Learning Together: Peer Tutoring in Higher Education by Nancy FalchikovMy rating: 3 of 5 stars Not a bad book. "Tutoring" in this book means anything between an the work that an "more knowledgeable other" (Vygotsky) does, to teaching assistants. There is quite a broad range to work with, and an interesting book to consult when thinking both about course design and program-level design.

Learning Together and Alone: Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualistic Learning by David W. JohnsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars Interesting book looking at individual, competitive, and collaborative learning. The framing of the book is more K-12, but I can see applications to higher education. Definitely worth at least a quick look through both by instructors and instructional designers.

I was logging into audiobook today to setup some short welcome notes for a workshop I am facilitating this coming week when I saw the attached notice... I guess the free ride for Audioboom (formerly audioboo) is over.  Luckily my workshop ends before the deadline for me to start paying, so here's to one last free ride...

For the past few weeks I've been facilitating a workshop on Social Media in Online Education.  The following graphic in one of the participant's final presentations made me smile :-)

Well... that was... interesting to say the least!Just yesterday I was writing about Lore going away...it seems that Pearson is also getting out of the LMS business as well.  I noticed this on Pearson's OpenClass website:OpenClass will retire on January 1, 2018On January 1, 2018, OpenClass will no longer be available to faculty, students, or administrators, and as of today, no new accounts will

Well, I guess the free LMS/social network Lore is going away soon!  I just got this email message the other day from the folks at Lore:I had joined Lore back in the days when it was called CourseKit.  The product, and the company, was created by a bunch of undergraduate students who wanted their face to face professors to use technology in the classroom - at least that's what the lore is...

I was reading an article that I had started in my google reader last week called "What are we assessing". This reminds me a lot of my undergraduate days as a learner of the German Language (and any language that I had taken for that matter). The name of the game was learn enough grammar and vocabulary necessary to pass the test and the test after that, until the semester ends. This of course got

Like the pun? academian + yawn =… oh never mind!I never said I was a comedian ;-)Anyway, in the past couple of years I’ve been thinking of a doctorate. I have discovered that I like to teach, so I thought that I may be able to do it for a living at a college level, which requires a PhD (or some doctorate thereof). I’ve been frustrated with PhD programs though. Most are full time, which means