I’m sitting in the Rio airport one leg down and three to go on my way home from the Canadian-Brazil International Seminar on Distance Education, just concluded in Goianas. The seminar featured presentations and lots of questions from about 200 Brazilian delegates and Canadian DEers Heather Kanuka, Griff Richards, Elizabeth Murphy and myself. I did [...]
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This post from Goiânia Brazil where four of us Canadian Distance Education folks are presenting at a Brazilian-Canadian summit on Distance Education. Goiânia is one of those agriculturally based town in Central Brazil with 1.5 million inhabitants that few in North America have ever heard of. But the folks are friendly, the weather tropical, the [...]
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A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education confirms my own experience that most students enrolled in online course do not complete standard course evaluations forms. Online teachers don’t have the luxury of handing out evaluations forms on the last day of classes (naturally before marked papers are returned,) and assigning a graduate student [...]
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During my presentation to CK08 Stephen Downes challenged me to clarify if his distinctions between groups and networks matched my own. I had a little trouble determining exactly his criteria- as I am sure he has my own, but I did find a long speech he gave in New Zealand in 2006 titled Groups versus [...]
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The announcement that 6 candidates in the current Canadian federal election have had to resign from the race due to network documented “indiscretions” gives one thought about the potentially haunting effects of web exposure. Now, most of us have enough sense not to release videos of us lighting up 30 joints at a time [...]
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I am pleased that Ben, Dave and others at ELGG have released version 1.0 of ELGG as scheduled yesterday. The new version promises a number of significant improvements over Elgg .9 that we have been piloting at Athabasca. The software is described here and can be downloaded and installed locally or taken for a test [...]
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I’ve long been a fan of Clayton Christensen’s ‘disruptive innovation” theories outlined in “Innovator’s Dilemma” and the follow up “Innovator’s Solution I think he provides a great deal of sound theoretical and practical reasoning about the process of innovation. Unfortunately, the examples in his books come mostly from industry and especially high tech innovation [...]
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I am pleased to announce the 2nd edition of the edited text Theory and Practice of Online Learning. As the first edition, this one is available in paper copy ($39.95 Canadian) and in PDF for open access download. This is one of the first 6 books produced by the newly launched Athabasca University Press which [...]
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The following is a rather long and scholarly type post arguing for the use of Networks in addition to groups commonly employed in formal campus and distance education. The essay will probably find its way into a published paper or book chapter, but I thought I would post it here in case anyone has interest [...]
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The latest issue of EduCause Review headlines an article Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit by George Siemen, Peter Tittenberger and myself. The work is mostly George’s but I was happy to play a supportive role in its production and editing. The article does a good job of overviewing the ‘augmented’ use of network technologies [...]
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