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

I like common craft videos and I was a little disappointed that I had not seen a new one for a while. Well, the good folks over at common craft have created a video for cloud computing. I think that I sense a change in direction here for these videos - previous videos seemed to be more for the layperson-enduser, however this particular video seems to be targeted toward the layperson-manager. Interesting,

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 :-)

Wow, this semester is really (REALLY) moving along quite fast. This month is just flying by, and December is going to be quite literally two class sessions. Lots of stuff is due, lots of papers, final projects, critical essays....wow...So what's on my plate?- Observation Analysis + Lesson plan for my ESL methods/materials class- Complete Thematic Unit Lesson Plan for my Foreign Language methods class

I guess that by this point you've guessed that I am a language geek (among other types of geek). A week or so ago I was reading this opinion piece, titled Only English Spoken, on Inside Higher Ed.The author goes through a synopsis of historical liberal arts education, and the role that foreign languages played in it. The general view of the opinion piece (which you should read, by the way) is that

I guess this is one of those self-congratulatory blog posts ;-) I'll try not to be too cocky about it :-)Anyway. Recently a colleague of mine sent me this blog post from the .eduGuru blog. The blog post is interesting to read so you should go ahead and do that. The quick highlights though are these:1. College wants to do something exclusive for new students2. College creates online exclusive community3.

OK, so in the last post I covered the model to be used in an introduction to instructional design class. Now the model should not be the focus of the course. The model should be an overarching theme that can be used to tie other elements together, and to be used in producing a final project in the course.In an intro class I could expect the following:Introduction to some learning theories: Theories

In the past couple of months I've had some interesting discussions with colleagues and classmates about the introduction to instructional design class that we've taken in our instructional design program. It's interesting that people generally tend to fall into one of two camps: the anti-Dick & Carey camp, and the for-Dick & Carey camp.Before I go on, let me just say that our program uses the Dick

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