"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
(…or “It’s All Fracking Online!!!”) I was looking over the session schedule for the SLOAN-C Conference on Online Learning and was a bit disappointed in what I saw. Here, as in elsewhere throughout the blogosphere and more importantly the mainstream education journals, one sees the term “online learning” continually bantered around. Yet, it is a… Read more What is Online Learning?
As you know from my last post, I spent Friday with Jeff Nugent co-facilitating a full-day workshop at the INFORMS Teaching Effectiveness Colloquium. It was rather exciting to spend a full day with a room full of mathematicians! I am still reflecting on what transpired, but wanted to share some thoughts on one aspect, triggered… Read more The Digital Divide – Students versus Faculty
I spent most of today mapping out the first four weeks of my Fall graduate course, Instructional Strategies Using the Internet – a totally online course with students scattered over three states. As this is now an Ed Leadership course, Jon Becker and I are taking it from a strictly Web 1.0 classroom focused course… Read more Backwards Translation
A couple of tweets caught my eye today (and had Jeff Nugent and I in deep conversation!). followed by: In the first, Steve Rubel pointed all of us to a blog post by Leah Jones entitled Enabled Serendipity. Leah talked about how Twitter continually enables her to find and meet other people who are passing… Read more The Twitter Sphere – Two Uses
Jeff Nugent, Bud Deihl and I were brainstorming about workshops to offer next fall to the VCU faculty, and we began to take apart our normal offerings of the various “tools” associated with instructional technology. Jeff began to draw on the whiteboard (yes…we still go low tech at times….) and laid out the following visualization… Read more Moving Beyond Access and Convenience to Learning
It is a little known fact that nothing will get me doing the Air Guitar faster than Dire Straits and Sting’s “Money for Nothing“. And thanks to Songza, I can pull this song and many others up on demand for free when ever I am in the mood. Anyway, that thought of “Money for Nothing”… Read more If Free is Expected, Define “Value”
Friday afternoon, I tweeted that I was checking out a very good list of top K12 Edublogs and asked on Twitter if anyone knew of a comparable list of higher education edublogs. I also noted that I liked the Education Alltop because it mixed higher ed with K-12. Jon Becker tweeted back with a good… Read more Taking a Different Tack
Events this week have had me thinking about “trust” as it applies to our craft. My last post was a bit of a knee jerk reaction to Stephen Downes knee jerk reaction, when he said “I can’t trust anything Sue Waters and Steve Dembo write – and that’s an unhappy state to be in.” What… Read more The Trust Factor
Cathy Nelson blogged about 21st Century Learner Standards yesterday, drawing our attention to the American Association of School Librarian’s Core Standards: The Standards describe how learners use skills, resources, and tools to inquire, think critically, and gain knowledge; draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge; share knowledge and… Read more Twenty-First Century Learning?
Emile Zola said, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” Yet work is not work when joy is evident. . These thoughts came to mind as I watched my Center for Teaching Excellence partner, Bud Deihl, developing his first draft VoiceThread. Each of us in the Center has… Read more Artist at Work