Virtual Canuck

I participated in an interesting meeting of the Athabasca University Academic Council (our senate equivalent) this morning and the most contentious item concerned our option for ‘challenge for credit” alternative, that is offered in most of our undergraduate programs.
By way of background, Athabasca undergrad programs are offered as continuous enrollment and mostly self study programs that follow the old correspondence model. We offer support from an individual tutor, a study guide (that roughly serves as an interpretation of the study materials), a FEW interactive options (little used) via Moodle and a course pack that typically consists of a reading package and a text or two.  Students are given 6 months (can be extended with $$$ to a year), as much access (phone and email) as they want to an assigned  tutor, tutor marked assignments and an invigilated exam. We have recently been offering ‘optional’ networking and support via our elgg based social networking system (the Athabasca Landing) but the take up by tutors, faculty and students has (to date) been modest.
Credit for challenge (as opposed to seat time or completion of course activities), is an old idea first institutionalized by the University of London in the 19th century. Read the rest of this entry »

The good folks at DERN (Australia) posted a nice summary of Jon Dron and my article from the recent Connectivist special issue of IRRODL.  They write:

“A review of the three dominant learning theories: Cognitive-Behaviourist, Social-Constructivist and Connectivist, and the pedagogies derived from them. The review is very relevant to the use of digital technologies in education using a community of inquiry analysis model beginning with a description of each learning theory and then analyses of the cognitive presence, social presence and teacher presence, and concludes with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each. This paper is a must read for educators interested in elearning.”

Over a beer and salty tears yesterday, (we were watching the Canucks get hammered by the Bruins), Jon and I were talking about a slide set he was preparing for a presentation to our Nursing Faculty here at Athabasca.  One of the slides shows a fourth integrative pedagogy that it refers to as holist. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been a fan of Jessie Brown and his podcasts (notably SearchEngine on CBC and now TVO). I’ve spent many a pleasant walk to work listening to Jessie on my iphone. Thus, I was pleased to be able to hear him speak F2F at Can. Network for Innovation in Education (CNIE) in Hamilton. He talked about his personal education as a 1977 vintage “net generation” boy in Canadian schools – more interested in comics and media than formal lessons.

I had no idea he was one of the co-founders of Bitstrips the toolset that lets ANYONE create, mix and remix cartoon characters and strips. He told of the over 1,000,000 published strips being done by school kids in Ontario schools (and no doubt after school) half of whom are being written by boys. One small, but important, step in battle for literacy amongst that threatened population of too many illiterates – young boys.

Jessie is an engaging speaker and of course embraces the learning that can and does embrace new and participatory media for learning. His answer to “Does the Net make you stupid” ended “it doesn’t matter and or who cares”  Ideas of stupidness and smartness do and have changed over time and the Net is embedded in 21st century life “The past and the future share the world” educators must embrace learning from  both. A bit technologial deterministic to my mind, but probably true

My favorite quote from the talk in regard to web 2.0 and social software like Facebook “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”

The talk reminded me that I haven’t shared my one and only cartoon – created a year ago, so here it is: http://bitstrips.com/

.

The second book I want to post about is the 3rd edition of Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and technology that arrived on my desk yesterday. This one even came free ($82 in paper back, $45 as an ebook), because I authored one of the chapters (more below on that).

The book is edited by Robert Reiser and John Dempsey, and contains nearly 400 pages and 38 chapters. Each chapter is written by one of the big “who’s who” of mostly American instructional design (ID) gurus. You’ll find chapters by David Merrill, Walter Dick, David Jonassen, John Keller, Richard Clark,  Michael Hannafin and the two editors – names familiar to instructional designers and ed tech students for the past 3 decades at least. There are also a few new faces – notably e-learning and knowledge management guru Marc Rosenberg and Valerie Shute (amongst many others). You can see the full Table of Contents here. I also noted an increasing (but still far in the minority) number of women scholars such as Marcy Driscoll and Elizabeth Boling.

The text is designed for the serious instructional design student. The editors have produced an edition of this text every five Read the rest of this entry »

Well, after surviving end of term marking, coupled with two online keynotes and a real f2F one at Canadian MoodelMoot I’ve finally found some time to skim through two books that arrived on my desk that I want to share with you.

The first is The Publish or Perish Book (P 0r P) by Anne-Wil Harzing. Harzing is one my heroes because she created and released  PorP Open Access program that uses Google Scholar to evaluate journals, articles, and authors based upon the number of citations of the work, collection or journal in other scholarly works. Read the rest of this entry »

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of my friend Gary Boyd, Professor at Concordia University in  Montreal. Gary exemplified scholarship in education technology and came to personalize what I think are the necessary, but far too uncommon characteristics of  scholarship and application of new technologies and pedagogy to teaching and learning.

I first met Gary in 1988, when Robert Sweet and I went on a research trip to Concordia. I still remember two things about that first meeting- first the vivid introduction to scholarly mess – Gerry had mountains of texts, papers, floppy disks and conference proceedings spilling out and over his desk and the floor. Second, I also remember his big smile and very warm greeting to Robert (a past Concordia colleague) and to myself, At that time, I was about  million psychological miles from an academic vocation and life style. I was impressed by both aspects of Gary’s life.

Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Rory McGreal and I are very fortunate to have been invited to by the Estonian E-Learning Development Centre (oh to have a funded, national e-learning group and strategy!!) to present at the 8th annual Estonian E-learning conference in Tartu starting tomorrow.  Yesterday morning we spent the day gawking at the wonderful ‘old town’ here in Tallinn. Although Rory kept grousing about the Disneyfication of Europe’s old cities, we were pretty impressed.

Tallinn, Estonia old town

The town was settled by European immigrants in the 12-14 century. It has the highest town wall (complete with towers) that I have seen and the center is chalked full of very old houses, Inns, churches and the current Estonian houses of Parliament. Of course all of this beauty comes with a zillion tourist and handicraft shops, outdoor booths and restaurants.  The season is just beginning as there is still dirty snow piled up on the corners (reminds me of home). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve decided to repost the email I sent to subscribers to IRRODL, announcing this VERY special issue.  If you want to be one of the 5054 (and growing) IRRODL subscribers (its free) and get your very own email announcement of each new issue, rather than read this boring old blog, click here.

I am especially pleased with this special issue, partly because, I am becoming a connectivist evangelist, partially because this is the first full issue on Connectivsm in a peer reviewed Journal and certainly not least because Jon Dron and I have an article in it!

I usually shy away from publishing in IRRODL – too easy to be less than objective about reviewing and editing your own work!  But I took the opportunity of a hot topic, personal interest, great guest editors (who of course were ruthless in their reviews – making it a better article!!) and a brilliant co-author made this opportunity irresistible.

Here is the subscriber letter: Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, its back to the future for me this week. I haven’t been doing face-2-face lectures for years, but this week is campus all over again.

I was honoured to be asked to do a week long PhD seminar at the Universidade Nova de Lisbo here in Lisbon Portugal. The seminar has attracted students and staff from Nova and a few other universities and especially the Univesidade Aberta – Portugese Open University .  The seminars are being web cast and sent out via H323 video conferencing, with a twitter feed (mostly in Portugese), all of which have worked flawlessly, so nothing shabby about the technology here!.

Nova University is relatively new to online learning, with no tradition of distance education (that being the almost exclusive domain in the past to The Open University). But as everywhere, they are interested and expanding access through this technology. The lectures were fun in that was able to recycle some of my earlier powerpoints, but was able to expand and hone all of them for a new audience and to dust off some of my earlier work and thinking.  I do five sessions:

• Distance Education publishing and open access – with lots borrowed from my friend Olaf Zawacki-Richter
• Research Methods and especially Design based research
• Distance education Theories and Models- with a focus on Community of Inquiry
• My Three generations of DE pedagogy – similar to talk I did in Sydney (very slightly updated, sorry, new ideas do not come all that quickly to old brains…..)
• Open Scholarship (also mostly an update on an earlier talk)

I’ve also had some great meetings with my host Patrica Fidalgo, who is a PhD student at Nova and who we met at last summer’s TEKRI doctoral seminar at Athabasca University. This very successful seminar at Nova shows the value of one PhD student making things happen in her own school. Maybe you should think about attending this year’s week long seminar on social networking at Athabasca in Edmonton???

I’ve spent a few hours seeing the city and its many historical sights, and looking forward to a day off on Saturday before hoping the flight to Estonia.

Até mais tarde!

Terry

Our friends at Digital Education Research Network (DERN) alerted me to an interesting review of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) which is largest capital project ever undertaken by the Australian government. The NBN is a 43 billion dollar, 8 year project begun in 2010 which “will deliver high-speed broadband to all Australians” through provision of a wholesale connectivity to thousands of Internet providers throughout the country. They have an ambitious goal of providing fibre to the end user for 93% of users.

The Australian’s were seeing their connectivity continue to lag behind other developed countries – in terms of connectivity, use and end-user costs.  The OECD (2010) rated Australia 18th most connected country (23.4% of citizens compared to the Netherlands as most connected with 36% of citizens using broadband and Canada in 12th place with 30%.

Of recent interest is the establishment of a parliamentary committee to investigate the role and potential of the NBN.  The terms of the committee are both interesting and very broad. They empower the committee to investigate the current and potential value of broadband networking to education, health and other services. Read the rest of this entry »