Think of a topic that you deeply care about. That you advocate for. Or argue with others who have a different viewpoint. In my world, maybe it’s Open Education. Or MOOCs. Or cMOOCs (POOCS, SMOOCS DOOCS…) Badges. Textbooks. Learning Analytics. Maybe your passionate discussions are not quite monkeys tossing excrement, but have you ever pondered […]
Has anyone jumped any chasms lately? Once again, the associative trails in my cerebral memex fired off this morning. Via a tweet from Karen Fasimpaur, I watched Wes Fryer’s metaphor rich keynote Igniting Innovation in Teaching and Learning At 2:41 Wes introduced the Technology Adoption Curve, the notion based on Everett Rodgers Diffusion of Innovation […]
I intend not to discuss the merits/demons of badging systems. My main response on weighing such questions always slide down to “It Depends”. But to me badging, nanodegreeing, calculating massive course dropouts remains overweighted on one side of the system. This has been mulling in the cranium for a while (often best where ideas are […]
It’s more than a dream… The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of […]
This started out as one of my usual chasings of photos showing the number 106 in honor of ds106, but I am finding a lesson that you can keep peeling back layers of a story, find interesing bits, but maybe never get there. So I was doing a stroll on a lovely day in Hobart, […]
I almost stopped writing, as this image just makes me want to be in a world where presentations are this exciting. Frankly, now coming up on 18 years in the ed tech game, the differences from the experience of my very first educational conference to my most recent is perhaps better quality projectors. We still […]
My, how virtual worlds have tarnished. From all the high expectations of 2006, people calling for the coming of the “3D web”, and its been a year since the crows on the wire started sqwaking the “Second Life is Dead” as the big corporations who responded to the flash of light packed up their virtual buildings and left. Or, now it is relegated as a niche or that it is only good for 50 people.
Here is a code phrase to look out for- any statement that X is dead is suspect unless X is that skunk you ran over on the highway and has been flattened. Always question such assertions; ask to see the corpse.
I’m just coming off of a two day utterly engaging experience in what we do at the NMC as online conferences- these are not your webinar slideshow brigades- for 3 and a half years, we have run two to four conferences per year in a virtual world space, ones where people pay money to attend, and I can say first hand that the ones we have run are a completely different, and from what I have seen, more participatory experience from your typical web-based conference.
This is going to be a monster long post, maybe the longest I have ever lobbed on my server…
But before I make a case about this, which I am setting up for the rock throwers, I’d like first to rave about the NMC 2010 Symposium on New Media & Learning — from behind the curtain, it is an utterly exhausting affar, and usually by the time it is over, I have decompressed, and lack the energy to really capture the experience. But this one, may have been the best one we have every done, for the range and quality of the sessions and the discussions we saw bubbling around it.
As you may know, after seeing her speak in 2008 at SXSW and WordCamp, I was rather determined to invite Kathy Sierra to keynote the 2009 NMC Summer Conference. I was a fan long before this as a follower of her blog Creating Passionate Users. I had done a parady of her graphic style in […]
