDDE 802 we are tackling knowing, ways of knowing, "valid" knowledge and ways of known, frameworks for research and so on.  It's quite a huge topic, and something that even seasoned researchers keep coming back to and analyzing, debating, discussing, and re-evaluating. The prodding question this week to get our mental gears kicking is one of introspection - looking at our own beliefs and world views and seeing how those fit with defined ontologies and epistemologies that we are reading in the textbook. The nice thing is that when I was preparing to teach my own (MEd level) research methods course the textbook we are using was the same (a previous edition, but the same nevertheless), so between my own experience as a learner (at the MA level) in research methods, my own experience designing and teaching a course, and now the experience of being back in the learner's seat has indicated one thing to...

Week 1 of 15, of semester 2 of 8, of doctoral work is about to end!  The course that my cohort is focusing on this semester is a research methods course . Luckily neither I, nor it seems many of my classmates, are that new to research methods.  It's nice to have the group (or at least quite a few members of the group) exposed to the basics so that we can spend some time in critiquing and going deeper (and that's something we did on our cohort's facebook group this week anyway).  I also appreciate the fact the course isn't setup to only allow for one path through the course.  There are certainly foundational materials that we are expected to read and know, but for presentations it seems like we have a ton of choices in terms of what research methods we choose to present. I've been thinking about the assignments and I think I will spend some time exploring research methods that I haven't had a ton of exposure in, or methods that I've been meaning to go muc...

In a recent posting about doctoral degrees ("academic" versus "professional" ) there was one line of thought that I meant to explore, but I really neglected because it didn't quite fit in with the post the way it was ultimately flowed. In the ACM eLearn article that really got my mental gears going, and to which my post was a response to, the professional doctor "is more likely to consume research" (para. 5). I find this statement  problematic on many levels with regard to to a doctoral degree, and the false differentiation between a PhD and an EdD, but I also find it problematic when I think of Higher Education in general.  My initial thoughts (last week) were that students, at the end of their Masters level studies should "consume" research, they shouldn't have to wait until their complete a doctorate in order to consume research.  After some time pondering the point I started wondering if we've come to a point in Higher Educ...

Alright, being now back from my mini vacation, and back into the regular rhythm of work, reading, and very soon classes, I've caught up with a lot of my saved Pocket articles.  The one thing I saw is, still, the very schizo nature of MOOC reporting and commentary. This reminds me a bit of the headlines, back in the day on Engadget and other tech sites, about studies on cell phones causing/not causing cancer. In the MOOC context this is about whether or not MOOCs (in their many forms?) are/aren't good, revolutionary, the best-thing-since-sliced-bread, etc. Sometimes I feel like the Charlie Brooker of the field of education when I write these, but hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Right before the holiday break, one of my colleagues sent me an article from Technology Review which he thought I should publicly respond to (being the crazy MOOCie that I am).  The article is What are MOOCs good for ? and I may have read this a while back, but probably didn't real...

Happy new year to all! The other day I was catching up on some reading in my Pocket account when I read an article in eLearn Magazine about online doctorates . I feel like I should have a grumpy-cat image on this blog with a big "no" on it since there were a number of things that seemed really wrong to me about this article. Some of them are probably the author's interpretation, or way of explicating things, and other things are wide-spread academia myths (in my view). I think the article author intends well, as the crux of the article seems to be to research things well before you commit to any online program, but things seem to go awry in explanations.  First the author writes: As the number of master's students from the initial flush of fully online degrees stabilizes, those interested in increased revenue streams have opened up the university gates wide and have started to look to doctoral-level education for the next big democratization of higher educati...

[warning: lengthier post than usual] Before I left for December my mini vacation I had a holiday themed catch-up with a number of friends and colleagues on campus. With the semester winding down, and with the holidays as an excuse it was a good opportunity for people to get together and share some news about what had transpired over the past semester, share notes, best practices, and so on. One of my colleagues inquired how things are going in the office as far as admissions go. There seems to be some doom and gloom over falling admission on campus, but that's a topic for another day. Things are going well in my department (knock on wood), so much so that we are not able to admit all qualified applicants since we don't have enough people to teach for us. My colleague's solution (my colleague is a full time instructional designer, for what it's worth) was that we need to "change the model," instead of relying on tenure stream professors to teach our cou...

It's the final stretch of 2014! This makes it my fourth year in exploring MOOCs - boy does time fly!  When I started off with LAK11 I was really just looking for ways to continue learning for free.  While I do get a tuition benefit at work, this also involves standard semesters of 13 weeks, getting work-release time (since online learning isn't covered by the benefit) and retaining the motivation to keep going through a predefined course and syllabus.  Even when MobiMOOC happened and we formed the MobiMOOC research team I really didn't foresee that the, oddly named, MOOC would catch on fire the way it did.  At the time I was eager to get some initial thoughts together on how to put together a MOOC (now they are called cMOOCs) and put together a Great Big MOOC Book , with others, that was a right mix of research and practice.  Since the MOOC has really expanded a lot over the years, with many different things being called a "MOOC" the original idea might be be...

Hey!  We've made it! It's the final blog post about #dalmooc... well... the final blog post with regard to the paced course on Edx anyway :)  Since we're now in vacation territory, I've decided to combine Weeks 9 and 10 of DALMOOC into one week.   These last two weeks have been a little light on the DALMOOC side, at least for me.  Work, and other work-related pursuits, made my experimentation with LightSIDE a little light (no pun intended).  I did go through the videos for these two weeks and I did pick out some interesting things to keep in mind as I move through this field. First, the challenges with this sort of endeavor: First we have data preparation. This part is important since you can't just dump from a database into programs like LightSIDE. Data needs some massaging before we can do anything with it.  I think this was covered in a previous week, but I think it needs to be mentioned again since there is no magic involved, just hard work! T...