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 [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work, educational social software on Dec 14th, 2008 10 Comments »
I have nearly completed this term’s paper and report marking using Adobe Acrobat to add voice comments and annotations. In a word, the results are terrific!!
First, it saved me time. I am not a fast typer and using voice, meant I didn’t even have to spell check!! My comments were much longer than text annotations [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work, Uncategorized, educational social software on Nov 15th, 2008 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work, educational social software on Sep 24th, 2008 No Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Sep 8th, 2008 4 Comments »
On one of my shortest transatlantic jaunts, I spent 3 days this week with an international team developing a series of eight web based tutorials on e-learning for university faculty. The series is a bold, entrepreneurial attempt to speed the adoption and effective use of e-learning and online education resources beyond early adopters to the [...]
Posted in My Work, PLEs on Aug 14th, 2008 1 Comment »
Thanks to Stephen and Graham Atwell, I discovered a fascinating development in the Personal learning Environment development. To date most of the PLE implementations I have seen have been aggregators of RSS feeds, with not much more functionality than a iGoogle or Pageflake portal. The paper “Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments” by Fridolin [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Jul 10th, 2008 No Comments »
My friend Jennifer Maddrell (of EdTechTalk fame) has completed a systems analysis of Athabasca University. She posted the report to Scribd and it can be downloaded or read, but I think you have to join scribd (which is likely a useful activity in any case). I assume the report was done as coursework in her [...]
Posted in Distance Education, My Work on Jul 10th, 2008 1 Comment »
I thought I would take a moment to link to the slides and the paper I wrote for this morning’s keynote at the ACDE’s 2nd Congress being held in Lagos and hosted by the National Open University of Nigeria. This talk has forced me out of my comfort zone, as I’ve had to do more [...]
Posted in Distance Education, IRRODL, My Work on Jul 3rd, 2008 2 Comments »
Volume 9, No. 2 of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (www.irrodl.org) is now online.
I like this issue for a number of reasons:
I managed to twist the arm of a colleague, Jon Baggaley, to guest edit the issue, as I am still officially on sabbatical. Jon, with the usual able assistance [...]
