Anna de Liddo and Simon Buckingham Shum, both of whom I met at Learning Analytics 2011 in Banff, provide a very different take on the design of collaborative environments, in their article about Cohere. Instead of focusing on little kids “playing scientists” and learning to think like scientists, they focus on actual scientists, politicians, city [...]

I was very excited when I first came across Dan Suther’s 2008 article “Empirical studies of the value of conceptually explicit notations in collaborative learning” in the book “Knowledge Cartography: Software tools and mapping techniques” (a book which is filled with other very interesting chapters as well). I had been acquainted with Knowledge Forum for [...]

Introduction P2PU courses typically consist of an asynchronous and a synchronous part. The asynchronous part is all the work that is done throughout the week, reading articles, posting blog posts, or comments on the site, collaborating on a wiki article, etc. The synchronous part is usually the “mass-meeting”, where all the participants who are able [...]

I’m back in the game! Due to a number of circumstances, I was absent from the course for about two weeks. This was much longer than I had planned, and I apologize for it. I am also very grateful to Monica for her great work in the interim. It feels great to be back, seeing [...]

Week four‘s second reading is Contributions to a Theoretical Framework for CSCL by Gerry Stahl. Stahl is a key figure in the CSCL movement, as an editor of ijCSCL, the key CSCL journal, and a prolific publisher. He is also an incredibly generous academic, sharing an incredible amount of information on his website. He even [...]

This spring, I took a class called “Knowledge, Media and Learning”, where one of the assignments was to do research and create a design proposal. Together with Rebecca Cober and Lixa Lin, we decided to look at the research workflow for a junior researcher, such as a graduate student. Although we could think of many [...]

I completed my MA thesis on the Chinese National Top Level Courses Project in September 2010, and since then, I have been experimenting with publishing the results in a variety of different formats. I not only made available the classic double-spaced nicely formatted PDF, but also a more compressed two-column single-spaced version fit for printing, [...]

In week 4 of CSCL-intro, we are talking about Knowledge Building, and the first paper is Knowledge building: theory, pedagogy and technology by Scardamalia and Bereiter. I have read a number of their papers before, and have quite a bit of experience with Knowledge Forum, the platform that they developed (I also made a screencast [...]

AERA stands for the American Educational Research Association, but as with so many American associations, their annual meeting is a decidedly international affair. It’s also gigantic, easily the largest meeting of educators in the world, with this year’s meeting bringing some 13,000 attendees spread over 5 large hotels in downtown New Orleans. This was my [...]

Thanks to the generous recommendation by Zaid Ali Alsagoff, George Siemens invited me to give a talk to the Connectivism 2011 MOOC. I decided that instead of giving a talk about something I know and have thought a lot about, like open access or OER, I would try to challenge myself by proposing a topic [...]