I was a Teaching Assistant for a Knowledge Media and Design Institute course on Knowledge Media and Learning this term, and during the last class, I got invited to give a one hour overview of open courses. I put together a presentation which reused some of my old material, but also looked at the new [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
