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The following is yet another sign that the thesis is finally getting close to submission. The following is the second version of an abstract of the thesis. There have been some changes, feedback always welcome....more...
The quote attributed to Lisa Paul illustrates the vast distance between her experience and that of staff within universities. The phrase "we'll get to that after the AUQA audit" has been oft repeated at one institution I'm familiar with for at the best part of a year. ...more...
The following explores some ideas for extensions to BIM based on a blog post from Dave Cormier....more...
As work on the thesis is slowly finishing, I'm increasingly starting to think about the next chapter. What am I going to do post-PhD? The answer, potentially surprising for some, is probably going to high school teaching....more...
20 years ago, straight from graduating, I started work as a part-time tutor within a Department of Mathematics and Computing. Within a few years it was obvious to a naive computing person that the mathematics part of the department was in trouble. Fewer and fewer people were enrolling in the mathematics programs, but they still had a fairly large group of academics (mostly doing service teaching - i.e. stats for business undergrads). At the same time, computing was exploding in enrolments. We had too few staff and too many students. The perception was that it wasn't fair on us, to carry them....more...
Once I get out from under the PhD, I'm hoping to expand an initial idea attacking the rhetoric of blended learning currently in vogue in some parts of higher education. The purpose of this quote is to save a quote that I've just come across for that expansion, and also to summarise the idea....more...
The following draws together some work on distributed cognition in the Globe Theatre and some early thoughts on how that might be useful in improving the design of learning management systems such as Moodle (there's also an argument to be made about university teaching and learning, but I'll mostly leave that alone). While primarily focusing on helping teachers teach and thus improve the student learning experience, the ideas could equally be applied to learners (and probably have been)....more...