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 [...]
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 [...]
This course is inspired both by “Wiley wikis”, and by “MOOCs”. One of the innovations that Stephen Downes brought in with his first MOOC back in 2008 was the concept of “The Daily”, a daily e-mail that would summarize the readings, the events, and some of the most interesting blog posts or other artefacts that [...]
Introduction I have had many opportunities to think about grading and assessment this term. I am currently running a course called Introduction to Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, and have thought a lot about incentive mechanisms and badges with Monica Resendes, who is co-facilitating the course with me. I am also preparing to design and teach a course in [...]
I have been intimately involved with P2PU since the first courses started in September 2009, working on supporting course organizers, designing and developing some of the technology, and thinking about the models of learning interactions that we wanted to support. However, I have still not taught a single course myself. Time to change that! I [...]
This term, I took a Knowledge Media and Design Institute class on values and design. Part of the class was a group assignment that had us choose a public venue, and do unobtrusive participant observation (this could be a public square, a museum or another place where people congregate). Based on what we found through [...]
Existing approaches to course-based OER There are generally two approaches to course-based “big OER” (institutional OER projects, as opposed to resources released by individual professors or others). The first is the MIT OpenCourseWare approach (which has been replicated by universities across the US, and the world). Given that professors are already developing a set of materials [...]
I’ve previously posted all my tweets from different conferences, and I thought I’d do it again with the Learning Analytics conference. I don’t know how useful it is to others, but at the very least, it’s a very useful archive for myself. I tweeted much more in the beginning, and began to write more in the [...]
During the second day of the Learning Analytics Conference, I continued taking notes in Etherpad, just like I had done during the pre-conference, and day 1. After lunch, I felt quite burnt out however, after taking quite detailed notes for two and a half day already. In addition, I had some very interesting conversations during [...]
