Do you remember the kerfuffle when Georgia Tech canceled a Coursera MOOC on “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” because the ill-advised use of a Google spreadsheet for 40,000 participants, crashed it? Can you imagine what would happen to Georgia Tech courses if a Category 4 hurricane slammed the state, leaving its inhabitants flooded, […]
A true story. A NASA scientist who has a long career in using satellite imagery to study earth landforms is hired to teach a Structural Geology course at a university near where he works, Goddard Space Flight Center. He is currently participating in the authoring/editing of a new textbook on Geomorphology. He creates an assignment […]
Like a fragile flower, continually littered by link rot, the web is not helped at all when outfits like Storify just rip their content out of the web’s fabric. Three years ago, for no real reason beyond the imagination in my head, I published a video featuring 35 web site skeletons dancing to the beat […]
Borrowing from a movie’s taglines the opening here might be “The time is just right for an out and out podcast like this” or “There are no rules and no holds barred when Antonio’s accent cuts loose!” Here is the first episode of a new podcast that Antonio Vantaggiato and I produced asynchronously collaboratively. TW […]
Sitting in an airport for a trip where I will never see Friday, I’m thinking of the view from my back deck. Because what you observe is not always what it turns out to be. That view of a straight ridge has always intrigued me, covered in snow or not. Yes the first reality altering […]
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, […]
