"Predicting the future is easy. It's trying to figure out what's going on now that's hard" (Dressler, 2005)
I am not at the Educause Learning Initiative 2014 conference this year, but I always look forward to the New Media Consortium‘s annual Horizon Report, in which a team of colleagues from around the world attempt to forecast six key trends, six significant challenges, and six emerging technologies that will impact teaching and learning in… Read more On the Horizon
With my colleagues at the VCU Center for Teaching Excellence, we have challenged ourselves this Fall to dedicate time each week to exploring a learning framework that has informed our work for years – the Community of Inquiry Framework. Or as Bud Deihl so eloquently stated, we are starting a Community of Inquiry about the… Read more Inquiring into CoI
Last week in GRAD-602, Jeff Nugent led an exploration on assessment. We noted that a distinction can be made between learning for mastery versus the traditional approach that typically leads to sorting and sifting students. This provided a segway to the evening’s focus on formative and summative assessment. In class, we brainstormed ways in which… Read more Roundtable Discussion on Assessment
Sat down with Jeff Nugent and David McLeod, my co-teachers for GRAD-602, to discuss the tension between learner autonomy and learner compliance. This is planned to be the first in a series of podcasts we three will do for this course. Good discussion around power, roles, self-directedness, and learning-centered students. Note: The Skeptical Goat made… Read more A Conversation on Learner Autonomy and Compliance
For six years now, Jane Hart has annually compiled the Top 100 Tools for Learning. She does this by crowdsourcing the list and having learning professionals in the field provide their top ten tools. One can submit their top ten tools via Twitter or Facebook or a survey. The 2011 list has had over 160,000 views on her… Read more Top Tools for Learning (at the present moment)
I have to admit – 2011 seemed like a long year, and I am glad to see it go. 2012 seems more promising, even with a presidential election looming. 🙂 I did not blog much in 2011, but I also did little teaching in 2011 (and none online), and so did not feel that I… Read more Hello 2012 and a New Community for Learning
I am currently reading Bill Kist’s new book, The Socially Networked Classroom. While written for all levels of education from elementary through postsecondary, he focuses on the use of social media in classes from middle school and above. As I continue to work with K-12 teachers in my graduate course, this book addresses many of… Read more The Socially Networked Student
I am heading out for a couple of weeks vacation, but I wanted to try and capture some thoughts about the summer institute our team at the CTE completed on Friday. My last two posts focused on the first two days. The further we got into the week, the less energy I had at day’s… Read more Teaching Online (Versus Online Teaching)
Michael Bugeja’s opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job,” struck a nerve today. He started by noting that for “most of this decade, professors embraced the pedagogy of engagement, wooing students via technology and ignoring the costs because traditional methods, from textbooks to lectures, purportedly bored students who… Read more What Walls Need Tearing Down?
I just finished reading Curtis J. Bonk’s new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that Wiley, the publisher, emailed me after I reviewed Dan Willingham’s book in a previous post and asked if they could send me Bonk’s book for… Read more Faculty Development in An Open World