Many years ago, maybe around 16 years ago, I was sitting in the office of my computer science major advisor, getting my academic plan for next semester signed off on.  My computer science program was actually an offshoot of the mathematics department, and until recent years (2003?) they were one and the same.  My advisor, while looking at my transcript, noticed that (on average) I was doing

[Warning: longer than usual post] Recently I came across an article on InsideHigherEd titled In Higher Ed, Loyalty Is a One-Way Street, and the tagline was "Loyalty of students and faculty is often demanded. Is it returned?"   The main thesis of the article is that in higher education the job you're in is the job you're in unless you apply for another job and get in, at which point you can

I came across an article on Campus Technology last week titled 7 Tips for Listing MOOCs on Your Résumé, and it was citing a CEO of an employer/employee matchmaking firm.  One piece of advice says to create a new section for MOOCs taken to list them there. This is not all that controversial since I do the same.  Not on my resume, but rather on my extended CV (which I don't share anyone),

It's been a long time since I've blogged about something educational, other than my classes of course.  With one thing down (and a million more to go), I decided to take a little breather to see what's accumulated on Pocket over these past few months.  I saw a post by Martin Weller on Institutional Memory, and it seemed quite pertinent to my day to day work existence these past six or so

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 title of this post sounds a little Sisyphean, doesn't it?  After all everyone dreads homework...don't they?  Perhaps if you are Lisa Simpson maybe you do not, but for most people the idea of homework does conjure up the mental image of a chore.  Something that isn't particularly pleasing, yet we have to do it.  It also seems to be other-regulated.  Homework isn't something

Among the many streams of things happening these days is keeping tabs on some interesting things happening in my various internet circles.  I've resolved to just dip into my RSS stream and look at things periodically over a couple of days and not be as 'vigilant' as I have been in the past.  Too many things to focus on, not enough time for news.  That said, I came across an interesting

I was reading this post on InsideHigherEd the other day by Joshua Kim.  The post, A plague of directors, which was a bit comical; the mental image that came to mind was one of plague carrying zombies with name tags that said "director" - yeah, I know, sometimes my imagination runs wild and comical video games like Plants vs. Zombies get mixed in with titles like Josh's.Joshua wonders if

Another story I had in my Pocket account (for what seems like forever) is this story from campus technology talking about how nano-degrees are disrupting higher education.  I don't know about you, but it seems to me that people just love the word disrupt, or the pairing disruptive innovation.  I have a feeling that in 10-15 years when we're past this fad we will look back at this time period

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

[warning: lengthier post than usual] Before I left for December my mini vacation I had a holiday themed catch-up with a number of friends and colleagues on campus. With the semester winding down, and with the holidays as an excuse it was a good opportunity for people to get together and share some news about what had transpired over the past semester, share notes, best practices, and so on. One of

I am back home, and with vacation behind me I guess it's time to get back to work.  I've got the day-job for which I've already created a list of tasks to undertake; the teaching of my newly renumbered course INSDSG 684 (formerly 619) and the updates I want to make to the course materials as well as gearing up for my #altcred experiment, version 2.0; and finally the Great Big MOOC Book which I

Over the last few days I've been thinking about The Great Big MOOC Book, something that's been a project of interest since my first MOOCs (cMOOCs back then) and something I finally got the wheels off th ground, posted a call for chapters, even though I didn't have a publisher, got a number of great proposals that my two great colleagues, Rebecca Hogue and Alan Girelli, helped read, evaluate as well,

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

You are using it wrong...A little while back I was reading Rebecca's post titled When teaching online doesn’t mean ‘at a distance’. Quite a few things came to mind, but they were too many for one blog post, so I thought I would do two separate ones.  One from my experiences as a program coordinator (and unofficial instructional designer) for the Applied Linguistics department where I work,

So, week 3 is done, week 4 is upon us in #Rhizo14, and the topic for week 4 is undeclared. So, this is a good opportunity to maybe do a summation of last week.  However, as I was thinking about this topic I was a bit uncertain on how to proceed.  There were many things discussed, and many topics approached in facebook, P2PU and the various blogs.  I guess Jenny and I had the same issue

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 :)

Last week a colleague of mine alerted me to some free local workshops for educators.  Initially I saw the first week's workshops and thought that they might be too basic for me, but luckily another co-worker pointed out that Week 2 had some mobile development workshops - I guess the lesson here is to never judge a set of workshops by the first week!In any case, since mobiMOOC was a recent occurrence and

I posted this as a discussion topic in one of my LinkedIn groups, but no takers!  Everyone seems to be paying lipservice to Portfolios, but no one (that I've seen in groups) has talked about their effectiveness.   Your thoughts?//Start of copied info from LinkedIn//This thought came to me while reading the discussion on the importance of a degree/certificate in ID. So here's a question

I came across this article on Mashable a few weeks ago about the traits of a good community manager. Granted this article is concerned more with commerce rather than academia, however I do think that the traits do translate one-to-one in academia.I encourage people to go to mashable and read the article. Here are a few of my thoughts on it.1. Love your jobWell this is a d'uh for almost any job (otherwise

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