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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 work in progress). The following is simply a placeholder for a quote from the paper and a brief connection with the ISDT and what I think it means for curriculum design and academic development....more...
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 in a line of "popular science" books aimed at making clear what science/research knows about the topic....more...
The following is a slightly edited copy of a message I've just sent off to the Learning Analytics GoogleGroup set up by George Siemens. I'm into reuse. Essentially it tries to highlight a small subset of the uses of learning analytics that I see as most interesting....more...
The following is a summary/explanation of a common problem with BIM and its mirroring of blog posts and a common solution. The problem is generally caused by folk creating their blog posts in Word and then copying and pasting them into the blog post. For various reasons this process brings along some "special" characters which, while they work fine in Word, screw up royally within more constrained textual representations, like those of Web browsers and XML/RSS parsing libraries....more...
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)...more...
Yet another "death of X" article is the spark for this post. This one comes from the Wall Street Journal and is titled The end of management. There's been a wave of these articles recently, but this one I like because it caters to my prejudice that most of the problems in organisations, especially in universities around learning and teaching, arise from an inappropriate management paradigm. The following has some connections to the oil sheiks thread....more...
I'm in the midst of the horrible task of trying to abstract what I think I know about implementing e-learning information systems within universities into the formal "language" required of an information systems design theory and a PhD thesis. This post is a welcome break from that, but is still connected in that it builds on what is perhaps fundamentally different between what most universities are currently doing, and what I think is a more effective approach. In particular, it highlights some more recent developments which are arguably a step towards what I'm thinking....more...
The following arises from a combination of factors including:...more...
The following is an attempt to consider and respond to a suggestion on my thesis from my esteemed supervisor. It's essentially some thinking and questions arising from further refinement of the research method being used in my thesis....more...
Am attempting to keep this weekly update thing going within the new context. Not much to report this week as I was out of town for three days, baby sitting and recovering for another, and thinking about jobs and family-based travel on the other....more...
Am finding this HBR article to have an interesting take on the centralisation verse de-centralisation argument. However, still reading through it. ...more...
And now for something completely different, leaving the dinosaurs of academic development within universities behind, it's time to move on to some real dinosaurs, or at least their fossilised remains. In a few weeks, the two boys and I are off out west. In particular, we're off to "ride" the Dinosaur trail of Western Queensland. Both boys are going through the dinosaur phase, with the 5 year old certain he wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up....more...
There is a lot I like about within this discussion of a "systems approach to e-learning". However, there is also much that I dislike. ...more...
The following is an early draft of the "lessons learned" section of chapter 5 of the thesis, the third last section that needs to be completed (to first draft stage). It still needs some work and completing the last two sections will probably lead to some changes, but it's a start....more...
It seems the open educational resources and open courses are one of the next big fads. I realise that they've been around for a long time. There is the formalisation of open courses arising out of the MIT and similar projects leading to the OCW consortium and more recently there's been idea of a MOOC idea arising from work by Seimens, Cormier, Downes and others. Even before all that there were various ad hoc examples of open courses (of different types) made available through the work of various "lone rangers". The fad cycle around OER/OCW has been in an upswing for a while, lots of formal institutional interest and increasingly there are grants being awarded. In fact, it appears that including OER/OCW in a grant title seems to be a good thing at the moment. Sure sign of a fad?...more...
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 thesis and some broader thinking about "academic development" (one of the terms applied to trying to help improve the teaching and learning of university)....more...
Am somewhat torn between the logic of this sort of approach to applying insights from broader business practice to higher education, and a slight shudder at the history of misuse that exists as folk mindlessly adapt business practices to higher education. Mindless, ill-informed, or perhaps simply naive adoption of techno-rational management approaches such as top-down, "strategic" thinking and aspects of quality management are amongst the biggest problems for higher education at the moment. ...more...
It's been over 4 months since my last PhD update, past time to get back into the discipline. A lot has happened in those 4 months, the grant talked about in the last post didn't get off the ground thanks to folk leaving positions at the potential partner institution and then because I left mine. So, the new context is that I'm currently a man of leisure, thanks to a separation payout, and increasingly focused on finally finishing the thesis....more...
This quote summarises very nicely what I think will become a major research interest of mine in the future. i.e. how can we modify the environment - particularly, but not primarily, through information technology - within universities to encourage and enable improvements in teaching and learning? ...more...
It seems like I'm in the downhill stretch with the thesis. Almost all the new material has been written, am just waiting on some feedback from my esteemed supervisor before completing the last new section (it follows the same structure as a previous section, hence the importance of feedback). So, while I'm waiting on that feedback, I'm starting the revision of the draft chapters. The following is a re-working of the first main section of chapter 1 and provides the background to the research....more...
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 a problem with any simplistic implementation of academic analytics....more...
In writing the last post, I had the opportunity re-read the Wikipedia article on wicked problems. This quote struck a chord with me...more...
Over on the Remote Learner blog, Jason Cole has posted some information about a keynote by Dr Richard Clark at one of the US MoodleMoots. I want to focus on one key quote from that talk and its implications for Australian higher education and current trends to "improve" learning and teaching and adopt open source LMS (like Moodle)....more...
The following is a "formalisation" of a previous post. This is the version that forms the first draft of a section in the thesis....more...
Have spent the last day or so doing some more data munging of access logs trying to determine the level of usage of Wf applications within Webfuse. Wf was the framework for developing dynamic web applications within Webfuse - the topic/outcome of my PhD. The following is an initial summary of that munging with some initial reflection. This will get further polished and re-worked for inclusion in chapter 5 of the thesis....more...
The dissonance between the lived experience of academics and students having to deal with institutional innovations in learning and teaching, and the outcomes reported by institutional evaluations of those innovations is a growing concern for me. As top-down management gets involved in these innovations, in directing what they are and how they should be done, it doesn't seem that the accompanying gathering of evidence and critical reflection is coming along with it. ...more...
I think I came across this via amplify, and am now using amplify to see how this posts back to the blog. ...more...
Dave Cormier has presented 8 hypotheses summarising what he's learned about open learning. I've been meaning to post about it for a day or so, there is some really good stuff here. Some really important insights that formal education institutions need to think about, especially those wishing to ride the online learning revolution into the greener fields of growing student markets....more...
This is the first post in a new tradition. Any problems folk report with BIM and the subsequent diagnosis and solution I undertake will get reported here on the blog and hopefully mirrored in some way onto the BIM github page....more...
As part of the PhD I have to summarise aspects of Webfuse usage, the following is a quick attempt to summarise usage of the Webfuse course sites from 1997 through 2009. The main aim is to show what I've got so far, think about what needs to be added, generate a to do list, and make an initial stab at explaining some of the movements. The hope is that writing this is essentially a rough draft/scribble of material that will end up in the thesis....more...