Virtual Canuck

Well, after surviving end of term marking, coupled with two online keynotes and a real f2F one at Canadian MoodelMoot I’ve finally found some time to skim through two books that arrived on my desk that I want to share with you.

The first is The Publish or Perish Book (P 0r P) by Anne-Wil Harzing. Harzing is one my heroes because she created and released  PorP Open Access program that uses Google Scholar to evaluate journals, articles, and authors based upon the number of citations of the work, collection or journal in other scholarly works. (more…)

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of my friend Gary Boyd, Professor at Concordia University in  Montreal. Gary exemplified scholarship in education technology and came to personalize what I think are the necessary, but far too uncommon characteristics of  scholarship and application of new technologies and pedagogy to teaching and learning.

I first met Gary in 1988, when Robert Sweet and I went on a research trip to Concordia. I still remember two things about that first meeting- first the vivid introduction to scholarly mess – Gerry had mountains of texts, papers, floppy disks and conference proceedings spilling out and over his desk and the floor. Second, I also remember his big smile and very warm greeting to Robert (a past Concordia colleague) and to myself, At that time, I was about  million psychological miles from an academic vocation and life style. I was impressed by both aspects of Gary’s life.

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My friend Rory McGreal and I are very fortunate to have been invited to by the Estonian E-Learning Development Centre (oh to have a funded, national e-learning group and strategy!!) to present at the 8th annual Estonian E-learning conference in Tartu starting tomorrow.  Yesterday morning we spent the day gawking at the wonderful ‘old town’ here in Tallinn. Although Rory kept grousing about the Disneyfication of Europe’s old cities, we were pretty impressed.

Tallinn, Estonia old town

The town was settled by European immigrants in the 12-14 century. It has the highest town wall (complete with towers) that I have seen and the center is chalked full of very old houses, Inns, churches and the current Estonian houses of Parliament. Of course all of this beauty comes with a zillion tourist and handicraft shops, outdoor booths and restaurants.  The season is just beginning as there is still dirty snow piled up on the corners (reminds me of home). (more…)

I’ve decided to repost the email I sent to subscribers to IRRODL, announcing this VERY special issue.  If you want to be one of the 5054 (and growing) IRRODL subscribers (its free) and get your very own email announcement of each new issue, rather than read this boring old blog, click here.

I am especially pleased with this special issue, partly because, I am becoming a connectivist evangelist, partially because this is the first full issue on Connectivsm in a peer reviewed Journal and certainly not least because Jon Dron and I have an article in it!

I usually shy away from publishing in IRRODL – too easy to be less than objective about reviewing and editing your own work!  But I took the opportunity of a hot topic, personal interest, great guest editors (who of course were ruthless in their reviews – making it a better article!!) and a brilliant co-author made this opportunity irresistible.

Here is the subscriber letter: (more…)

Wow, its back to the future for me this week. I haven’t been doing face-2-face lectures for years, but this week is campus all over again.

I was honoured to be asked to do a week long PhD seminar at the Universidade Nova de Lisbo here in Lisbon Portugal. The seminar has attracted students and staff from Nova and a few other universities and especially the Univesidade Aberta – Portugese Open University .  The seminars are being web cast and sent out via H323 video conferencing, with a twitter feed (mostly in Portugese), all of which have worked flawlessly, so nothing shabby about the technology here!.

Nova University is relatively new to online learning, with no tradition of distance education (that being the almost exclusive domain in the past to The Open University). But as everywhere, they are interested and expanding access through this technology. The lectures were fun in that was able to recycle some of my earlier powerpoints, but was able to expand and hone all of them for a new audience and to dust off some of my earlier work and thinking.  I do five sessions:

• Distance Education publishing and open access – with lots borrowed from my friend Olaf Zawacki-Richter
• Research Methods and especially Design based research
• Distance education Theories and Models- with a focus on Community of Inquiry
• My Three generations of DE pedagogy – similar to talk I did in Sydney (very slightly updated, sorry, new ideas do not come all that quickly to old brains…..)
• Open Scholarship (also mostly an update on an earlier talk)

I’ve also had some great meetings with my host Patrica Fidalgo, who is a PhD student at Nova and who we met at last summer’s TEKRI doctoral seminar at Athabasca University. This very successful seminar at Nova shows the value of one PhD student making things happen in her own school. Maybe you should think about attending this year’s week long seminar on social networking at Athabasca in Edmonton???

I’ve spent a few hours seeing the city and its many historical sights, and looking forward to a day off on Saturday before hoping the flight to Estonia.

Até mais tarde!

Terry

Our friends at Digital Education Research Network (DERN) alerted me to an interesting review of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) which is largest capital project ever undertaken by the Australian government. The NBN is a 43 billion dollar, 8 year project begun in 2010 which “will deliver high-speed broadband to all Australians” through provision of a wholesale connectivity to thousands of Internet providers throughout the country. They have an ambitious goal of providing fibre to the end user for 93% of users.

The Australian’s were seeing their connectivity continue to lag behind other developed countries – in terms of connectivity, use and end-user costs.  The OECD (2010) rated Australia 18th most connected country (23.4% of citizens compared to the Netherlands as most connected with 36% of citizens using broadband and Canada in 12th place with 30%.

Of recent interest is the establishment of a parliamentary committee to investigate the role and potential of the NBN.  The terms of the committee are both interesting and very broad. They empower the committee to investigate the current and potential value of broadband networking to education, health and other services. (more…)

I’m really pleased to present the second issue of IRRODL 12.2 for this year. I’ve cut and pasted the Table of Contents below, but you need to go to the IRRODL site to find the live links to this open access journal.

Enjoy

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I’ve been neglecting my blog for the past few weeks, partly because I’ve been busy and mostly as I’ve been in half-holiday mode in Australia. Overall, Australia is a lot like Canada except the weather is better and the wine slightly cheaper- though EVERYTHING else is more expensive. I won’t revile my fellow Canadians with tales of exploring Tasmania or sitting on the beech (though it happened, and tempting as it is to remember as I head back to -31 C. in Edmonton). Rather I wanted to post a few observations about distance education in Australia.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to present the opening keynote at the HUB/ODLAA conference in Sydney HUB is a two-year-old multi-institutional, multi institutional research project, funded by the Australian government to advance research and innovation in distance education. The conference attracted about 250 Distance Education (DE) types including foreigners from 21 countries. The conference format featured the usual mix of keynotes, panels and multiple parallel sessions. I expanded an earlier presentation on the 3 generations of DE pedagogy, with more current examples of technology use to enhance all three generations and more development on the types of knowledge development most applicable to each generation (slides at http://www.slideshare.net/terrya/hub-de-summit-sydney.). The talk seemed fairly well received and I was first flattered and then a bit embarrassed by how many of the other speakers referred to my talk in their presentation. I guess a side benefit of going first.

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The start of this year promises to be an active one for consumers of distance education and open learning research. IRRODL will be publishing 3 issues in the next 6 weeks, beginning with Vol. 12(1) that is described and linked to in this post.

This special issue of IRRDOL focuses on the exciting convergence of interests between open and distance learning (ODL) and the recognition of prior learning (RPL). The guest editor of this special issue is Dr Dianne Conrad who is the director, Centre for Learning Accreditation at Athabasca University. Dianne has used her contacts in this community to solicit the quality research articles and field notes that help us all understand more deeply this important and timely topic.

We hope you will take the time to visit the site, download, bookmark and cite articles in this issue. As usual the articles are disseminated in HTML, PDF, MP3 (audio) and EPUB (mobile) formats.

Finally I wish to thank all authors, reviewers, editors (and especially Dianne Conrad) and sponsors who make quality open access publishing possible.

Terry Anderson

Editor,

International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

Athabasca University

Table of Contents

Editorial The landscape of prior learning assessment: A sampling from a diverse field Dianne Conrad HTML PDF MP3 EPUB

Research Articles

Field Notes

I’m a few days late with this Solstice Greeting to you!

I decided to loose a few pounds before Christmas excesses this year, by having stomach flu for 4 days and so even missed our annual Unitarian Solstice Service at Westwood. However, in Northern Canada it is not easy to forget the promise of a return to light and new life, in the midst of some very dark days.  Sun rises here around 9:00 AM and sets at 4:00 PM so we get  less than 8 hours of daylight. But Canadians always think about the season coming up, and so we are planning a special event for the summer solstice at Athabasca University.

Athabasca’s Technology Enhanced Research Centre (Tekri) is sponsoring our second, week long  doctoral seminar. This year’s theme is Social Networking. The format is quite casual with an opportunity for doctoral students and faculty to present, discuss, critique and argue about research projects that they are involved in. Each morning one of our faculty or invited guests does a half day presentation with lots of chance for group interaction. In the afternoon  the Doctoral students or visiting faculty members present their work/ideas and gets the whole groups feedback. In the evenings we do something fun around Edmonton and generally get a chance to really  know 15-25 interesting new friends from around the world.

This year’s core faculty include Jon Dron, Sabina Graf, George Siemens and myself with shorter drop in presentations by other TEKRI fellows such as Dragan Gasevich and Kinshuk. Special invited faculty include Bruno Poelhuber from U. of Montreal and  a couple of others who haven’t quite confirmed yet. Last year Stephen Downes, Alan Levine, and Michael Barbour dropped by, so who knows who will be in Edmonton next June?.

If this type of event is of interest to you and you are an active online researcher (student or faculty) please consider joining us.

The seminar takes place over the summer solstice June 20-24. Those days the sun gets up at 5:00 AM and it stays light till 11:00 PM, so lots of time to enjoy Northern Canada. if you are thinking of coming from overseas (and our 15 participants last year came from 7 countries), you may also want to take the opportunity to see the Canadian Rockies. One can quite easily rent a car, or hop a bus  in Edmonton and spend a couple of days on the Banff to Jasper Icefields Parkway- argueably the most beautiful highway in the world.

So for more details, costs etc check out the TEKRI website

Social Networks and Learning 2011.

From the site:

Social media and networked technologies have altered the ways in which society communicates, educates and produces. Research into social networks and learning is progressing rapidly. In order to advance the conversation around current and future research, the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University is pleased to sponsor a doctoral seminar on Social Networks in Learning. This year’s seminar will be held at Athaabsca University in Edmonton from June 20-24 2011.

Finally Best Wishes for a Rejuvenating Holiday and a wonder filled New Year!

Terry