Multilitteratus Incognitus

Continuing on my quest for 'inbox zero' for Pocket, here is another interesting post that deals with the personality of the instructor in the teaching and learning endeavor . There are actually two interesting strands here, one that deals with the instructor themselves, and one that deals with material creation.  I'll tackle the material creation first as I find that this is what piqued my initial interest.  Martin Weller writes a little bit about creating materials for the Open University and taking on the role of a member of the content creation team, as opposed to having his own personality. I find this interesting on two counts. First, in my own online education I have not, prior to starting my doctorate at Athabasca, attended an Open University. Through some of the coursework (namely EDDE 801) I got to see what some of the course packs look like in an Open University setting (assuming that some of the MEd materials shared with us are what a stereotypical course p...

I am finally catching up with my Pocket reading list, again!  This seems to be a fool's errand since it just keeps filling up again with interesting things to read and ponder ;-).  In any case, Rebecca recently was pondering on her blog if Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) is an appropriate method for a dissertation.   Rebecca, as far as I know, is currently ABD and looking at wrapping up her degree - I have no doubt that soon she will be Dr. Rebecca :-). I think that there are many reasons why CAE is a good approach to researching certain things. I am introducing my own bias here when I say that I prefer working with others on research projects and on publishing.  I've written some things myself, and there is a benefit to the lone researcher with his readings, literature reviews, data crunching, and data analysis.  It's sort of like going to the gym on your own and working out on your own.  It has its place.  That said, despite the fact that ...

This month I decided that it was high time I started preparing for the fall semester.  Sure, my third class  - EDDE803 -(and third semester) of my EdD program is 2 months away, however since I have the books (thank you Athabasca for planning ahead! :-) ), why not start now that I am a little more relaxed?  The first book that I just finished is by Diana Laurillard Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology . This book was on my to-read list on Goodread for a while, so I am quite happy to finally get an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The book makes, in my mind, a valid point that teaching should be approached from a design science perspective, implementing, analyzing, tweaking, analyzing some more, tweaking again, and so on. As I was reading this book I was thinking back to the process of instructional design. Instructional design is iterative in nature and there are many elements of this book (if not all of...

"Instructional Designer" - by AK & Net Art Generator - for #CLMOOC Continuing on my quest to read through what I've accumulated in my Pocket account, I came across a blog with the title  Learning Experience Design: A Better Title Than Instructional Design? The title was catchy enough for me to save it to pocket for later reading (which seemed to be forever ago).  In any case, Christy seems to be making the point that people, who are not in the field of instructional design, are perplexed when someone tells them that they are Instructional Designers, or that they earned their degree in Instructional Design.  What the heck does that mean?  What is an instructional designer qualified to do? This is a good conversation to have over a drink or a cup of coffee, but since my instructional designer friends are nowhere to be found, it's blogging time! That's a good question, and I am sure that if you ask 10 different instructional designers what they do, ther...

"Fractured Spock" - by me and Net Art Generator, for #clmooc Over the past couple of years, since the silly acronym "SPOC" was invented to denote a course that was the antithesis to the MOOC, a Small Private Online Course , I've had issues with the acronym, and took exception to this new discovery  on the part of schools that newly invented  this form of education, considering that there are schools that have been doing it since the early aughts. In any case, I was finally going through my Pocket account today, trying to read as many things as I've saved for later reading since Rhizo15 when I came across a couple of articles that really made me roll my eyes a bit and made me want to facepalm... The first article is a featured article in Harvard Magazine, July/August issue, titled Is Small Beautiful? This was a fairly quick read, but I couldn't help but think that this was mostly a PR piece on the part of Harvard and Harvardx. There is a lot ...

Well, the count down has begun for Campus Technology (and AAEBL) 2015 :-)  I am looking forward to this conference!  I just got a press release about the keynote speakers of the conference (pasted after this message).  The names are ones that I don't recognize, but the institutions seem pretty interesting.  I bet I will most likely have some snarky tweets, but I'll do my best to take the snarkyness (especially when it comes to MOOCs). Higher-Ed Conference Attendees to Connect with Nationally Acclaimed Tech Leaders BOSTON –  Higher education technology leaders will gather at Campus Technology (CT) 2015 in Boston July 27-30 to share their experiences and strategies for innovating colleges and universities across the country. Throughout the four-day conference, these five keynote speakers will equip attendees with the tools they need to lead their campus innovation and vision:  Beth Porter ,  Paul LeBlanc ,  Shawn Nason ,  Jordan Brehove...

I've been thinking about what the post for the second week of CLMOOC, whose theme this week is re-mediation . I was thinking of several ideas, all of which require media skills beyond what I have (and what I have time to learn at the moment), so it looked like a busted week for me (even though I am quite comfortable being a peripheral member in this community).  Then, cats provided inspiration. Here is the original medium: For those that don't know, this is Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the protagonist of 3 Assassin's Creed games. One of the maxim's of the creed is "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted'.  Hence remediation, step 1: Now, last year we got a little crazy cat who seemed to embody the crazyness of young Ezio in Assassin's Creed 2. I named him Ezio because he liked high places, and ran throughout the house in as crazy manner as I made Ezio run through Florence.  Here is remediation 2:

Drumroll please!  This is it!  The final Latour conversation (at least as far as his book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory goes.  It's been fun, Latour, but I have a pile of MOOC articles that aren't going to read themselves (note to voice technology people. I need a computer to read things to me like Majel Barrett does in Star Trek - voice of the computer.  The mechanical voice on my Android keeps mispronouncing things...)  So, the theme of this final write up is Connecting sites ... With ANT, we push theory one step further into abstraction: it is a negative, empty, relativistic grid that allows us not to synthesize the ingredients of the social in the actor’s place. Since it’s never substantive, it never possesses the power of the other types of accounts. But that’s just the point. Social explanations have of late become too cheap, too automatic; they have outlived their expiration dates—and critical explanations ev...

Alright!  Just as #clmooc is starting, I am finishing off Latour!  Here is part 2, of a 3 part wrap-up on Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.  Once he discussed 5 uncertainties, now we're looking at re-assembling the social. Just as before, I've pulled one some quotes that made me go "huh!" when I was reading  the book (finished it a few weeks ago), and I am reacting to them more fully now - that is if I can remember why something made me go "huh!" This section started with the term  glocalization.  I just wanted to start off this post by saying that I hate the term glocalization. It is meaningless, and this comes from someone with an MBA background. It's just one of those buzz words thrown around - but anyway, don't let my cranky-pants attitude spoil this post ;-) How is the local itself being generated? This time it is not the global that is going to be localized, it is the local that has to be re...

I was walking to the train station yesterday, and my eye caught this.  My mobile phone's camera also caught it.  Was pretty pleased about it. Hey CLMOOC! btw - I signed up for the newsletter for CLMOOC 2014. I was wondering why I didn't get anything. Good thing I joined the Fb group and saw all these un-intros, otherwise I'd still be left wondering...