See also: Archives
Tracey's found her blogging mojo with a raft of posts (new since I last looked) including this one linking to work that identifies conscientiousness as the main secret to success in much of life. The focus on personality is in common the connections to Myers-Briggs and related ideas that Brendon and Anne have touched on....more...
It's been an "interesting" few weeks destined to challenge the optimism of the most optimistic person - of which I'm not. Broader events in the world do appear to be the outcome of a conspiracy to rob the world of optimism. Mix in some personal woes - death of a grandparent, illness (no great problem), interruptions to routine brought on my Apple's inability to provide a working iPhone, and the stupidity of organisations (especially universities that have been recently restructured) - and it's definitely a time for pessimism....more...
For some time Australian universities have led an increasing mantra around increasing flexibility. An inevitable repercussion of the vast majority of students not being full-time learners, but instead having to balance family, work and study, is that study comes last. Family and work pressures lead to difficulty in meeting set deadlines for assessment, hence the call for flexibility. I'm actually all for that increase in flexibility, but it comes at a cost....more...
One of the other participants shared her current position with NGL...more...
I had a choice to make. Do a bit of prep of content for the next week of NGL or make more connections with what folk have been doing? I've decided that the later is more important and long overdue....more...
Catching up with everyone in NGL is taking longer than I thought, mainly due to external factors. Here's some more....more...
The use of blogs in one of the courses I teach is now into it's fourth semester. Well past time to do explore how it's all going, evaluate some of the design decisions, and make some decisions about future developments. In preparation for that it's time to look at some of the extant literature to look at findings and methods. The following is the first such summary and is focused on @spalm et al's...more...
Some thinking and reporting on some explorations of getting into the Reclaim project (movement?). -- update: picking this up after a few weeks of inactivity....more...
Time to continue catching up on all the interesting work of the participants of the NGL course....more...
by john.d.mcdonald ...more...
So Part B of the NGL catch up. Main focus here will be on the 11 participants blogs I haven't yet caught up on and a to do list to follow up on....more...
Early this week I received an email from a student who took the course EDC3100, ICT and Pedagogy in 2013. In essence he had remembered a useful bit of information in the course study material and wanted to use it. On the plus side, he still had access to course material but because of the big flaw (the absence of a search engine) in our institution's Moodle implementation he has to manually search through the information to find what he was looking for and didn't have the motivation/time to do so....more...
Suffering a minor malaise brought on the strategic/operational planning process currently underway at my place of work. As a process it always seems an exercise in futility and frustration, but at least the current process is significantly better than some I've observed....more...
In a comment on this post about the ups and downs participants are going through in the NGL course Mari shares the struggles of being offline in this type of a course. The feeling where being offline feels a bit like you've left the conversation and have fallen behind the evolution of where the others are up to....more...
The last couple of weeks have been just a bit hectic and my participation in the network forming about the NGL course has been less than I'd aimed for. The following is an attempt to document some of the interesting bits I've missed and sign-post them for further action. It's really just an attempt to experiment with what any participant might need to do in such a course if they wanted to catch up. It's a test to see how well some of the technology has been set up and whether it helps capture most of what's happened....more...
What passes for institutional e-learning within Universities appears to be largely stuck in the "enterprise", centralised mindset of the first decade of this century. As the technological environment is changing it is increasingly appearing more and more clunky. This creates challenges for those stuck with these systems and provides impetus to move beyond the confines of institutional systems. An impetus given more kick along for me by the last couple of days observing the difference between the centralised, institutional systems and the ad hoc collection of external systems I rely upon to teach....more...
The following is the first step in an attempt to modify the Moodle Activity Viewer (or at least a local instance). I'd like a modified version of MAV to allow me to...more...