"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
Stephen Downes noted this report in his blog post a few days back, noting: “This report has some flaws but it is overall a far better snapshot of the future of learning than many of its contemporaries… five scenarios dominate – education as usual, global giants, regional rising, peer-to-peed, and robo revolution. These aren’t depicted… Read more Oh The Changes We Will See
This week, I start teaching an 8-week course for Merrimack – ED6306 – Technology, Communication and School Improvement. One of the course objectives is for students to revise or develop a social media marketing plan for their school. And I am half-way through the Spring term at Northeastern for EDU6333 – Social Media and Beyond,… Read more Two Faces of Social Media
In a five-part series, Canadian Tony Bates looked at the overall purpose of online courses, in reaction to recent moves by the Canadian government: Ontario’s strategy to use online learning to ease pressure on high schools using online learning to reduce the cost of higher education using online education to support disadvantaged students: no online… Read more The Purpose of Online Learning
An interesting conversation developed today in my class hashtag on Twitter. One student shared Mary Ludden’s post “How to connect in a connectionless environment…”, which suggested that three key areas of focus were: Be present. Be connected. Be real. For some reason, the old book Fish! and the Fish Philosophy jumped to my mind. I… Read more On Being There
Yesterday during a web conference with faculty teaching in the Creighton University Interdisciplinary Doctorate in Leadership, we were discussing andragogy – the teaching of adults. Jeff Miller noted that one practice he used was to add Twitter to his classes. In an email later following up with me, he shared his rationale that is in… Read more Teaching and Learning with Twitter
During a brainstorming web conference with Elizabeth Mahler at Northeastern earlier this week, she noted the need to move our elearning and instructional design courses beyond simply instructional design to focus more on the user experience. Learning Experience Design (LXD) has been around for awhile, but I wonder how much attention it has garnered? Ruth… Read more Leaving a Bit of Our Heart in our Courses
It is a few years old now, but I finally got around to reading Jim Lang’s excellent book Small Teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning (2016). Jim defines small teaching as “…an approach that seeks to spark positive change in higher education through small but powerful modifications to our course design and teaching… Read more The Small Teaching Approach
In my post last Saturday on eLearning Myths a Decade Later, Sue Waters in Australia asked a good question: While I first taught online at the University of Nebraska in 1995 (pre-LMS’s), I have been teaching continuously online since 2001. So I thought I would look back 18 years and 8 years, and compare my… Read more Changes in Two Decades of Online Teaching
In the 2019 Edublog challenge, yesterday we were to update an old post. I am catching up today, but I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at a post I did almost 11 years ago…in my first month of blogging. I posted “eLearning Myths” on February 16, 2008 while I was… Read more eLearning Myths a Decade Later
I made some minor changes to my posted teaching philosophy two years ago and last year…but it really had not been updated since 2014…and as we all know, the world of 2018 is markedly different from the world of 2014. The web now is not as friendly as it once was, and “truth” now carries… Read more Updating My Teaching Philosophy
