What does that spell?  elp-ss-ss ;-) OK...well that sounded more funny in my head... Anyway! Week 5 of NRC01PL (last week! All caught up! yay!) was about Learning Performance Support Systems.  My first introduction to LPSS (a brief one at that) was in an instructional design course almost 10 years ago (if my memory works).  The funny thing is that we did talk about LPSS (without

Well, after a couple of month of not paying the Ning bill UMassID.com is dead!  Well, the domain is still fine, @cdetorres got that one for 10 years, but the Ning community that it pointed to is pretty much dead. So what is was UMassID.com? Well, back in 2008, when I started my MEd in instructional design, the outgoing class was looking for a new president for the student association (GIDA

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

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

Look for traces of the "social" One of the things I like about Rhizo14, and our collaboration, is that we keep going, exploring our participation, and collaboration post Rhizo14 through a variety of lenses.  This keeps the mind active and exploring new areas.  I've been meaning to get acquainted with Actor Network Theory (ANT), but the time is rarely right. Classes, work, other projects

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 Introduction 2014 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

The other day I was reading a CCK11 blog on a way to visualize the connections on your LinkedIn network.  Since this week's topic is "the network" on CCK11, I thought it would be cool to see how my network looks. You always get a notification on your social networks indicating who a particular contact has in common with you, but you don't generally get the full picture. With a few hundred contacts

This week's readings bring back memories; memories of computer science (creating algorithms in C to traverse a network) and memories of my MBA (organizational development).  Fun stuff! Krebs' reading was short, but quite interesting nevertheless.  What stood out for me was this Common wisdom in personal networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always so. What really matters

I was reading a recent article on First Monday the other day (abstract and link bellow) that seems to point out the obvious. In my early days on the internet in the late 90s I spent a lot of time on IRC chat rooms, Yahoo chat rooms, meeting people on ICQ and other related services. It was pretty cool to meet people from other countries and get to talk to them about their daily lives. Many times we

One of the "in" things today is to try to use social networks for everything including marketing, advertising, social mobilization and yes even teaching. I came across this graphic a while back showing which social networks are prevalent in which countries.This is quite interesting, but it only gives you which networks are most popular based on goodle trends and alexa at one point in time. Don't get