The other day I was reading a recent post by Jenny Mackness on questions about being open. Jenny had attended the recent ALT-C conference and was responding to a fellow ALT-C participant's questions on openness.  Specifically Viv Rofle ponders:I’m questioning not just openness by my motives behind wanting to contribute to it.What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of

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

A report from the field....Traveling home is a good opportunity to catch up with posts made by fellow #rhizo15  participants. It's also a good time to read books and articles. I thought that for this commute I would go to rhizo because Latour is taking forever to make his point in the Actor-Network Theory book I am reading for another rhizo project.I just read a post, by fellow participation,

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 Introduction2014 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

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forumA 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

I don't often read Inside Higher Education these days. I used to gobble it up, but I've found that a lot of the content seems to be off-base opinion (and when there is real news, the RSS feed doesn't give you anything but the title, so I refuse to take that bait - give me at least some content).In any case, I came across a blog post by Joshua Kim the other day with the topic of 9 Academic Freedoms

I came across Charles Jennings's piece the other day titled "Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises." It's quite a fascinating read and I encourage all of you to read through it and think about it. This piece reminded me of my Knowledge Management days as an MBA student, and as an Instructional Design student in thinking about corporate learning. A few nights

Last weekend I finished reading the book Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation. It was an interesting book, recommended for both Instructional Designers and Language Teachers alike. Some chapters as admittedly better than others, but as a whole the book was quite good (related note: follow me on GoodReads).Hot on the heels of this I came across a post on ProfHacker called "How

I was reading Inside Higher Ed earlier this week and there was an interesting list (similar to Educause's 7-things lists) about what define a learning technologists.Out of this list these three points are quite interesting to me, and quite possibly define my weltsanschauung with regard to educational technology and my likes at work.We learning technologists share a healthy skepticism towards the dominant

I was reading a post titled Language learning, critical thinking and the role of the teacher on the linguist the other day and I was really surprised. Now granted I am not a member of his list-serv, perhaps I should be to get the whole story, even though ESL isn't my immediate field of interest.Now long story short here, it appears that some people have their feathers ruffled because of the belief

I came across this post on the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks back about a revolt of sorts that is happening in some pockets of academia. Many people seem sick of Blackboard (and in my opinion its anti-competitive tactics) and seem to want to move to different instructional technology media.I don't blame them. Blackboard has become the Frankenmonster of the LMS world. If a new feature comes

I came across this presentation about blogs in Education a while back (see end of post). I actually think that blogs are a quite useful tool in an educational environment. For the student, if the blog is student-based, it provides an opportunity to start building a portfolio of academic work. The research papers that the student writes can be posted in blog format. Obviously if the paper is 30, 40,

I was reading this post on Dangeously Irrelevent.Most of their posts I like, however this one left me with a "WTF?!" grimace. The topic is 5 clever powerpoint tips. Some tips are actually good, like creating a custom slide show and hyperliking to a new presentation.There are two tips that are just not well thought out.The first is to "start creating your presentations in widescreen format"I hadn’t

Well OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but it's quite interesting.I thought that for the last post of May it would make sense to close the month with something linguistics related given that this semester was all linguistics all the time :-) I was reading this article on Slate called There's No Klingon Word for Hello. I honestly didn't expect it to be so interesting! For instance I did not

I don't rant often...or rather I hope I don't rant often, however I think this will be a a ranting post. I was reading Jane's e-learning blog, specifically a post on how the future of e-learning is social.ALL learning is social, at least all the learning had in a school, with an instructor and other students in the room. Recently I keep hearing about Web 2.0 and social learning and it amazes me to

Anytime a bozo takes the stage and proclaims something radical it seems to stir up the educational community. In similar vain an article circulated the interwebs a few weeks ago about David Wiley who is getting a ton of publicity over his comments that College will be obsolete by 2020. I suppose in David's case bad press is good press....In any case his idea that colleges will be obsolete by 2020

I was reading a post the other day called Who owns information. It's been quite a few years since my Knowledge Management class, but I think I've read the article that Jane is referring to.I think the question here is not Who owns the information, but rather Why do you share information. In my knowledge management class we went through different ideas a tactics to use to get employees who have a wealth

I was reading this blog post on Donald Clark's blog on the subject of twitter followers. Luckily the incidents that he describes are not happening to me with as much frequency - because my tweets are private. I follow about 50 people, and 40 people follow me. The people I follow I want to follow, and the people that follow me are people that I think are interesting and I would like to interact with.Of

I was reading this article on insidehighered.com the other day.All I have to say is BRILLIANT! (OK, maybe I am getting a bit carried away here)While the article doesn't point out much new information (for me anyways - sorry, I don't mean to sound like a snob), it manages to point out that a lecture is not an inherent ability that you are either born with or you are not. It's is a skill, an art dare

I had a good laugh when I read this over at the PowerPoint Ninja. The author goes though a list of the different types of bad PowerPoint presenter types (although I find that sometimes these types intermix).It's no surprise that I've survived a number of bad PowerPoint presentations. The most annoying ones are the Reader, the Apologist and the Wanderer. This tells me that they've spent NO time actually

I was reading an article called Knowledge Overload over at Inside Higher Ed about a month ago. It was quite an interesting article. I've personally experienced information overload in the last few years by discovering new blogs and information sources and it was interesting to see an academic perspective.I won't really go into the whole article, you should head over and read it if academia and academic

In the past number of months I've been reading the Brazen Careerist, and I've seen a number of blog posts that can essentially be boiled down to this: "I could have learned what I learned in college on my own!" Now I've also seen a blog post on the UMassOnline Blog about the debate over three year colleges, and I see more connections.There are a few things that people should understand about college,

I saw this over at the PowerPoint ninja a while back and decided that it would be a good resource to post on here for all the PowerPoint n00bs.It's the PowerPoint Design Triangle - similar to any good-ol' project management/competing attention type of paradigm (gah! I used that word again!)Have a look - it's worth at least five minutes of your time :-)

I was recently reading through the post titled IDs - It's time for some seriously tough love when I came across the following closing statement:When you look at the job titles, you see things like content analyst, technical writer, screen writer, video producer, project manager, budget manager, evaluator, test-writer, statistician, graphic artist, web designer, content author, scripter, coder, analyst.

I was recently reading Jay Cross's article on the Chief Learning Officer on Getting Rid of the Training Department, followed by his post on New Roles for former trainers.The following quote summarizes the whole thing quite nicely:When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes, we don’t suggest firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them as connectors, wiki

I came across this article recently on Community Managers.For the past year or so, ever since I created a Ning community for the Instructional Design program, and helped/consulted on the creation of a Community for the Applied Linguistics online program, I've been advocating for a community manager for all online programs.What I've noticed is that there is a void in-between semesters, especially for

I came across this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently. It was an interesting read. I can't really speak to the financial information they give because I am not involved in that area of university management. I did however have a couple of comments on other topics...Millions of workers have lost their jobs in recent months. But tenured professors are hard to fire. And some powerful faculty

...well it depends on what you mean by "Education"I was reading the UMassOnlineBlog the other day and I saw this article by a guest blogger. I thought to myself seriously? They are going to tax education? It drew me in, until I read that it wasn't really about Distance Education...The relevant piece of information here is this:The department asserts that an e-course offered by SkillSoft Corporation,

I was catching up on my Omniglot Blog unread posts and I came across this post asking people When is a language dead? This whole discussion come up because Manx was declared as a dead language even though there are still speakers of the language.The range of opinions posted in the comments was quite interesting, and it serves to point out there is not consensus on when a language is dead, or in some

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group.One

I came across a blog post entitled The Great ID Debate the other day. I actually found it quite interesting to read.I found the last three paragraphs quite poignant:Think about it - these days a good ID needs to be able to write instructional objective. Conduct a content analysis. And an audience analysis. Measure job/performance outcomes. Write a criterion referenced test Create a shared collaborative

It seems odd that you could analyze a blog as a personality type, but I suppose word analysis and construction of ideas could be computed in an algorythm.Typealyzer does an MBTI test for blogs. According to it, this blog is an INTJ (which kinda goes along with my personality).This is their description of this blog.The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking

Just as I've started taking a course called "structure of the English Language", which deals with English Grammar, here comes a blog post called "there is no grammar".OK, now that the other blog got your attention, I think that I agree with the original blogger. Grammar is a construct made up to understand the language we speak. From a language learner's perspective though is it useful to start learning

I recently came across a blog post on engaged learning dot net called convincing others to blog.I read it and I found it quite interesting. As someone how's got four blogs already, I know that there is value to speaking about things you like and topics where you may be a subject matter expert. The time commitment to blog is not very taxing. If you know what you are talking about you can write a blog

Recently, while clearing out my Google Starred Items, I ran across this article on the Linguist that I meant to read - but it slipped through my radar.I do have to agree with Steve on some points. If you are strictly a linguist, the teaching terminology is jargon that just doesn't make sense. This is one of the reasons I decided to do a dual master's degree in Instructional Design and Applied Linguistics.

Back to instructional & educational technology during the winter break.Over the past few months a number of things have happened:1. We've seen IT departments bitten by the budget shortfall bug, and IT departments are looking at how they can be lean and mean.2. We've seen colleges contemplating stopping services like email that students can get for free and often have prior to entering college.3. Boston