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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]