Virtual Canuck

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Defining terms like Open and Distance Education has consumed the interest, and resulted in many publications for vocabulary squabblers and some noted educational academics over the years. The rapid evolution of technologies and their adaptation and adoption within the learning and education communities provides opportunities for yet more of this discourse and this post, will [...]

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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 [...]

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Thanks to the DownLoad Squad I bumped into a very interesting tool to mine collective knowledge. Avanoo is a social software tool that allows members to query others through simple Likert like scale items. Nothing too new here except that everyone gets to view and segment the results according to demographic criteria including gender, nationality, [...]

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Scott Wilson notes some concerns with the “lack of clarity” between the three entities of the Many that Jon Dron and I have been discussing and blogging about.
An educational taxonomy or a model gains its pragmatic value by the extent to which it helps practitioners and online learning researchers develop, implement and assess learning [...]

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During the last eight years of his life the Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan worked on developing and validating four “Laws of Media” He argued that every new media Enhances through new affordances, Obsoletes through improvements in form, function and cost; Retrieves older patterns of behaviour and Reverses when over stressed into older, non functional [...]

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I am certainly not the first to ponder the relative merits of blogging inside or outside of education’s closed garden walls (see Bill Ives Is Blogging Inside the Firewall an Oxymoron?) However, I’ve recently seen a couple of presentation by University innovators using blogging - but from behind the institutional firewall and password protection - [...]

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I’ve been on the road (well make that airplane, train and ‘coach’) for most of the past 6 weeks having gratefully responded to offers from colleagues to present keynote talks at a number of interesting academic conferences. I’m not nearly prolific enough to hit the blog compose button after each event, so am summarizing my [...]

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Nancy White has done a great series of postings where she creates a simple taxonomy of three types of blogs - single blog centric, topic centric and community centric.

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