After spending a few days visiting friends and family in Central Queensland – not to mention enjoying the beach – a long 7+ hour drive home provided an opportunity for some thinking. I’ve long had significant qualms about the notion of leadership, especially as it is increasingly being understood and defined by the current corporatisation
Category: highereducation
Oh Academia
It’s been one of those weeks in academia. Earlier in the week the “I quit academia” meme went through my Twitter stream. Perhaps the closest this meme came to me was @marksmithers “On leaving academia” post. That was about the day when I had to pull the pin on a grant application. Great idea, something
IRAC – Four questions for learning analytics interventions
The following is an early description of work arising out of The Indicators Project an ongoing attempt to think about learning analytics. With IRAC (Information, Representation, Affordances and Change) Colin Beer, Damien Clark and I are trying to develop a set of questions that can guide the use of learning analytics to improve learning and
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Schools and computers: Tales of a digital romance
It’s the last week of semester, EDC3100 ICTs and Pedagogy is drawing to a close and I’m putting together the last bit of activities/resources for the students in the course. Most are focused on the last assignment and in particular a final essay that asks them to evaluate their use of ICTs while on their
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One example of industrial e-learning as "on the web" not "of the web"
The following arises from some recent experiences with the idea of “minimum course sites” and this observation from @cogdog in this blog post I have no idea if this is off base, but frankly it is a major (to me) difference of doing things ON the web (e.g. putting stuff inside LMSes) and doing things
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Lessons for the meta-level of networked learning?
This semester I’m teaching EDU8117, Networked and Global Learning, one of the Masters level courses here at USQ. It’s been an interesting experience because I’m essentially supporting the design – a very detailed “constructive alignment” design – prepared by someone else. The following is a belated start of my plan to engage in the course
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Schemata and the source of dissonance?
The following is intended to be an illustration of one of the potential origins of the gap between learning technologists and educators. It picks up on the idea of schemata from this week’s study in one course and connects to my point about the dissonance between how educational technology is implemented in universities and what
Some stories from teaching awards
This particular post tells some personal stories about teaching awards within Australian higher education. It’s inspired by a tweet or two from @jonpowles Some personal success For my sins, I was the “recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Quality Teaching for the Year 2000”. The citation includes in recoginition of demonstrated outstanding practices in teaching
Situated shared practice, curriculum design and academic development
Am currently reading Faegri et al (2010) as part of developing the justificatory knowledge for the final ISDT for e-learning that is meant to be the contribution of the thesis. The principle from the ISDT that this paper connects with is the idea of a “Multi-skilled, integrated development and support team” (the name is a
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The rider, elephant, and shaping the path
Listened to this interview of Chip Heath, a Stanford Professor in Organizational Behaviour about his co-authored book Switch: How to change things when change is hard. My particular interest in this arises from figuring out how to improve learning and teaching in universities. From the interview and the podcast this seems to be another one
