Rural China Education Foundation is an NGO set up by overseas Chinese who want to strengthen rural education in China. They train local teachers, develop materials, provide some funding, and also invite volunteers from China and abroad for shorter stays. I had the chance to visit two of their schools a few years ago, and wrote [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the presentations that impressed me at the recent GCCCE 2011 was by Chen Wenli on using GroupScribbles for language learning. To be honest, I was more fascinated by the tool, than by the exact way in which she had used it. This is a good example of how you the way you read [...]

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, [...]

Welcome back. Sorry that we are slightly behind on the bi-weeklies, but all shall be summarized here. Last week, we discussed scaffolding, and read a really interesting article: Puntambekar, S. Scaffolding in Complex Learning Environments: What we have gained and what we have missed? Stian summarized the article, and blogged about it. Nate also blogged about [...]

This week in CSCL-intro, we read Puntambekar & Hubscher’s Scaffolding in complex learning environments: What we have gained and what we have missed. We were also supposed to read an article by Slotta, but that link seems to have gone broken. The Puntambekar paper was a great read though, and a very nice introduction to [...]

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 [...]