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A recent work I read raised the issue of “pedagogical content knowledge.” The idea behind this concept is the profound level of understanding of a domain field necessary for teaching it in a sophisticated and effective way. In other words, this connects both the subject knowledge and pedagogy [per Lee S. Shulman’s idea (1986)]. This also brings in understandings of learners and how they progress in their learning in the field.
The work I saw proposed some initial elements ...
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“In the field of computer science, many of us have been surprised by the lasting result of the Rainfall problem, originally constructed and studied by Elliot Soloway. This work demonstrated the difficulty that beginning computing students have in composing a program that involves a loop, summation variable, and sentinel exit value. We’re surprised when we learn of this result, because the problem seems so easy. We’ve completely forgotten our own earlier novice minds, and we can’t imagine ...
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Hello, all: You are cordially invited to participate in a modified e-Delphi study re: MOOCs and feasibility.
This online survey is being conducted to sample some current insights, attitudes, and concerns about massive open online courses (MOOCs) to get a sense of the feasibility and near-term adoption of the offering of MOOCs by various universities and colleges. This will be conducted as a one-time modified electronic Delphi study to capture the insights of practicing faculty and administrators in higher education ...
Continue reading Invitation to Participate in a Modified E-Delphi Study re: MOOCs
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A quarter-long term is a very brief one: 10 weeks of fairly intense reading, analysis, and writing, in many of the courses that I teach. These courses have to be designed in a way to meet transfer requirements for thousands of other institutions of higher education. Even more important, they have to achieve certain learning aims for all learners.
Many students have been vetted before they enter the college learning system and start college-level courses. (For those entering at a ...
Continue reading Ensuring Student Reading of Commentary on Work
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The current fad is still “MOOCs,” massive open online courses. A recent provost’s lecture featured a speaker who discussed some MOOC endeavors at his university. Some webinars have focused on the MOOC phenomena. A forthcoming issue in an international journal is focused around MOOCs. That said, there are some who say that the “MOOC hype cycle,” two years in, is heading to the “trough of disillusionment.” Maybe so. Maybe so.
More compelling, there are still the demographics: huge human ...
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Several times now, I’ve given “flipped” presentations a try. The fantasy goes like this. I put a digital poster or slideshow online and include the link in the pre-conference agenda. Ideally, the audience would have looked at the materials, and in the 50-minute F2F session, we can go through demos on the software and other more engaging materials instead of setting the stage.
This is not a fair assumption. After all, most professionals in IT are busy. They have ...
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So much of how I judge the success of an endeavor is by its outcome. For a project’s ultimate success, it has to reach a wider public and have a positive impact in the world. When there was a last-minute call for work, I thought I would actualize an idea that I’d long had. After all, the best time to engage a publication is when they have a perceived need for work. Well, I created the work only ...
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In choosing to move across multiple states to take on a new job elsewhere, it’s generally wise to look into the near- and mid-distance to see if it makes sense to be in a particular position. This came to mind recently when I heard an intense bout of rumors that an office which I’d started my career at at this university might not be continuing with their own homegrown learning management system but might be going open-source.
Some ...
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Years ago, one of my students had made the assertion that she her real life was an online life. In support of that assertion, she had multiple identities and accounts online. She wrote prolifically and powerfully on a range of popular culture issues. She traveled to conferences across the country to meet with friends she’d only known virtually, to put a face to the name. She also asserted then that she could keep her identities pseudonymous and that none ...
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It’s rarely a positive thing to be pulled back into old projects. Most PIs move on with projects that have been satisfactorily completed, and they work out other support in the bureaucracy for the work that they need. Or they maintain continuing ties (which is healthier because both sides can adapt to changes and both sides stay informed). For projects that have long moved forward—with new management several generations out, with new URLs, new designs, and other decisions ...
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In every publication project, there is a moment of time when one wonders whether it is going to “make” or not. In other words, is the work going to be of sufficient quality and length to appear in publication? Of late, I’ve had two back-to-back projects, and while the first will clearly “make,” the latter is somewhat questionable. Works that were promised are not coming in. The development teams working on various projects have dissolved.
For a short while ...
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One of the perks of working on a university campus is the access to high-level thinkers who have achieved widely in their fields. Recently, a CEO of a global company came to campus in order to talk about his background, his work in a global corporation, and some of his top 5 lessons. These talks are engaging because they are focused on students, so the ideas have to be straightforward and pithy. (This entry is purposefully general and non-specific to ...
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A few times every year, I end up writing letters of recommendation for students and then occasionally for colleagues. These are not generally very difficult to write. I tend to know people pretty well before I would even consider writing a letter for them; otherwise, I’ll just politely decline. Usually, I will run copies of the letter by the individual and get their okay before sending anything forward. That’s out of general politeness but also out of an ...
Continue reading Maintaining Clear Lines with Recommendations and Support
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I was chagrined to look up a fund-raising page for an open-source tool that I had discovered two months ago and have been using for my academic amusement (and a little research) since. The page was polite. It made some suggestions for levels of support: some $750 per user license for a corporation per year, $150 per academic institution user annually, and the cost of a good dinner for students.
There were warring impulses in me. Part of me was ...
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Years ago, in a planning meeting for some new features for our campus LMS, there was a side conversation about building a pedagogy-agnostic platform for online learning. The concept was that the technology would enable a wide range of learning approaches and types. People could couple elements of a course, or they could de-couple elements. They were under no obligation to build a course in any particular way. Once a faculty member learned the tool thoroughly, he or she could ...
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I can’t say that I’m the most empathic person in terms of late work or a lack of deliverables from a project. (Any of my students can attest to that. They do get a pass the first time or two, if they can produce evidence, but the extensions are not forever, and they never get carte blanche.) And yet, every so often, I am caught up short with a fundamental realization: bringing a project to fruition requires a ...
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A recent project involved a number of individuals around campus collaborating around a quality checklist for e-learning. A rubric had been in evolution for several years prior, but due to political pressures, an administrator decided that a renewal of that rubric would be important. This work aligned with the interests of the university deans to promote quality in online learning. As things often do, though, the work evolved, and a more natural alignment of roles occurred, and the project got ...
Continue reading Group Collaboration around an E-Learning Quality Checklist
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In the early phases of any conversation with a faculty member, there is a lot of assessing and cross-assessing. For my part, I am looking to see how serious the faculty member is in pursuing certain curriculum or learning object development. I am looking to see how practical they are in terms of funding. I am looking to understand how well they understand design and what it takes to actualize work. And finally, I am looking to make sure that ...
Continue reading Acquiring a New Skill Set for a (Potential) Project?
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Every academic I know has a different way of approaching writing. They brainstorm in different ways. They manage their research differently. They use different filters for what they consider to be relevant. They structure their ideas uniquely. Those who have some depth of experience start knowing what works for them, and they are able to set up the work in the most efficient way possible for themselves.
For my projects, I start out with a research question ...
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At a recent conference, the keynote speaker made a few side comments about the nature of novice learners (based on research). They generally tend not to pay attention to details. They only use the sufficient amount of attention to get by. Further, they do not often understand (the by definition unfamiliar) systems.
That started me thinking of how often we all engage in new environments and start all over again as novices. Anyone who ...
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One of the nightmare scenarios of democratic governments viewing autocratic or dictatorial governments is the scenario of bureaucracies grinding on endlessly, no matter what happens at the very top in governance. People are so dedicated to their positions in the political context that they cannot shift out of their roles. They keep functioning.
I started thinking about that recently when I received several emailed invitations to review draft chapters and articles by email. The invitations were from some of the ...
Continue reading Automated Invitations to Critique Chapters and Articles
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In my limited experiences with working across campus units to collaboratively purchase site licenses for software, most such endeavors end up with little achieved. There may be a small burst of interest, but then, everything goes to silence, and each department just purchases its own and doesn’t have to worry about anyone else. The potential savings are lost. Recently, though, a group came together and successfully set up the purchase of a site license. I thought I would examine ...
Continue reading Collaboratively Buying into a Campus Site License
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
30 January 2013
ANALYZING SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS WITH NODEXL: INSIGHTS FROM A CONNECTED WORLD. Derek L. Hansen, Ben Schneiderman, and Marc A. Smith. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2011. 284 pp. softcover.
What is most memorable about “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL” is the depth of information about the various social network sites that may be crawled using NodeXL. With so many evolving social network platforms, and each capturing and storing information differently, it helps to know what an actual data extraction means.
An embedded ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
28 January 2013
ANALYZING SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS WITH NODEXL: INSIGHTS FROM A CONNECTED WORLD. Derek L. Hansen, Ben Schneiderman, and Marc A. Smith. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2011. 284 pp. softcover.
One of the strengths of “Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL” is that it introduces a powerful research method and a tool that helps tap electronic media and non-electronic social network information intelligently, in a way that does not over-state what is knowable. The authors, Derek Hansen, Ben Schneiderman, and Marc A. Smith, are ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
26 January 2013
ANALYZING SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS WITH NODEXL: INSIGHTS FROM A CONNECTED WORLD. Derek L. Hansen, Ben Schneiderman, and Marc A. Smith. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2011. 284 pp. softcover.
“New tools are now available to collect, analyze, visualize, and generate insights from the collections of connections formed from billions of messages, links, posts, edits, uploaded photos and videos, reviews, and recommendations. As social media have emerged as a widespread platform for human interaction, the invisible ties that link each of us to others ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
13 January 2013
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO. Jaron Lanier. City: Book Publisher. 2010. $24.95. 209 pp. hardcover.
Jaron Lanier’s “You are Not a Gadget” (2010) reads the mainstream public into necessary conversations about the electronic-infused world that people are co-creating with each other. In his sense, code becomes destiny because it locks in certain types of experiences in the world. This situation is made worse when people misunderstand what computers can and cannot do. They may glorify tools ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Designing IT to engineer better (more fully realized) people (Part 2 of 2)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
11 January 2013
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET: A MANIFESTO. Jaron Lanier. City: Book Publisher. 2010. $24.95. 209 pp. hardcover.
“We have to think about the digital layers we are laying down now in order to benefit future generations. We should be optimistic that civilization will survive this challenging century, and put some effort into creating the best possible world for those who will inherit our efforts.” -- Jaron Lanier
Various technologists have taken to the public airwaves to share their concerns about ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Designing IT to engineer better (more fully realized) people (Part 1 of 2)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
04 January 2013
THE IMPULSE FACTOR: WHY SOME OF US PLAY IT SAFE AND OTHERS RISK IT ALL. Nick Tasler. City: Book Publisher. 2008. $24.95. 256 pp. hardcover.
Traditionally, impulsivity has been understood as a risk factor for people. Too much of it looks like a lack of self-control. “At their worst, impulsive people are exactly what nasty little stereotypes would predict. They are more likely to be sexaholics, dangerous drivers, bankrupt businesspeople, and the posthumous winners of the dubious Darwin Awards ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Capitalizing on impulsivity for effective decision-making
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IGNORANCE: HOW IT DRIVES SCIENCE. Stuart Firestein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. $21.95. 195 pp. hardcover.
“If ignorance, even more than data, is what propels science, then it requires the same degree of care and thought that one accords data. Whatever it may look like from outside the science establishment, the incorrect management of ignorance has far more serious consequences than screwing up with the data. There are correction procedures for mishandled data—they must be replicable, must answer ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Embracing ignorance as a driver for discovery
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
26 December 2012
“Behind this book sits the most visible corpse of the nineteenth century—the body of the utilitarian philosopher, social reformer and prison architect Jeremy Bentham, a cadaver that has been living in public since his death in June 1832. Seeking to immortalize his own reputation as what he called ‘a benefactor of ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Retaining essential human mystery in a time of digital over-sharing
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For the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with a freeware tool called NodeXL, which is a plug-in for Microsoft Excel. This enables the visualization of social network diagrams. Even better, it enables the extraction of mass amounts of data from various social networking sites (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and others) to map real-world networks from empirical data. There are easy ways to extract graph metrics. There are over a half-dozen visualizations that are enabled here.
The ...
Continue reading NodeXL Graph Gallery: Getting in on the Conversation
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
15 December 2012
THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T. Nate Silver. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. $27.95. 534 pp. hardcover.
The way Nate Silver tells it in “The Signal and the Noise,” people have historically gone far afield in trying to predict the future. They will focus on minutiae of details at the expense of critical thinking and the bigger picture. They will use intuition in lieu of thought. The mistaking of noise ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Sifting through noise for meaningful signal (Part 3 of 3)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
13 December 2012
THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T. Nate Silver. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. $27.95. 534 pp. hardcover.
Without an understanding of the larger context, misreading signals becomes much easier, and predictivity becomes moot. In this way, “The Signal and the Noise” makes a similar point to Nicholas Nassim Taleb in “The Black Swan” by pointing to the complexity of systems and the potential for chaotic outcomes (chaos theory suggests that ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Sifting through noise for meaningful signal (Part 2 of 3)
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
11 December 2012
THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE: WHY SO MANY PREDICTIONS FAIL—BUT SOME DON’T. Nate Silver. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. $27.95. 534 pp. hardcover.
Humans were made to make meaning of the world around them. It is a complex world about which there is much to learn and do. The senses can be overwhelmed by the amounts of information that come flooding in. To adapt, people turn the signals around them into shorthand. They use stereotypical understandings ...
Continue reading REVIEW: Sifting through noise for meaningful signal (Part 1 of 3)
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There have been some endeavors of late to promote the democratization of learning. This involves the next-generation effort from MIT’s OpenCourseware (which involved making zipped folders of course contents with virtually all copyrighted contents removed…and little to no investment by their faculty beyond the curricular materials)…to various educational channels in TEDEd , YouTube Education, BigThink, Vimeo…to MOOCs-ey efforts…and then to efforts like Khan Academy, Coursera, edX, and others.
In each turn, there have been some ...
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Usually, one of the factors I would consider before proposing a presentation topic for a conference or an article proposal is to figure out whether the “container” of the event or the article…is sufficient to contain the topic. After all, if the topic is too slim, then it won’t fill the time of the presentation and won’t attract an audience. If the topic is too complex, on the other hand, the presentation will come across as ineffectual ...
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I am looking at a Wordle image output. This online tool takes a list of words or the text of a website (with an RSS feed) and creates various word art visual depictions based on the prominence of the words (as defined by word count). These “word clouds” are deeply eye-catching. They’re not really to be used for qualitative analysis, but there’s something (small) to be said for using them as such. This tool is a very light ...
Continue reading The Limits to a For-Fun Word Count Text Analysis
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In a recent conversation with a colleague who works in online learning, we were chatting about projects. She mentioned that she thought it was a real benefit to an instructional designer to walk away with “the story” of the design to write about for publication. That started me thinking about some of the popular assumptions of academic publishing.
Instructional design projects are not inherently newsworthy. Many of the daily supports involve little of publication interest because ...
Continue reading False Assumptions about Academic Publishing
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
22 July 2012
THINKING FAST AND SLOW. Daniel Kahneman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011. 488 pp. $30.00 hard cover.
Nobel laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” culminates a life’s work in human decision-making under uncertainty.
He suggests that there are two mental systems at work in people’s lives. System 1 is automatic and operates without any sense of voluntary control or effort. It is the de facto system which engages the ...
Continue reading Review: Different Mental Systems for Different Decision-making Circumstances