I don’t know if it’s because I was reading about how Mark Zuckerberg is on a one year challenge to only eat what he kills, or if I was inspired by the speakers at TEDxIBYORK last Friday, but I decided I wanted to do some language learning. Initially, I was thinking about Urdu – it’s [...]
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 met Martin Aasbrenn, a Norwegian doctor and medical educator, through Twitter. Since then, we’ve had a number of interesting discussions about the production and use of Open Educational Resources online, and we had a chance to meet up last summer to continue these conversations. I always think I am busy myself, but here is [...]
The research I have detailed my trajectory into the Open Educational Resources movement many times on this blog, starting with the iCommons summit in Dubrovnik in 2007, and the Intro to Open Education course facilitated by David Wiley that fall. In addition to bringing me into contact with the people and ideas that would eventually [...]
I wrote earlier about preparing to give a guest lecture in a class called KMD 1002: Knowledge Communities: Patterns and Practices, where I assigned three resources for class preparation: a CIDER talk by Terry Anderson about Three Generations of Distance Education Pedagogy. I also ended up assigning a paper by Marlene Scardamalia: Collective Cognitive Responsibility [...]
As I wrote earlier, I was invited by Jeff Lail, Jeff Jackson and Laura Pasquini from BreakDrink to participate in their weekly podcast, and discuss P2PU. It was a fun format, and I got some really nice questions. I had a feeling we could have continued chatting for a while, and they invited me back [...]
I was invited to discuss Peer2Peer University at a newly launched podcast about universities, technologies and student affairs called Campus Tech Connections. According to the website, “[t]he goal is to help campus practitioners understand technology while becoming active digital citizens”. They use the blogtalkradio platform, which enables people to call in during the show to [...]
This weekend, I have three couchsurfers from Argentina staying with me, and I’ve been practicing my Spanish a lot. It’s quite rusty, but it’s fun, and we have had some great conversations. This evening, my roommate joined us, and all five of us were sitting around the table platicando. We talked about Toronto, and all [...]
I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow‘s work. Without planning to, I have actually read his entire oeuvres on screen. If I ever came across a paper copy of one of his books, I would love to pick it up, but I haven’t seen one at the airports I frequent. It started when I [...]
Introduction I’m fascinated by the idea of measurement itself having an effect on behavior. For example, it has been show that simply letting people see how much electricity they are using at any given time, leads people to decrease their usage. Data is also necessary to experiment, and measure the effect. I was fascinated by [...]
