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

Happy new year to all!I thought I would start my new year with a little (PhD) humor...While I don't think I'll be graduating by the end of 2017 (wouldn't that be nice?) I would like to make considerable headway with my dissertation.  This coming term (in 8 days, in-fact!) my spring semester (or as they call it in Canada "winter term") will begin.  This coming winter term I am doing my final

Happy winter break to everyone!  Classes are over and I guess I am supposed to start working on my candidacy exam...  This comic seems like it applies ;-)

Back from vacation and I feel like there is so much to do by December 10th ;-)Here is a most recent PhD comic that reminds me a lot of real life...

One of my friends posted this on their facebook wall the other day.  I thought it was quite pertinent for PhD students and other professionals out there :-)In case you don't speak German, it says: "Errors are for beginners.  We produce catastrophes" ;-)

I was catching up on my news comedy yesterday and I was delighted to see this as the subject of last week's "last week tonight"

A little funny-Friday stuff here.  This comic was shared by a cohort-mate this week.  It provided some good levity while we wait for grades for EDDE 804. That said... I do wonder how one can go on the offensive in a Distance Education context where the dissertation is defended via Adobe Connect...

I have a feeling this might be in my dreams in about 12 months ;-)

Note to self - save this for my own dissertation title naming ;-)

The other day I came across this PhD Comics strip on grading rubrics. As a trained instructional designer (and having worked with instructional designers on and off since I started university as an undergraduate student) the concept of rubrics has really stuck with me.  That said,  I generally struggle with rubrics.In theory they are brilliant - a way to objectively measure how well someone

It's funny because there is a chunk of truth in this. The comic is of course from PhDComics.comFood for thought, academia! Food. For. Thought.

I saw this on PhD Comics the other day...Right before New Year's, on Moodle, EDDE 804 opened up and was available to learners...there goes my guild-free break.  Now it's time to get a preview of what I need to do for class... The first two assignments are pretty straight forward (it seems).  The portfolio assignment is a little more nebulous.  A quick google search gives me some ideas

I came across this in PhD comics the other day:I am sure that the concept isn't novel  - I've been trying to get my friends and colleagues to do something like this for a few years now...to no avail. ;-)  I wonder if anyone in the AU EDDE cohorts wants to try something like this.  Or, maybe, a Magic the gathering type of card game with academics.  If you draw the George Siemens

HeckI was browsing coursera today and I noticed a course, recommended to me, for underwater basket-weaving.  I was intrigued because I knew it's April 1st, so I am looking out for interesting things on the net (I don't believe anything in my RSS feed today :p).In any case, I clicked on the course  (see screenshot) and it has all the trappings of a jokewhen looking at the institution's page,

Merry Christmas to all! A little holiday fun from PhD comics 😊 - Posted using BlogPress from my Newton 3000 (iPad)

The other day I was thinking of the research methods class that I may be teaching in the spring (as of yet there are only two students signed up) and I was reading a research article for the literature review for the MobiMOOC paper that the MRT is working on.  In this article quite a few things correlated, but I they didn't necessarily cause each other. To be fair, the researchers did not claim

Yesterday I got a note, presumably for an editor, to ask me to submit any manuscripts I have to the Journal of Strategies & Governance. The first thing that raised the "WTF" flag was that it wasn't just an email, but an email that contained a lot of quoted "Re:" text.  Well, I thought, it may have been an undergraduate student who was asked to send this out and didn't know that they

I was reading this most recent PhD comic last night and I found it quite funny, partly because I think it's true.  There are quite a few times when I get the same, or similar, reaction when I tell people that I work in academia, or that I am still pursuing my education.  Most Greeks (and any other ethnicity I've come across for that matter) seems to view education as something that should

I know I retweeted this the other day, but it's just too good to not share 

I saw this the other day and it was hilarious! Yes, it's the onion (so don't take it seriously!) but there is a smidgeon of truth in the story (if you know what you are looking for) which makes it really really funny :-)In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

I think humor will get me through this semester :-)Does this reflect your grad school experiences?

A while back I had posted a picture of a road sign (probably also from the failblog) which showed male genitals and a big giant NO to spanking the monkey. At the time I wondered what exactly could have driven the polish government (or private company for that matter since I don't know if this is a national road sign) to create such a prohibition. Was spanking the monkey while driving such a huge problem

OK, I figured that since today is a holiday, and yesterday was Valentine's Day, a little humor (courtesy of xkcd) is in order :-)

When I was an undergraduate, and I had more disposable income, I did actually spend a lot of my disposable income in eating out. As a grad student (with considerably less disposable income), I tend to bring food from home. The above comic put a smile on my face because it reminded me both of my undergrad days and the current grad days. I have to say that the "cost" curve on this is a little off for

Pretty funny! (I wonder if the writer was looking at the Massachusetts Elections when creating this)

Here's a funny end-of-the-week FAIL image for you all :-)And for those of you who are wondering what the Beer-Lambert Law is, our friends at Wikipedia say:In optics, the Beer–Lambert law, also known as Beer's law or the Lambert–Beer law or the Beer–Lambert–Bouguer law (in fact, most of the permutations of these three names appear somewhere in literature) relates the absorption of light to the

Ok, Ok...I was going to start the month off with something more serious (that response to SK for example), but the semester is almost over, my brain power is taken up with more homework/paper related things (i.e. getting them done on time), and it's December first! So here's another little humorous start to your academic month :-)I wonder if Google has indexed all academic articles going back like

I was going to wrap up the month (now that I generally post on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule) with some thoughts on Steve Kaufman's semi recent rant on Theorists muddling language education. However, since it is a holiday in the US and I am inclined to post something more light hearted and humorous, here's a recent xkcd comic on the differences between academia and "the real world". I think that some

Happy-almost-weekend!I just loved this PhD strip from a week or so ago :-)Everything is predicated on doing the least amount of work, which is work that doesn't waste time hahaha :-)

I love the PhD comic strip :-)

With the beginning of the semester behind us, and the opening festivities almost behind us as well, this puts an end to the free food on campus. I guess we're back to "normal" now, as indicated by this PhD comic strip

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

A little Friday humor for you all

A little Friday PhD humor for you:I have to say that I've never been that inventive with my project names :-) I just go off swearing up a storm when something does not work ;-)

I was reading about the deadly online seminar (or death by webinar as I call it) on the cogdogbloy recently. I couldn't help but smile because it reminded me of a Death by PowerPoint presentation that I had created a couple of years ago.I have to say that I echo all of the author's gripes about these types of webinars and it is the reason I generally hate Wimba sessions when we have them. Most Wimba

Well here's some near-the-end-of-the-month humor for you.One of the things that I remember doing in my Introduction to Instructional Design class was looking at products (mostly toys) and without instructions figuring out what they do, and designing instruction for them. We would design instruction that would let the parent know in simple terms how to operate the toy so that they could show their kid.This

I had a chuckle when I read this comic strip the other day.It brought back memories of my undergraduate mathematical logic class. The weird thing was that most things that I found logical seemed to not be valid mathematic proofs of logic.Oh well...

I was reading this article on Scienceblogs with an associated graphic on where info comes from (click to enlarge):further on in the article there is a more parody-like version of the same chart (click to enlarge):For what it's worth, the original article is short and easy to read - so you should read it.Here's my favorite quote from it:So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if

Here's a little weekend humor by PhD :-)

Since my other blog is out of commission for maintenance and Web 2.0 is the "it" thing for education now-a-days, here's a little Friday humor for all of you - Twitter in real life. I wonder what this guy would sound like if he were a professor...See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

The title of this blog post should be read with the same annunciation as the 'iron and sulfur' skit in Strindberg and helium. I need to find a way to incorporate Utterli into the blog.Anyway, I digress. I saw this follow up PhD comic strip and it reminded me very much about how I go about writing papers. First I go to TextEdit and I outline my sections. Then I got into word and I create styles for

A little humor for your Wednesday.Dedicated to all those that are starting a Thesis or Capstone project (or thinking about it anyway) :-)

Here's some weekend humor for you,courtesy of PhD comics

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

Here's a nice little comical flow chart for all you students who don't know how to refer to your professors :-)

Here's a little April Humor for you

Here's some PhD humor for all of you out there coming back from Spring Break

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

A little beginning-of-semester humor from PhD