Summer is usually the time for some professional development, after all during the academic year things are going at such a fast and furious pace that it doesn't leave much time (let alone brain/mind-space) to undertake much professional development.  This summer (because of "factors") professional development was not as easy going as it has been the past few years, so I needed to pick a

Well, my proposal (basically half my dissertation) is off to the internal members of my committee. Many thanks go to the help of my doctoral supervisors who've asked a lot of questions of my previous drafts and helped me refine my writing :-)Now the next step (assuming the committee likes my submitted draft) is to both find an external reviewer for this, and also defend it so that I can move onto the

The other day Paul Prinsloo posted this Guardian article on Facebook, and it seems like a popular article because Shyam Sharma (among others in my online educational social network and PLN posted it). As usual my PLN got me thinking (and, as is evidenced by this blog post, creatively procrastinating and not really working on my dissertation proposal...D'oh! 😜).  This blog post started life

I tried to come up with a witty title for this post, but I guess maybe it's didn't work out ;-).  Anyway...yesterday as I was working on my proposal I thought "hey...I haven't seen George Siemens blog recently..." which also made  me wonder when the last time I blogged was. Not as long as George (that's for sure ;-) ) but long enough.  So I thought I'd pull together some random streams

Yet another post that started as a comment on something that Paul Prinsloo posted on facebook (I guess I should be blaming facebook and Paul for getting me to think of things other than my dissertation :p hahaha).Anyway,  Paul posted an IHE story about a research study which indicates that instructional designers (IDers) think that they would benefit from conducting research in their field (teaching

It's been a while since I last just sat down to think and write about something (like the good old days when I was cMOOCing...).  These past few weeks have been about conferences, and getting back on track with my dissertation proposal (although I think I am the only one who is keeping a score on that at this point).In my attempt to get back to writing, and engaging with friends and colleagues

If you've ever seen the movie Shaun of the Dead, a humorous take on the surviving the zombie apocalypse, you are familiar with the Winchester plan.  The Winchester is a local (to the protagonist) pub, and it key to surviving the zombie apocalypse - according to the protagonist, is taking a short skip-and-a-hop to the local pub (after doing a couple of short tasks) and waiting for help to arrive

Last year, around this time of year, I went on a fun little academic detour. A colleague from overseas (Suzan) invited me to work with her on a conference paper for last year's Networked Learning conference.  While we worked on it we came up with the concept of Hybrid Presence which Suzan presented for us (since I could not attend in person) and we worked on an expanded version of the paper which

It's amazing how much access to the internet is really woven into our daily lives.  For the past 2 weeks I've been away on vacation in Spain.  Before we left home I tried to be proactive, I scanned some of the book chapters that were due for my class while I was away, I got Assignment 1 done before I left, and I downloaded articles onto my Surface Pro so that I had reading material to go

While the DigPedChat on the topic is a month behind us, I am only now getting to it ;-)  So, after reading this post by Sean Micheal Morris on Digital Pedagogy I thought I would tackle some of the questions posed for discussion.  Feel free to leave a response, or link to your own blog post via comment :-)What does it mean to perform teaching? What does it mean to perform learning? These

The past several weeks felt a little like a marathon and a spring combined while our team was getting ready to present on our topic.  For the second assignment for EDDE 804 we explored and proposed leadership implications and educational interventions for a complex issue in society.  The subject we selected was sexual harassment and assault in the armed forces (specifically in Canada).  Paper

Even though this semester is relatively calm, compared to last semester, I still find myself not writing as much as I think I would like.  I've set aside, temporarily, the book I was meant to have finished reviewing last October, on MOOCs, until the semester ends and I can focus on them a little more. One reason for the refocus of energies is EDDE 804. We are focusing on leadership in education,

Socrates Badge, by @merryspanielIt's a bit hard to believe, but two years ago - around this time of year - I was scurrying to get my application into Athabasca University to have my application considered for Cohort 7.  The deadline for Athabasca's program is at the same time as the deadline for my department (January 15th), so I was trying to make sure that my recommendations were all in order.

I've been trying to catch up with things I've saved in my Pocket reading list over the course of this past semester, and one of the articles (or blog posts?) came across was about how MOOCs have failed to democratize education, and given that this was one of the fundamental goals of MOOCs this is a problem.I don't think I know where exactly this goal, or rhetoric, about democratizing education came

Now that school is over, and grading is almost over for the course I am teaching this semester, I finally have an opportunity to go through and continue my quest to read existing MOOC literature.  I had started this past September reading a collection of articles in an IGI publication titled Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses which I got electronically for a limited

Well, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I

For the past semester I've mostly ignored synchronous learning on coursera.  Instead of consuming materials as they are released, I log in once a week, download the videos for the course, and I keep them in my video library.  If there are textual materials available as well, I donwload those, but I tend to focus more on video materials. When inspiration (or curiosity) strikes, I dive into

Time seems to be on fast forward these days.  Either that or I have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them in.  When did week 5 just end?  Time flies when you're having fun, and when you have a ton of your plate I guess.  The past couple of weeks on EDDE 803 have been relatively 'quiet'.  We haven't had discussion forums, and our live session was cancelled due

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

If I think about it long enough...I would say that rubber has met the road, with week 2 of EDDE803 almost over. People have started being active in the course forums, interesting perspectives and illustrative stories are shared and discussed, and projects are in progress! This semester we are joined by two members of Cohort 6, who I think will be added to our cohort, and thus adding to the diversity

With Campus Technology behind us, I've got some free time to compose some thoughts on what I experienced this year in Boston.  I like going to Campus Tech each year as I have an opportunity to attend some sessions, see what the EdTech vendors are up to, and meet with new and existing colleagues.  One of the keynotes this year, by SNHU (Southern New Hampshire University) President was really

"Instructional Designer" - by AK & Net Art Generator- for #CLMOOCContinuing 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

This week in Rhizo15 we are talking about content.  RhizoDave (I think I've decided that's Dave Cormier's new nickname - or his superhero name) has asked us to stretch and pull the word "content" and see what we come up with.  The phrase "content is king" has already come up somewhere in Rhizo15 - it may have been on twitter or Facebook, but I guess that's just one of those phrases that

This week has been rough in the office.  We learned that our colleague - and my former professor - Pepi Leistyna passed away. Details are scant at the moment and everyone in the department is in a state of shock as his death was quite sudden and unexpected.  I was going to write a blog post about about my history with him, how I knew him as a person when I worked in Media Services (good ol'

It's been a few days since I started writing about the various reactions I had (and started noting in the margins ;)  ) to a recent article from fellow MOOCers and MOOC researchers Frances and Jenny. I cut my previous post a bit shorter than I intended because it was getting long, and I didn't want it to go on and on. So this is a follow-up blog post to that original post with some reactions,

It feels a bit like I've had my nose close to the grind stone for the past few weeks.  I looked at my blog to see when was the last time I blogged about class, and it was close to 20 days ago.  In semester-terms I think that counts as "forever-ago".  To some extent it feels like a great weight has been lifted.  The first (of two) major papers is completed and delivered (awaiting

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"

My own doctoral journey may have just started, but it's been a meandering path to even get to the start.  It's not the destination after all that matters but the journey. Eventually all doctoral journeys culminate in a dissertation.  For the longest period of time this type of writing was a bit intimidating.  After all, who's got the energy to sit down and write a document that's 100

It's been a while, but I am finally (sort of) getting back to addressing some feedback that my colleague and I got on an article we are working on with regard to MOOCs.  My colleague, Zaharias, thought it would be a great idea to sit down and make an (initial) typology of issues around the development of MOOCs. The abstract was accepted for a special issue of a journal, but our final version was

Good ol' Zoidberg asking WhyBack when I was an MBA student, probably in a project management class, we were told that we should ask "why" five times in order to come to the root cause of the problem (I wonder why this is why kids seem to keep asking "why" incessantly ;-) ). It thus seems quite a propos that the first formal week (two weeks actually!) of Connected Courses are focused on Why we need

Slowly catching up and getting back to normal, although I suspect with the semester beginning next week at work we'll be on a different sort of normal for the next few weeks.  I thought it would be a good idea to continue my blogging debrief of my orientation experience for Athabasca's EdD program that I did last week in Edmonton.Part of the orientation experience is presenting the first assignment

Back in Boston!  I was off to Edmonton last week for my doctoral program orientation at Athabasca University. The orientation is a formal part of the first course (EDDE 801) and it is a requirement.  Not attending the orientation means not being the program.  Those who know me on campus know that I am not a fan of cohorts, and I don't like residential requirements, so it might seem illogical

This past week on the #rhizo14 facebook group my colleague, and co-author, Rebecca Hogue posted a link to this TED talk by Shai Reshef on the Ultra-Low Cost University. This talk really bugged me for a variety of reasons. On the facebook group I wrote that I was angry when I saw this, but it was really more of a "WTF" reaction to the video.  More disbelief that the incredible amount of BS†,

xkcd comic from xkcd.com Being in my last few days of summer vacation for this summer, I've started thinking about all the things I have to do, and want to do, in my professional and school life. August is drawing nearer, and I have to buy some plane tickets to Edmonton, and also book a hotel room for my stay during the orientation week for my EdD program. I am excited, yet a bit "freaked out"; not

Last week was the last formal week of #rhizo14.  Even though we crazy lunatics have taken over Dave's P2PU course site and are continuing the course on our own (for now), life goes on and other MOOCs start and finish.  This week was the week I completed the Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, and the course Diseño, Organización y Evaluación de videojuegos

The end is nigh! The end is nigh! This is the last week of #Rhizo14. Of course, the end is probably just a beginning, but we'll cross that bridge later on.  In any case, the topic for this week is Planned Obsolescence, or as I would frame it: the culminating step of the metamorphosis of our learners from guided to self-guided life-long learners.Dave asks How do we teach ourselves into uselessness?

Cookie cutters: detriment to creativity, or fuel to the creative fire?Last week, while I was updating something on LinkedIn, I saw one of my colleagues post a link to a post by the eLearning Brothers called The Top 10 Best eLearning Game Templates. I am generally not a fan of such list-posts, but every now and again I come across something really interesting.  I usually don't teach courses on

I came across this in an article talking about the Stanford Remote Lab. Pretty nifty!  I wonder what this might mean for online education (of various sorts) ten years down the road.

Vice Admiral Tolya KotrolyaWell, here we are! The final(ish) week of #edcmooc.  As I wrote in my tweet earlier this week, I think #edcmooc, like #ds106, is probably more of a way of life for some than an actual course.  Sure, there won't be additional prescribed readings or viewings after this week, so the course is technically over, however the hallmark of any good course, as far as I am

Trust Network BadgeWell, this is it!  We are in the final week of  the #OpenBadgesMOOC, and this is the last post (for badge purposes anyway) from Mozilla's #OpenBadgesMOOC. As with previous blog posts in this series I am brainstorming about including badges in an #ESLMOOC that I am thinking of designing, developing, implementing and them studying for a potential PhD.  With this week's

The real badge?Alright!  The penultimate week in #OpenBadgesMOOC, brought to us by Mozilla and Coursesites.  Continuing this week is the exploration of how badges can be incorporated into this #ESLMOOC that I've been thinking about designing, implementing, and hopefully collecting some data for some interesting analysis.  Dissertation-wise it seems like a good topic, but considering

Value Map BadgeIt's Saturday, so it must be #OpenBadgesMOOC time :)  The thing that I just noticed about these badges on the #OpenBadgesMOOC is that if you look closely enough they look stitched.  Maybe there is an easter egg hidden somewhere, whereby if you earn all #OpenBadgeMOOC badges they send you a sash with all of them stitched on - LOL :)In any case, it's the end of Week 4 on the

Custom is an odd name of a badge :)Week 3 of the Mozilla Open Badges MOOC on Coursesites (half way through) and we are continuing our exploration of using badges for the #ESLMOOC. As with previous posts, the prompt of the challenge comes first followed by my thoughts on the subject.Prompt:Challenge Assignment 3: Competency Frameworks for a Badge EcosystemAt the next level of complexity, we consider

It's week two (of six) in the #OpenBadgeMOOC and the challenge for this week is to think about and define the Currency of an Ecosystem. As with the first blog post in this series, this thought process relates to the #ESLMOOC that I am thinking of developing as part of a potential dissertation proposal, and the writing instructions for this challenge are posted in the first part of the blog post,

Who am I?** Updated on 9/19 with more detailed personas** Well, I will try to stay regular with these Mozilla Badge MOOC challenges (goal is it get them our each Saturday so I don't fall behind and other things get in the way).  I've decided that for the Badge Challenge I will start brainstorming on the topic of my ESL MOOC, that topic that's been floating in my mind as a potential PhD Dissertation

I was reading this article on Slate the other day about Georgia Tech's MOOC based MA in Computer Science which will cost around $6,000 for those interested in taking part in it. Even though Georgia Tech's Online Education MOOC crashed and burned, I am really curious to see this launch and succeed. If this is the program they are thinking of going full MOOC on, I think it may just work. Why do I think

This post is going to be badly formatted because I have yet to find an Android client for blogger that it as nice as BlogPress on my iPhone.<br>While on vacation, and on a train, I was able to catch up on the news in academia. One thing that came up, among the oodles on MOOC news is the question of whether MOOCs are just online courses (see here: http://www.thegoodmooc.com/2013/06/are-moocs-becoming-just-online-courses.html?m=1

While on vacation a friend and colleague sent me a small article warning about the end of the professoriate as a viable career. I was quite curious about it so I had a quick look (after all, it was about MOOCs in part, and I had a little spare time in the middle of the day once museums closed).On the surface it seems like an interesting conversation starter, but for me that's all it is: a conversation

We are almost there!  The course Aboriginal Worldview and Education is almost over! It's one of the few xMOOCs that survived the great course purge of late 2012 (courses that I decided to drop before they started because of my time commitment issues in March). When I signed up for the course I thought that the course was about Australia and New Zealand since I had only heard of Aboriginals in

I came across this pretty interesting TED talk on the loss of wisdom, hidden knowledge and skills, the reductionism in what we do. It's a must-see :)

Just in case you missed it the other day, here is the link for the stream (which was live, but now should be available to stream) for the CIEE and USDLA sponsored event on Sustainability in MOOCs (in which I was a panelist ;-)  ). The event was quite interesting and this was my first panel discussion - where I met quite a few interesting people!In any case, if you see the stream you will see two

One more MOOC is done! A coursera xMOOC to be more precise called Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society with Karl Ulrich from UPenn.For this course I took the "auditor" approach to participating in the course. I did listen or view (or listen and view) all the lectures, and I did poke around the assignments, but never bothered to submit any of them.  I did enjoy Karl Ulrich's presentations,

It's week 3 in #cfhe12 and the topic of the week is Entrepreneurship and commercial activity in education, and I kicked off the week by reading The Evolution of Ed Tech in Silicon Valley and How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education. There are, of course, other readings that I intent on getting to, but these two were the only HTML documents that were easy to sent to Pocket (I did however skim the

Well, another 6 week MOOC started this week, CFHE12 (which I keep wanting to spell a CHFE12 for some reason) with George Siemens and company.  This seems quite interesting, and it gives me an opportunity to check out the D2L environment in action, considering that  our campus could have been a D2L campus, but we went with Blackboard instead.In any case, one of the first things for this week

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge.The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are:OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge)Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge.The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are:OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge)Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write

It's day 2 of MOOC MOOC (sounds like something Zoidberg would say) and I was reading the intro for the day when I saw that a blog post of one of my colleagues (Pat Masson) was referenced. Pretty Cool!  I read it pretty quickly, to be responded to late. I must admit I don't subscribe to Pat's blog, but maybe it's time to do so :-)Today's task is a video, but I don't have a ton of time to invest

OK, so I did say that I would probably lurk in this MOOC, but I think I will upgrade my status to be that guy who yells from the stands at the people playing LOL :-)  If I have time, I will do my best to  come down to the green and kick the ball a bit myself ;-)The readings for today (and the general intro and topic outline available here) are things that I've encountered before in my almost-two-year

This second week of #ioe12 was all about open source. The materials included The Revolution OS, a video of Cory Doctorow at the 28th C3 conference, and a few readings about what open source is (including the Cathedral and the Bazaar). You can have a look over at the course website for get the actual materials.The Revolution OS is now about ten years old (this was my second viewing, the first one being

Last January David Wiley launched a course on the topic to Introduction to Open Education (how did I miss it?) I can't really say that this course is a MOOC, because it seems like it wasn't "massive", so I just it's just an OOC ;-) In any case, it seemed like a good point to start this course (better late than never!) and slowly take my time at completing the various tasks required to complete the

I was reading Lisa's response to #bonkopen the other day. Both the post and the comments were quite interesting. One of the issues is blackboard as a platform. OK, sure, LMS in general stink - regardless of whether it's Moodle, Bb Learn, Bb Vista (formerly WebCT, ANGEL and so on.  Lisa does prefer the distributed mode of communication which is typical in MOOCs like Change and CCK, but despite

Recently I read an article on the Chronicle of higer education on Program vs Technology. It was interesting, I'll give it that. It's just that recently (last couple of years) geeks both the blogosphere and the twittersphere seem to be longing for a time when computer science was taught in all of our schools (high school and specifically in this article University), and we've moved away from a "computer

Life and Death ScreenshotThis week is gaming and simulation week (if you haven't guessed from the posts that I've been posting and responding to) on Change11 with guest Clark Aldrich. As usual, I've skipped the live session since there is more than enough content on the blogs and what's been provided by the guest facilitators. The reading matter for this week is a short book by Clark titled Designing

Over the holiday, at some point I came across this blog post asking how much longer will (college) degrees mean something. It was a short, but interesting post, and something that I've thought about in the past; not in reference to how much longer will college degrees have a monopoly on accreditation of individuals, but rather I've been pondering what does a college degree mean.The impetus

The other day I was reading a Forbes article, which came to me via someone I follow on twitter, and the topic was Why MBA Programs Don't Produce Leaders. As someone with an MBA I was intrigued by the topic and what the author's views were so I added it to my Read It Later account for  my commute home.Hansen (the author) argues that MBA programs were places that people went to learn hands-on

The other day I made an observation on LinkedIn that 8 people had recently left the employment of UMass (LinkedIn told me so). The number seemed rather high, so I wanted, out of curiosity, to know who had left, was it someone I knew? It turns out that most of the people who "left" were teaching assistants, graduate assistants, or like me had added "student" to their profile under job. Back in the

I wrote an article last week for the UMass Online blog on the merits of preparation. If you are a current student or if you're an instructor looking to point your students to another student's views on how to be successful in the classroom and get the most out of yoru educational experience then check out this post. Comments always welcome!

Well, it's been one crazy year! I've managed to complete my final two masters degrees, meet some great colleagues from sister campuses and forged new friendships with classmates in both linguistics and instructional design. My last academic blogpost for the year I've posted over at the UMass Online blog; the topic is Making Services Accessible. Go have a look and post you thoughts on the matter of

My first blog post for the UMass Online blog is now live, check it out hereI think I may have approached the subject here before, I don't really remember, but orientations are, I think, pretty important when you are entering an academic program.  It really sets the tone for the program, both in term of curriculum and all the administrative minutiae that we as students have to deal with (and if

I've been following an interesting discussion in one of the LinkedIn groups that I am a member of called "How important is a formal certificate/degree in Instructional Design to become a successful Instructional Designer?" I guess the discussion is not new (well it may be new to this group, but it's been going on in the ID circle for a while).There are pros and cons to each position, for example non-formal

Last week I spoke to a friend of mine who is already pursuing a PhD - said friend is at the dissertation stage if I am not mistaken.  I let her know that I am considering a PhD - having overcome my fear of writing long research-based passages, and having grown accustomed to the Master's level difficulty, I've decided to up my game since I like learning new things.  I also aspire to one day

I came across a blog post on InsideHigherEd recently about PhD programs and the disappearing tenure-track job market and how PhD programs should help their students to do something more than research and specialization in an area that has a focus on tenure-track professorial jobs (because as we all know adjunct instructor pay stinks).The main point of the author here is that PhD programs should include:

I came across this article a while back on TechDirt (quite a few comments on the techdirt take!) Now the idea here is that any material or intellectual property created by a district employee, with either indirect or direct support from the district, would belong to the district. This may sound like a good idea, but it is an inherently bad idea - and it's bad on so many levels.From a philosophical

I like common craft videos and I was a little disappointed that I had not seen a new one for a while. Well, the good folks over at common craft have created a video for cloud computing. I think that I sense a change in direction here for these videos - previous videos seemed to be more for the layperson-enduser, however this particular video seems to be targeted toward the layperson-manager. Interesting,

I really wish I could do an Adam Sessler like video podcast on this (complete with sessler-like sarcasm ;-) ) - Oh well, I think I will keep it to text.I was reading an article on Inside Higher Ed a couple of weeks ago and I was waiting to see what comments this story would bring up. Alas, only about 13 comments.In any case, the blog post here is essentially about collaborative learning using technologies

OK, I fibbed, I am not going to give you the magic bullet that will make you an uber-student being able to tackle three graduate classes, a family and full time work! Heck, I don't have those answers to give :-)The situations recently where people tried to tap into the "secrets" I have for being able to manage a full graduate course load plus a full time job made me think of a seminar that I had as

I've had a couple of interactions with recent grad students - tapping into my knowledge of 'the system'. There is no doubt that in each person's mind they want to be a successful student - however the definition of what a successful student is varies from person to person.Some people want to be a successful student that takes as many courses as possible in order to graduate as soon as possible. They

I was reading an article on Science Direct on Librarianship Education. I am surprised that there is such a fuss over a name - however in a profession that only accepts individuals who received their degree from an ALA-accredited institution, it makes sense.Personally I think that librarianship, for the purposes of working in a public or academic library, is something that you don't need a Masters degree

I was reading an article recently on the Washington Post, the title of which was A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges. Quite honestly I've heard this before, and I've been hearing this for the last ten years. Still hasn't happened.Here's an interesting quote:the young students of tomorrow will be growing up in an on-demand, personalized world, in which the notion of a set-term, offline, prepackaged

It's been a while since I attended PodCamp Boston and met a lot of interesting people :-) One of those interesting people is Gina Minks (@gminks on twitter)Gina informed me about #lrnchat, on twitter (you can find transcripts here) and I eagerly wanted to check things out. What is #lrnchat? #lrnchat is an online chat that happens every Thursday night 8:30-10pm EST / 5:30-7pm PST over the social messaging

Well the semester started and I invariably got my first "I'm sorry, I'm just no good at computers" comment from someone at work. This reminded me of a post that I saw on Dangerously Irrelevant a few weeks back. I first started hearing this a couple of years back and ever got it.This quote from Dangerously Irrelevant was really interesting:What does this say about us as educators? As employees of supposed

Here's a nice little clip of Rheingold on Media LiteracyA quick run down of his literacies:* Attention * Participation * Collaboration * Critical consumption (aka crap detection).OMG he said crap! Personally I would have called it Bullshit detector :-) (or is that a different category?)21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Earlier this month I was reading the sinkhole ahead blog post on Inside Higher Ed, which prompted me to read this little rant on the D written by the same author.You know it's funny, I've been a student for quite some time now and I've never thought of the "D" much. One semester in my undergrad I just wanted to get a D in calculus II so that I can pass and move on. Calculus II wasn't required for

Earlier this month I was reading an article on Inside Higher Ed about about a Duke administrator that went back into teaching, how she found Grading so tiresome that she decided to outsource it...to her students! Yes indeed, students in her class also graded each others papers.This professor writes:I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning

I was reading this on Slashdot the other day about a person going back to school to complete their computer science degree.Here's a quick quote:I recently went back to college to finish my CS degree, however this time I moved to a new school. My previous school taught only C++, except for a few higher level electives (OpenGL). The school I am now attending teaches what seems like every language in

This past week I saw an article on the BBC and a blog post on the Brazen Careerist network that go well together - like w(h)ine and cheese. Yes, the bad pun was intended.The BBC article centers around a woman in New York who is a jobless graduate and is suing her college because she's failed to get a job after graduation. As the BBC reports:She is seeking to recover $70,000 (£42,000) she spent on

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,

There was an article that I saw a few weeks ago called Expert Predicts 6 Future Trends in Training. Being a sucker for predictions I went right ahead and I read it. I have to say that the six predictions were quite good - because we are already there, and we have been there for a while now.We covered all of these issues when I took courses in my MBA program about three years ago in topics such as

I came across this presentation on the use of twitter in educationPersonally I would use twitter for informational purposes like: "in the office" - "not in the office", "class moved to room xxxx", and "assignment X due in my mailbox by xx/xx/xxxx"IM is better for collaboration, chatting and discussions. Twitter doesn't really fit into this in my opinion.Twitter in EducationView more presentations

I came across this video near the end of last semester, but I did not have time to watch it. I've written about Tribes, the book by Seth Godin, that relates to communities of practice, management, marketing, communities (and so many other things).Here's the man himself talking about tribes. The video is only 17 minutes long - it's well worth the viewing time!

I know, I know, this is a few weeks late - but better late than never :-)In any case, I was reading this Op-Ed piece on the New York Times. The thesis of this op-ed piece is that:Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields

I was over at Library Journal a short while a go and I came across this article about the "debate" over the MLIS (Masters of Library and Information Science) at the most recent ACRL conference.Personally I didn't know there was an open debate among professionals - just those among us that don't want to get one but want to work in fields that are traditionally staffed by librarians. Apparently there

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 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.

Back when I started the MBA program (in 2004) I had to take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. At the time I was an INTJ. I was told that people change over a period of time, so since it's been 5 years since I last took the MBTI (give or take a few weeks), I decided to take it again.This time I am an ISTJI am:* moderately expressed introvert* slightly expressed sensing personality* moderately expressed

Recently I came across and article called the right to readIt's not long, and it's a short sci-fi story.With all the talk about ebooks this year being the in thing for 2009, and my own experiences with ebooks, I think that it's worth while to read.Now while this story is rather bleak and it points to a possibility, an unintended consequence of DRM on our media and its effects on education.Excerpt:For

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.

This is partly a rant, and partly a reference to an interesting blog piece I read earlier today.I was reading this blog article about the anatomy of an unworkshop. Now the content within the blog post is pretty interested, what I take issue with is the naming convention: the unworkshop.Sometimes I feel like academics have nothing better to do than come up with silly names to describe a slightly different

Over the summer I took INSDSG 605, a course which is all about new media. As a way of experimenting with a wiki, I started a course called Greek4Travelers on wikidot.com.I really didn't get far with the wiki because as most course and content creators know, creating curriculum does take up a lot of time. I would love to revisit the topic though at some point because my moodle implementation of the