From wikipedia: 1779 illustration of a Catholic Armenian monk of the Order of St Gregory the Illuminator,  Happy New Year! Yeah... it's the fourth of January, but I figure I can get away with it since we're still in the first week of 2018, and this is my first post for the year 😉Things have been a little quiet here on the blog as of late. Not a lot of MOOCing, not a lot of virtual connecting,

Drumroll please!  This is it!  The final Latour conversation (at least as far as his book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory goes.  It's been fun, Latour, but I have a pile of MOOC articles that aren't going to read themselves (note to voice technology people. I need a computer to read things to me like Majel Barrett does in Star Trek - voice of the computer.

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week.Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?  I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can

This was an eventful week! Snowstorm, followed by several days of coughing, sneezing and all those other lovely wonderful symptoms of winter colds (or whatever it is I have).  This has made me fall a little behind on reading the contributions of fellow rhizotravelers, but hopefully I can slowly catch up on my Pocket readings.One of the things I came across this past week was a post by Tellio where

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

This past week in Change11 we had George Veletsianos as the facilitator.  It was a pretty nice week, I really enjoyed the three articles he posted as readings. It seems like most of the posts in the daily (the few posts) were about MIT and Harvard and EdX....yaaawwwwnnnnn....Seriously, isn't EdX just a continuation of the OpenCourseWare movement that MIT started?  Let's just call it

I have come out of Change11 retirement (lurking status) this week (and probably the next few weeks).  I was reading the Change11 daily yesterday when I noticed that George Veletsianos was facilitating the topic of Scholars' online participation and practices. I've been following George for a couple of years now, and I was really looking forward to this week, so I am back!I download the articles

I was planning on doing a live-blog of NERCOMP last week, using storify, but in the end I got so wrapped up in the conversation, and the tweeting, that storify didn't really happen for me.  Last night I played with Storify a bit, grabbed as many images, tweets and websites I could and made a rather weak live-blog.  Oh well.  Maybe I will be doing some live-blogging at AAAL this weekend.In

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

I cam across this presentation recently on Moodle and Web 2.0 featuresWeb 2.0 tools and techniquesView more presentations from Mark Drechsler.Yes, it is quite interesting, but I think that LMS creators are missing the point. The reason why Web 2.0 is popular is because you are not in a walled garden. The content is open to the greater internet using community, and you've got many, many users creating,

Now you've probably seen this already, but in case you have not here's another great commonCraft video.

I came across this presentation a while back, but I did not have the opportunity until recently to go through it. It's a great presentation and I wish that they also had the audio of the presentation to go with it because it seems like a great topic.I particularly liked slides 100 to 109 where institutions of higher education are likened to the recording instutry ;-) I also liked slide 95 with the

I must admit that I was skeptical before I first saw this, but when I thought about it more, the idea of using hashtags in a survey class (an intro class that a lot of people have to take) is interesting.

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 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

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.

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

For a few weeks now I've been using a piece of Web 2.0 software called Prezi.I read this blog post named Throw Away your PowerPoints, Simply Use Prezi, and I knew that I had to try it.To be honest, I really didn't read the blog entry carefully because now that I have used Prezi for a few weeks I know what this means. Ignatia (blog author) says:Prezi enables anyone to quickly build a multimedia rich

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 though my feed reader the other day and I came across this post. The author and I agree on many points, and I have elaborated more with my face to face colleagues on this issue.I had brought up the issue of blogs, wikis, bookmark-sharing and other potentially useful. The response I got was similar to this:Well, the new release of Blackboard now includes the ability to do Blogs, wikis,

This is a repost from FastCompanyOriginal Article: click hereIt's pretty interesting.GPS is nice, but I think Data Portability will be the major issue. No one likes their data to be held captive by a company.8 Experts Predict How Web 2.0 Will Evolve In 2009| posted by Allyson Kapin2008 was the year that Web 2.0 became more mainstream. More ad agencies, businesses, and non-profits used Web 2.0 tools