I just wrote about two articles published based on my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses, and this inspired me to look at some of the download statistics from my website. Back in 2008, I wrote about the idea of a “Fair Trade” symbol for research, and the idea the research ethics shouldn’t stop with the [...]

I released my MA thesis about Chinese Open Courses September 13, 2010, and more than a year later, two journal articles partly based on the thesis have also appeared, one in English and one in Chinese. British Journal of Educational Technology The English article appeared in British Journal of Educational Technology as “Online First” in November 2011. [...]

I recently gave a keynote presentation at ICETC 2011 in Changchun, where I discussed some of the experiences from facilitating the course “Introduction to CSCL” on P2PU, and pointed towards some ideas for technologies and ways of organizing courses that could enable deeper learning in open courses. Open Courses and Informal Learning in a Web [...]

While in Hong Kong attending CSCL, I was surprised to receive an invitiation by Professor Li Luyi at Northwestern Normal University in Changchun to give a keynote lecture at the upcoming International Conference on Educational Technology and Computer. Since I would be participating in the Beijing post-conference and doctoral summer school at the same time, [...]

What is a follower? P2PU courses have always been entirely transparent, even without logging in, a visitor would be able to see not only the course outline and the links to all the freely accessible course resources (often linked from other websites), but also all the interactions and discussions between the course members. On the [...]

This was my first year attending the bi-annual CSCL conference, which this year happened to be at the Hong Kong University campus. I was very excited, since I had been reading papers by many of the people who would be attending, and it would also be the first time I’d be in Hong Kong (and [...]

The course During the past eight weeks, Monica Resendes and I facilitated a course called “Introduction to the field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning” on P2PU. We are both interested in developing a research agenda around open courses, although this first course did not have an explicit research design or research questions. We approached it [...]

Last week, I went to Hangzhou to participate in the Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education (GCCCE). Hangzhou is a beautiful city, where I once spent half a year, and I was looking forward to a chance to go back. The registration fee for the conference was also quite reasonable, only $75 for students, [...]

I am really happy to finally announce that the full Chinese translation of my MA thesis on Chinese Top Level Courses is available. The Chinese title is “中国国家精品课程项目：使用开放教育资源提升本科教学质量”, and it can be downloaded in a number of formats: PDF DOC ODT RTF. You can also find more information about the thesis, additional downloads etc, on my [...]

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 [...]