Multilitteratus Incognitus

These past couple of weeks, along with some projects I am working on with colleagues, I am also trying to make some headway for my fall class, EDDE 805, which is the first of two doctoral seminars. From what I can see from the abbreviated syllabus (love that it's just posted on the web!) one of the assignments is an analysis of dissertations of people who are already doctors  in our field.  The assignment is as follows: Short presentations in two-weekly synchronous sessions facilitated by the instructor (schedule to be determined in week 1). In each synchronous session between weeks 3 - 11, two students will present a review and respond to questions on these reviews of two outstanding dissertations relevant to their field of research, for 20 minutes each. Reviews should include consideration of specific points of quality or lack thereof, the good/bad aspects, and what information, research processes, ideas, theoretical approaches or organizational structures could...

It took a while for me to get this post started.  Conferences are great, but between being physically tired, and having to catch up on other work (that wasn't done while at the conference), it means that some things that require more bandwidth get kicked a little further down the road :-) In any case, I thought I would write a little bit about my first time being an onsite Buddy (sBuddy - "oBuddy" seemed weird as a term) for virtually connecting. I've been a virtual buddy (vBuddy) quite a few times over the past year (or has it been 2? I don't remember), and I thought it would be cool to be an sBuddy at Campus Technology and AAEEBL this year.  I did not expect it to be a lot more work than usual, however I learned that being an sBuddy is actually much more work (or at least I ended up making it much more work, even if it isn't). For quite a few years (7 years by my count) I've been attending Campus Technology and AAEEBL on a press pass.  First, as...

From the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at University of Mary Washington this week :-)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with Rebecca Petersen.  Enjoy :)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with Amy Collier, Stephen Downes, And Abby Machson-Carter.  Enjoy :)

A little self-archiving here for a couple of vConnecting sessions that we did last week at Campus Technology and AAEEBL in Boston.  This particular one is with George Station and Bryan Alexander.  Enjoy :)

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology . One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and the other begin in this process?  It's a good question, and like many questions, the answer is "it depends".  The metaphor that I use is the one that calls back to two sides of the same coin.  In order for instruction to ultimately be successful you need both sides to work together.  An excellent design will fail in the hands of a bad instructor, and a bad design will severely hold back a good instructor (assuming that there is an instructor and it's not self-paced learning). There is the other side too: as instructional design students we were told that we would be w...

Εύρηκα! (eureka) There is nothing like a deadline to get you going - that's all I have to say!  A while back, like last January or something, a colleague asked me if I would be interested in presenting at an IALLT webinar on a topic of my choosing - it just had to do with technology and education.  I generally don't have a problem with coming up with topic to talk about, but this particular topic gave me pause to ponder.  While I can talk about pedagogy and technology in general, pedagogy and technology in the context of a language classroom is not something I actively think about. I know, it's a bit odd since I have both an MA in Applied Linguistics and I work for a department of applied linguistics!  My own research ponderings have taken me away from the linguistic side of things, although like dark side  it's alluring and I often think about it. Anyway, I couldn't really come up with a topic then and there because EDDE 804 was taking up all of my bra...

I wasn't particularly inspired by week 2 of CLMOOC ...at least no muses were speaking to me. So cleared my mind     and went through CLMOOC's timeline on Facebook with an empty mind and submerged myself in the stream. A posting by Stephanie Loomis popped out  - an article on Hybrid Pedagogy . I read it. It was interesting. You should read it. I remixed the image. ;-) Enjoy.

It feels like forever ago that I actually posted something by text on the blog. This summer has been much more action packed than I had anticipated.  Between teaching, virtually connecting, and taking my own course, MDDE 702, there hasn't been a dull moment! I am actually quite happy that I ended up taking the refresher course on qualitative research methods. While the concepts weren't new to me, I did love the opportunity to actually work on part of my dissertation proposal and receive some feedback before I actually start the seminar in which I develop the first good draft of my proposal (EDDE 805). I also liked being the same course as members of other cohorts. This gives me both an opportunity to see what's a little down the road for me, by observing and talking to people in the cohorts ahead of me, and it gives me an opportunity to relive some of the things that I already went through these past few years, via cohorts that started after my own cohort started....