This post arises from two events today The ASCILITE’2014 call for papers came out today and I’m thinking about a paper I might submit. The first #edc3100 assignment is due today and my use of BIM has struck a unique problem that I need to solve. The third is that I’m a touch fried from
Category: herding cats
Ateleological travels in a teleological world: Past and future journeys around ICTs in education
In my previous academic life, I never really saw the point of book chapters as a publication form. For a variety of reasons, however, my next phase in academia appears likely to involve an increasing number of book chapters. The need for the first such chapter has arisen this week and the first draft is
Alan Kay and some reasons why the educational technology revolution hasn't happened
While reading a recent post from Gardner Campbell I was taken by a quote from Alan Kay The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas A google search later and I came across this interview with Kay for the Scholastic Administrator magazine. The article is titled “Alan Kay still waiting for the revolution”
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Nobody likes a do-gooder – another reason for e-learning not mainstreaming?
Came across the article, “Nobody likes a do-gooder: Study confirms selfless behaviour is alienating” from the Daily Mail via Morgaine’s amplify. I’m wondering if there’s a connection between this and the chasm in the adoption of instructional technology identified by Geoghegan (1994) The chasm Back in 1994, Geoghegan draw on Moore’s Crossing the Chasm to
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How people learn and implications for academic development
While I’m traveling this week I am reading How people learn. This is a fairly well known book that arose out of a US National Academy of Science project to look at recent insights from research about how people learn and then generate insights for teaching. I’ll be reading it through the lens of my
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The McNamara Fallacy and pass rates, academic analytics, and engagement
In some reading for the thesis today I came across the concept of McNamara’s fallacy. I hadn’t heard this before. This is somewhat surprising as it points out another common problem with some of the more simplistic approaches to improving learning and teaching that are going around at the moment. It’s also likely to be
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The grammar of school, psychological dissonance and all professors are rather ludditical
Yesterday, via a tweet from @marksmithers I read this post from the author of the DIYU book titled “Vast Majority of Professors Are Rather Ludditical”. This is somewhat typical of the defict model of academics which is fairly prevalent and rather pointless. It’s pointless for a number of reasons, but the main one is that
McGuffins, learning, teaching and universities
D’Arcy Norman suggests that Edupunk is a McGuffin. I like the metaphor. But I think it breaks down a bit, at least in the context I’m interested in. Wikipedia uses a definition of a McGuffin that suggests it is “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of
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Functional fixedness, analytics, and the LMS
A blog post on the website of Gilfes Education Group (apparently a “network of independent education experts”) picks up on the Indicators project and its take on academic analytics. The post seems to largely in agreement with what we’re doing and the reasons behind it. The following seeks to pick up on a point made
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The confusion of small and big changes
Over the last couple of days I’ve enjoyed a small discussion that has arisen out of some comments Kevin has made on my blog. This post is an attempt to partially engage with the most recent comment. I echo Kevin’s conclusion, I’d love to hear anyone else’s take on this. The unanswered question The main
