Virtual Canuck

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

This is the second book in the series Issues in Distance Education from Athabasca University Press. I am the series editor, and wrote the forward to this text, so obviously there is lots of room for conflict of interest (though no pecuniary gain) in this review.

The book is edited and contains an introduction by Athabasca [...]

Read Full Post »

I much enjoyed the sessions at the second Canada Moodlemoot last week in my home town of Edmonton. Many of the sessions and all the keynotes (including my own) were distributed (often 60-70 remote participants, over 300 F2F) and recorded using Elluminate. Slides from 34 of the presentations are accessible on Slideshare with the tag [...]

Read Full Post »

Larry Ragan, Director of Faculty development at Penn State’s World Campus has put his flip camcorder to good use over the past few months, cornering various ‘experts’, practitioners and generally experienced online teachers. He  asked each to describe one core competency for successful online teaching.
He has uploaded about 30 of these 1-3 minute videos to [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

I feel less engaged in shameless self-promotion, with this announcement of the 9.3 issue of the International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), as Jon Baggaley was the editor in charge of this fine issue.
The issue features a video as well as text editorial by Jon, neither of which should be [...]

Read Full Post »

My friend Jon Dron has finally nailed his own (and no doubt others) ideas about the collective nature of Wikipedia. His recent post notes:

the individual actions that create most of the articles,
the groups of administrative types who manage the overall infrastructure and set in place the algorithms that manage the look, feel and performance [...]

Read Full Post »

Here at Athabasca University we are finally getting serious about ELGG and bringing our instance (Me2U) inside the single signon set of apps we provide to all staff and students (portal, library, Moodle, etc.). This means all new login names and thus all data from the old version is lost (sigh…..)
It is annoying having to [...]

Read Full Post »

From the AU News Room:
Dr. Terry Anderson’s appointment as Canada Research Chair in distance education has been renewed for five years. He was presented with the award at the Convocation ceremony on June 10.

Leslie Chivers, communications director for
MP Brian Jean, presented Dr. Terry Anderson
with the documentation to officially renew his Canada Research Chair [...]

Read Full Post »

Stephen Downes nicely ties ideas of ownership, control, learner centricity and choice from PLE’s into notions of the mutlimedia and readwrite nature of web 2.0. Great stuff! Wish I had been there!.
I was especially interested in his update of the Community of Inquiry (COI) model that Randy Garrison and I created some years ago. This [...]

Read Full Post »