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

A report from the field.... Traveling home is a good opportunity to catch up with posts made by fellow #rhizo15  participants. It's also a good time to read books and articles. I thought that for this commute I would go to rhizo because Latour is taking forever to make his point in the Actor-Network Theory book I am reading for another rhizo project. I just read a post, by fellow participation,

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

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forum A 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

I don't often read Inside Higher Education these days. I used to gobble it up, but I've found that a lot of the content seems to be off-base opinion (and when there is real news, the RSS feed doesn't give you anything but the title, so I refuse to take that bait - give me at least some content). In any case, I came across a blog post by Joshua Kim the other day with the topic of 9 Academic Freedoms

I came across Charles Jennings's piece the other day titled "Real learning – let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises." It's quite a fascinating read and I encourage all of you to read through it and think about it. This piece reminded me of my Knowledge Management days as an MBA student, and as an Instructional Design student in thinking about corporate learning. A few nights

Last weekend I finished reading the book Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation. It was an interesting book, recommended for both Instructional Designers and Language Teachers alike. Some chapters as admittedly better than others, but as a whole the book was quite good (related note: follow me on GoodReads). Hot on the heels of this I came across a post on ProfHacker called "How

I was reading Inside Higher Ed earlier this week and there was an interesting list (similar to Educause's 7-things lists) about what define a learning technologists.Out of this list these three points are quite interesting to me, and quite possibly define my weltsanschauung with regard to educational technology and my likes at work.We learning technologists share a healthy skepticism towards the dominant

I was reading a post titled Language learning, critical thinking and the role of the teacher on the linguist the other day and I was really surprised. Now granted I am not a member of his list-serv, perhaps I should be to get the whole story, even though ESL isn't my immediate field of interest.Now long story short here, it appears that some people have their feathers ruffled because of the belief