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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
It is very exciting to see the CSCL-intro course come to life! Monica and I have been imagining this for many months, and been discussing and planning intensely for the last few weeks. Suddenly, people are doing the readings, writing blog posts, and engaging! Which means we have to do it too, because one of [...]
