Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Jun 23rd, 2009 3 Comments »
I was very pleased to be invited to do a keynote at International Council for Distance Education (ICDE) in Maastricht Holland this month. ICDE is the largest coordinating and professional development organization for distance education and open learning institutions and communities around the globe. It attracts delegates from the large mega universities as well as [...]
Posted in My Work, Personal on Jun 15th, 2009 10 Comments »
I was saddened to hear this morning of the death of a good friend, fellow Canadian and colleague, Robin Mason. Robin was an influential and important figure in the development of computer conferencing for educational applications. She worked for many years at the British Open University and there she was the first to develop computer [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Jun 4th, 2009 No Comments »
A year ago George Siemens, Sylvia Currie, Paul Stacey and I organized a two week online conference titled Shaping Our Future: Toward a Pan-Canadian E-leaning Research Agenda. The release of the CCL report last week, reminded me that we had never properly promoted the final report of this conference. Joanne Nielsen produced a report [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on May 25th, 2009 14 Comments »
The title of this posting may be a bit melodramatic, but it accurately reflects the lost of international e-learning leadership by Canada as documented in the release of State of E-learning in Canada 2009 by Canada Council on Learning. I could find nothing I totally disagreed with in this 145 page report and much that [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work, Uncategorized on May 13th, 2009 No Comments »
A couple of months ago I was honored to be asked to give the annual Ernest Boyer lecture at an all -college gathering of Empire State College- State University of New York. I had heard about Empire State for some years, as it was founded in 1971 – about the same time as the Open [...]
Posted in My Work, PLEs, educational social software on May 7th, 2009 3 Comments »
I was pleased to read a recent article that creates a framework for use and adoption of blogs in higher education.The article is Kerawalla, L., Minocha, S., Kirkup, G., & Conole, G. (2009). An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25(1). I normally wouldn’t link to or [...]
Posted in Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work on Mar 3rd, 2009 4 Comments »
We are pleased to release another fine issue of International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL). This issue marks our 10th year of publication and I am confident that IRRODL is now the most widely read and cited distance education journal in the world. We present in this issue 8 peer reviewed [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work, PLEs, collective on Feb 9th, 2009 No Comments »
In my recent talks, I’ve been reminding audiences of the green effect and the potential for reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption by choosing distance as opposed to campus based education. Ironically, I’ve often had to fly on a carbon footprint expanding airplane, to get to these conferences, but that is another irony that escapes [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Jan 16th, 2009 2 Comments »
I’m writing this mostly for the students in our own Distance Education program at Athabasca University, but it may be of interest to others holding access to a well connected research library.
By way of disclosure, let me state that I love and use Google Scholar on a daily basis. The only thing I don’t like [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Dec 17th, 2008 3 Comments »
As an instructor in Athabasca University’s Master of Distance Education program, I was involved in providing an e-portfolio option to replace the standard comprehensive exam process for non thesis route students. The old ‘comps’ consisted of the candidate writing yet two more essays on material covered in the porgram and defending the essays with two [...]
