See also: Archives
Col Beer has been doing some work around the "indicators" project - an attempt to mine system logs and databases of a course management system (CMS) to generate data of some use....more...
The editorial team over at Slideshare have decided my recent PhD presentation is worth of featuring on the Slideshare home page. The following screen shot of the Slideshare home page is included as proof and also as a record. 105 views before being featured. How high can you go?...more...
Shirley is keen to do some more work on the "research note" suggesting a structure for a design theory/research thesis/paper. This was the appendix that was original part of Gregor and Jones (2007) but which JAIS decided not to publish. The main reason was that the reviewers thought it boiled down the process of publishing to a formula, and they obviously thought this was a bad thing....more...
Part of the rationale for developing and using BAM had its origins in this unpublished paper (Jones, 2005). A part of the paper talks about minute papers, that content is reproduced below....more...
Most university teaching is crap. Too general, too sweeping? Maybe, but based on my experience I'm fairly comfortable with that statement. The vast majority of what passes for teaching at Universities has a number of really significant flaws. It's based more on what the teaching academic is familiar with (generally based on the discipline experience) than on any idea of what might be effective....more...
Edupunk as a term has been circulating since May last year. D'Arcy Norman has posted the YouTube video from below with a couple of folk talking about Edupunk, including Jim Groom the guy who originated the idea...more...
The Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) Project is a 3 year old project to extend some of the ideas (especially small pieces loosely joined) behind my thesis into the brave new world of "Web 2.0" (circa 2006). It was also intended to help solve a set of immediate problems in a particular course I was teaching through appropriate assessment and activities implemented by each student having their own blog. BAM provided the essential management and institutional wrapper around the use of these blogs to enable us to track and mark student progress....more...
I'm currently reading Waeraas and Solbakk (2009), a paper titled "Defining the essence of a university: lessons from higher education branding." and with the following abstract....more...
It's amazing at how perspectives around technology and its use in education don't change. In the presentation on this page I use some quotes from the what if presentation by Karl Fisch to outline some previous fearful perspectives on the impact of technology on learning that mirror many of the perspectives held of e-learning....more...
In the following I reflect on my aborted and half-baked attempts at harnessing design patterns within the practice of e-learning at universities and wonder whether it was a lost opportunity and/or a project that was destined to fail. This is written in the light shed by the work of a number of other folk (Google "patterns for e-learning"), including the current JISC-emerge project and, I believe, the related Pattern Language Network....more...
On Friday the 20th of Feb I gave a talk at the ANU on my PhD. A previous post has some background and an overview of the presentation....more...
Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Australian National University on my PhD. I'm doing it through ANU and this 30 minute presentation is a standard requirement of study. The slides are up on slideshare (embedded below). I recorded the audio and will be trying to put that online later on today and make the slides into a slidecast....more...
When you talk to anyone in an "organisational" position (e.g IT or perhaps some leadership positions) within a university about using external "Web 2.0" tools to support student learning one of the first complaints raised is...more...
I've had a Facebook account for about a year. I've never really used it beyond making contact with other folk. Have never uploaded any content and tonight I've decided to make that permanent. I won't shut the account down. I'll keep it open so that friends from the past can find me....more...
The following is a quick mind dump of ideas that have arisen today about how you might make use of the usage data and content of course websites from course management systems (CMS) to find out interesting things about learning and teaching. i.e. Col is aiming to develop inidcators that might be of use to the participants associated with e-learning - management, support staff, academics, students etc....more...
Wesley Fryer has a post summarising a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson. I'm pulling out a few relevant quotes/recollections for later use....more...
I'm a fan of frameworks and taxonomies. Also known as theories for understanding (Gregor, 2006). It's the understanding part that I like. They provide, or at least good ones do, a leg up in understanding difficult concepts. As Mischra and Koehler (2006, p 1019) say...more...
Came across the following quote in Mischra and Koehler (2006), storing it here for future use....more...
Last night I was looking for some information about recording audio for powerpoint presentations in order to create a slidecast...more...
In a previous post examining one reason folk don't take to e-learning I included the following quote from a book by Carolyn Marvin...more...
This is a submission to a conference later in the year. The conference has its own specific requirements for submissions, hence the structure of this post. In some cases I've left in quotes or italics the directions given by the conference as to the content of the submission. It's still a work in progress. Submission is not due for a few days. More than keen to hear suggestions and criticisms....more...
A lot of what I do could be seen as innovation. In the past I was a "faculty teaching and learning innovation officer" and I may well take on such a role in the future. Today, I came across the following quote from Douglas Adams which seems connected to the idea of innovation....more...
!!! warning "Broken image link"...more...
The video from NASA referenced in a post from yesterday illustrates many of the difficulties in attempting to be innovative within any largish type of organisation....more...
This video speaks to me on so many levels. It summarises many of the problems I have faced and encountered trying to implement innovative approaches to e-learning at universities over the last 15 plus year. I'm sure I am not alone....more...
In a recent post I started my collection of quotes on this blog. I also talked about the "mere exposure effect" and suggested it's one reason behind the horseless carriage approach to using new technology. It's also one reason why people resist new technology - especially e-learning/computer technology....more...
Moving into the "web 2.0"/social media/online world can be confronting for people. Especially the "open" part. With blogs, photo sharing, social bookmarking etc a lot of what used to be private (or closed) becomes public (or open). This can challenge people. Damien talked about this and other problems with social media in a blog post from late last year....more...
In a post yesterday I talked about how most applications of e-learning within universities seems to actively prevent students and staff leveraging the protean nature of information technology. That is the nature of computer software to be flexible, malleable and customisable....more...
A part of my thinking around the Ps Framework I suggest that there are a number of dominant assumptions that underpin the current implementation of e-learning within institutions of higher education. I believe these dominant assumptions limit the quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovativness of e-learning at Universities. In this post I am trying to identify one of the dominant assumptions associated with the "Product" component of the Ps Framework and its implications....more...
The very idea of "best practice" is silly. In any meaningful complex activity the idea of simply copying what someone else did is destined to fail because it doesn't seek to understand the reasons why that best practice worked for them and what are the differences between "them" and "us"....more...
This is the first post in my new "quotes" section. Acting as a storage place for all the interesting insights I come across....more...
Scott has a post discussing the potential benefits of using VoiceThread as a mechanism for providing feedback to students - both by staff and students. Based on some experience, I agree there is some potential, but I also think there are some issues to be looked at. Details follow....more...
This is a part of some reflections from running a session on course analysis and design for new academics at CQUniversity last week. This one focuses on the benefits of using the ritual dissent workshop method from Cognitive Edge....more...
For almost as long as learning management systems have been around their have been researchers and technologists investigating how the usage logs of these systems can be harnessed to inform and improve learning and teaching. For a little while I was sort of involved in a project that would look at some of this - interest has waned in line with organisational realignments....more...
Jocene and I are having a bit of a chat about PLEs and she raises a number of questions or perspectives in her last comment in that discussion that are worth of thought. So, I'm starting a new blog post here, rather than making a comment (the inequity in power and ease of use between the editing tools/interface used to create a post and those used to make a comment - very limited - make an interesting comment about the assumptions and affordances of a blog)....more...