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Am in the process of creating a new blog to be called "Is my digital footprint ready for teaching?". The following describes the why and what and records some initial planning/design....more...
Following up on a broader research idea the following paragraph summarises a nascent, more specific idea a colleague and I are stumbling toward. It fits within the broader agenda....more...
If you hadn't realised by now, this blog is often used as a notebook to record ideas in development. This is by no means complete, but the record is there....more...
As the semester starts warming up the online students are starting to post their introductions using Popplet (essentially a simplified Prezi, but one which is being a little unreliable today), Prezi or other tools. One of the interesting threads that run through many of these posts has been the amazement at how young children, as young as 1 or 2, quickly become proficient at using information technology. My two young suns are currently getting into pocket edition of Minecraft on their iPads with no advice from me....more...
Almost 20 days ago I started thinking about the design of the Moodle (1.9.x) site (called a StudyDesk at my institution) for my course. As O-Week draws to a close, the following describes the current final product....more...
So after three weeks at the new institution and busy thinking about how I'm going to do something interesting with my course design I find out that EOIs for a fairly large and beneficial set of research grants is due in a week or so. Bugger. No way I'm going to get my head around the new field, teaching and meet that deadline....more...
Another weekend and I'm thinking about EDC3100, and thanks to an IT maintenance day bringing Moodle down I have the time to post here. The following is an attempt to conceptualise and describe what I hope might become the replacement for the lecture/tutorial model that is dominant in this course. It is informed by/borrowed from the work of many I've seen over recent years, especially the Siemens/Downes MOOC movement...more...
Do you know of any "dating services" for online courses?...more...
The following tells the story of how and why I designed the following "Web 2.0" (and yes, I am very reluctant to use that term for a range of reasons but will for a range of other reasons) introduction of myself....more...
This Chronicle-based blog post titled "Four things lecture is good for" is resonating with a lot of people. At least judging by the retweets etc....more...
This is in response to a blog post with the same title. The title attracted me I've just started work within a teacher preparation program and have some concerns about such programs being irrelevant....more...
Almost 16 years ago I gave my first presentation at an academic conference. It was AusWeb'96 and I was talking to a paper titled "Solving some problems of university education: A case study". I started out my presentation with "Lectures suck!"....more...
I've come home early today from my new job within a Faculty of Education at a University. Entirely because the quality of the technology I have at home far exceeds the quality of the technology I have at work. The following suggests that this little anecdote highlights one of the contributing factors as to why the quantity and quality of ICT integration in schools is less than good....more...
Disclaimer: I started this post in November 2011 and never posted it. It is essentially a development diary for some initial steps in development BIM for Moodle 2.x....more...
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to be responsible for the design of a Moodle course site. This will be the first time in almost 5 years that I've been the academic responsible for a course site, the first time in Moodle and in fact the first time in an "LMS" I didn't design. Add to this my on-going feelings of discomfort about the affordances of Moodle's course structure (scroll of death etc.) and the observation of some truly ugly Moodle course sites and I feel the need to be further informed....more...