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"Digital Imagery and Informational Graphics in E-Learning: Maximizing Visual Technologies" will be released in November 2009.
http://www.igi-global.com/marketingdept/newsletter/novnewsletter/hai-jew.html
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
21 November 2009
“Innovation in Educational Technology: The Virtualization of K-12 and Higher Education”
Dr. Sam S. Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “The US Market for Self-paced eLearning Products and Services: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis” in late Oct. 2009. He made a forecast for the changes that would occur with online learning for Pre-K-12 to Higher Education through 2014, and he focused on the growth of social learning platforms and the internationalization of virtual education.
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Recently, I caught the tail end of a webinar that left a strong, positive impression. The presenter Dr. Patricia Ritschel-Trifilo (of Hardin-Simmons University) was demonstrating how she versioned a course lesson for the various types of learning styles based on a conceptualization by Albert Canfield summarized here http://people.usd.edu/~ssanto/canfield.html .
She applied the Canfield’s Learning Styles Inventory
http://arispa.com/styles/canfield1.html
or
www.tecweb.org/styles/canfield1.html
to her students and compared ...
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Educause 2009 was streamed live to over a thousand participants at 44 colleges and universities in over 8 countries. The online presentations captured via MediaSite are available here.
http://educause.mediasite.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=ef86ba82-810b-4e15-b223-097b2ea90230
Continue reading Educause 2009 National Conference (Recorded)
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Participatory Sensing
For a kind of “situational awareness,” various fields (law enforcement, environmental science, landscape architecture, biological sciences, architecture, agriculture, and others) are now tapping into “participatory sensing.” This is a kind of information capture based on the widespread distribution of mobile devices that capture imagery and sounds in a location-sensitive way. Many mobile technologies enable live and easy emailing of the information and uploading of the contents to the WWW. Dedicated remote sensors also enable rich information captures.
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Note: Roger McHaney will be co-presenting "Virtual Collaboration: Applied Projects and Tools" 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, at Union 212, as part of the Instructional Design Technology Roundtables. All are welcome to attend.
Those of you who attended preschool years ago probably learned the importance of sharing. Today, in the Web’s early youth, the same lessons are being reinforced as we learn to share without regard to geography or time ...
Continue reading Roger McHaney: Virtual Collaboration in Academic Courses
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Business models around higher education are changing based on the downward pressures of “free” digital contents and bits and bytes in the current economy—as it goes through a massive retrenchment.
Chris Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (2009) suggests that business organizations that want to be competitive will need to reconceptualize prices and how to harness the power of digital contents and free products and services in order to offer value and connect with potential consumers ...
Continue reading Reconceptualizing "Free" and Online Higher Education
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Hello, all: A number of universities have created strong academic degree programs and courses for online delivery. Their areas of specialty enable many to stand out as global leaders in particular domain-field niches, disciplinary fields, and cross-disciplinary areas of study. How these colleges and universities reach out to a global and local student population is of interest, particularly their global branding strategies.
I am conducting a survey on the global branding of e-learning programs and courses in higher education.
This ...
Continue reading Global Branding of E-Learning in Higher Education (Survey)
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A recent article discussed the phenomena of “psychological ownership” of digital contents. The context of this was about how individual work is marked in a collaborative work environment. The authors discuss various motives for ownership—perceptual (social-cognitive) or part of the human need to categorize the world, instrumental (efficacy and in control) to satisfy (workplace or personal) needs, and symbolic (self-identity) in terms of how people perceive themselves (Wang, Battocchi, Graziola, Pianesi, Tomasini, Zancanaro, & Nass, 2006, p. 226). The researchers ...
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This last entry of this series focuses on finding the resources which may be good “homes” for a particular author. The following then are some of my favorite tips.
One way in this modern age of publishing is to evolve the informal to the formal. One example of this is the writing of a blog and turning that opportunity to writing articles and then maybe chapters and maybe books.
Another strategy is to see ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 6 of 6)
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People who haven’t published think that their lives change after publication of a work. It really doesn’t in a major way. There may be small changes. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Having published for a number of years, I have found that publishing a work really doesn’t change one’s life. There’s always been a muted response. There may be offers to co-write academic works but usually from people with whom I have ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 5 of 6)
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This seminar series then addresses the various written artifacts in writing and publishing. Then, this describes a typical publishing cycle. Finally, this also addresses the publishing implications of digital contents—including multimedia.
The common written artifacts are the following related to academic writing.
Query letter: A cover letter offering topic ideas and a professional author introduction
Book prospectus: An overview of the domain area, objectives of the book, possible audiences, suggested titles, academic value, other textbook competitors ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 4 of 6)
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The sticky issue of authorship then arises. Should a writer author a work himself or herself? Should he / she co-write a work?
Most writers write from central areas of expertise. They have primary research and experience in a particular part of a field, a professional interest in that area, access to all the necessary information, and an ability to create all the informational substance and digital contents. In those situations, there are plenty of reasons to go solo ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 3 of 6)
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The actual contents of the slideshow presentation, after several weeks of evolution, comes together in a nifty two-hour session. The slideshow objectives are defined as follows:
Define academic publishing as a field
Review the conventions and ethics of academic writing
Discuss the relevant laws affecting academic publishing
Describe information gathering and research
Describe some written artifacts related to publishing
Review usual academic publisher processes
Explain imagery concerns for publishing
Describe multimedia often created for academic publication
Discuss issues for writers ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 2 of 6)
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A colleague on a branch campus asked if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of writing for publication. Those invitations are fairly common, and they come from people I’ve never even met to those who invite me out for coffee and are those from peripheral fields. The usual answer is “no” not out of any arrogance, but because the logistics of collaboration require that the collaborators have some shared research and experiences. Without that, what’s there to ...
Continue reading The Academic Writing and Publishing Series (Part 1 of 6)
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The opening of the article was riveting. An instructor of an introductory course in computer programming was noticing his student demographics, and the high probability that they…
“Are from some minority group Did some portion of their k-12 in a compromised educational system Are students not just out of high school and may be working Are not born in the United States Speak English as there (sic) second language Have very little (sic) computer skills May be dismayed by the ...
Continue reading The Challenges of the "Highly Anxious" Student Profile
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MERLOT's JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching) just published a position paper titled "Exploring the Immersive Parasocial: Is it You or the Thought of You?" related to 3D immersive learning.
http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no3/hai-jew_0909.htm
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
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Design questions that other people wrangle with regarding socio-technical systems often reveal a lot about people. With the emphasis on self-help and self-management as a money-savings endeavor for education, healthcare, and other aspects of modern life, people have been looking at how to offer sufficient feedback and encouragement to help people self-assess, and further, to help them know when to seek help (and from where).
Help-seeking is not as simple of a phenomena as one might ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
09 September 2009
A recent foray into the riches of e-learning research has led to a fascinating article. Here, the researcher cleverly examined the popularity of particular researchers based on a number of factors (their links to other professionals, their visibility, and their professional affiliations) to see if that might lead to any distortions in self-estimation—in terms of estimating how many articles they had published in the past three years (measured against the actual objective number of publications).
People experience ...
Continue reading Network Standing, Attributions for Popularity, and Self Delusions
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The decision in publication has not been about going to an academic print one vs. a Web-based one because so many academic journals either have gone wholly online or archive digitally. Rather, the question now seems more to be about going for high-brow or low-brow, to radically over-simplify.
On the one extreme are the journals that require a half-year to a year of peer review before a decision is made and then rigorous publishing processes to shape an article into ...
Continue reading Going for Elite Academic Journals or More Populist Ones?
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Dr. Sam Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight, presented on “Open Learning: The Convergence of Collaboration-Based Learning and Social Network Learning” (June 24, 2009) via a free webinar.
He explained his role in surveilling various customer segments—consumer; PreK-12; higher education; corporations and businesses; the federal government; state and local government; associations, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and nonprofits; and healthcare—in terms of their use of online learning products.
Their model tracks ...
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With the growing popularity of various repositories of information, many amateurs have joined in the work of informal archival and preservation of contents. And recently, I have heard about a project at a university (not in the US) that encouraged the digital sharing of privately-owned artifacts related to WWII via digital photo captures.
There was no apparent training of those who posted the contents, and there was not apparent vetting. People basically identified artifacts from WWII based on family lore ...
Continue reading Protecting Solicited Amateur Digital Work...into the Future
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For about half a year now, I’ve been reviewing contents for two electronic publications for e-learning, and while both have been on my reading list, I’ve had a comfy insider’s view of some of their policies and editorial practices.
The truth is that for most publications, they would not be able to survive financially if they had to commission the works that they run. An article can take many many many dozens of hours of research, writing ...
Continue reading DIfferent Mindsets and Cultures for Different E-Publications
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by IDOS Newswire
28 May 2009
Dr. Carla R. Payne of Union Institute and the University of Vermont College has recently edited an edition of a reference text titled "Information Technolgy and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks."
http://www.igi-global.com/downloads/pdf/33447.pdf
Continue reading IT and Constructivism in Higher Education: Progressive Learning Frameworks
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The launch issue of EQ online is now live.
http://www.educause.edu/eq
This publication strives to use the multimedia Web space creatively. Check it out!
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In most academic fields, editors and publishers play a gatekeeper function by vetting the articles that make it into their vaunted pages (whether paper or digital). These roles involve a lot of power and a lot of responsibility and discretion. New faculty’s careers may be made or broken based on their publishing records. Even those who have published widely and are long-term tenured faculty have a stake in their reputations with the public and their peers when they publish ...
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Hello, all: I am soliciting responses to a brief survey on the experiences instructors and facilitators have had regarding security in 3D immersive, interactive and persistent spaces (like Second Life) in higher education. This information will be used for a forthcoming article or chapter.
Survey Title: Security in 3D Immersive and Interactive Spaces in Higher Education
This survey will be offered Mar 9, 2009 through Mar 31, 2009.
To participate in the survey, please go to the following link:
https ...
Continue reading Survey on Security in 3D Immersive Spaces in Higher Education
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After coming off a spate of case studies and qualitative research, I came across a lecture in my work that suddenly put that work in a different light. The basic assertion of the lecturer was the need for quantitative metrics to inform decision-making. That’s a simple enough point. Quantitative measures are used often for decision-making. There’s a kind unknowability for various types of information using qualitative methods or mixed methods. (That’s also true in the reverse, in ...
Continue reading The "Sugar" of Case Studies and Qualitative Work
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A librarian recently gave a presentation of an online reference tool that outputs in-text citations and bibliographies based on quite a few of the main citation methods. This program allows users to create as many accounts as they desire, such as for different projects, and has plenty of folder-level functionality. Even footnoting is possible.
Works that are drawn from data repositories and libraries have a simple interface that populates the various informational fields in a citation-agnostic way. Manual inputs ...
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It usually takes several elements to go wrong in an online situation for things to get really nutty. And reversing this little catastrophe early in an online course is not difficult to see at all. First, I trusted in a pre-made class. While I had gone in and rearranged files, I hadn’t looked to check if the calendar was set up. I didn’t check to make sure that a learner walk-through was working. Mistake 1.
Next, I did ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
23 October 2008
I must be some sort of optimist. The “master” courses that I work on building are set up as perennial files, started one day and projected to go out to the year 2030 or beyond.
There’s no possibility that these courses will be offered in the same form as today some 20+ years from now, but that date is shorthand for “sometime into the future” until this course is sunsetted.
While we instructional designers may not ...
Continue reading For the Next Little While: Digital Preservation and Long-term Storage
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The rationale goes: Today’s generation is a visual one, so to get their ideas, it’s pretty critical to use imagery surveys…or surveys in which an integral component involves a visual or graphic or photo.
An interesting study used just such images to assess perceptions of the computing disciplne. They first vetted the images to see if they were assessed as positive, negative or neutral—as a way to test for content validity. Then the images were integrated ...
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“Encapsulation” makes a lot of sense not only as a design strategy for software design but also for some instructional design. This basic concept is that of hiding elements that may be distracting or irrelevant or extraneous for learners. Apparently, the term comes from object-oriented programming in software design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
I’ve seen this theory in action in the designing of graphical user interfaces on a learning / course management system (L/CMS) and also in ...
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Learning about learning seems to be a central part of instructional design. And whenever I have a free moment, I try to finalize a course design that started a while ago but lacked funding for transcription. So while transcription is most certainly not part of the actual assigned work, I try to patch this course’s accessibility gaps whenever possible.
It was in this line of work that I ran across some engaging ideas about learning and the building of ...
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“New technologies arise that permit or encourage new, richer forms of non-zero-sum interaction; then (for intelligible reasons grounded ultimately in human nature) social structures evolve that realize this rich potential—that convert non-zero-sum situations into positive sums. Thus does social complexity grow in scope and size.” -- Robert Wright in “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (as cited in Rheingold, 2003, p. 183)
--
Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution” offers a generally benign view of the potentially of ...
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In Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” (2008), he talks about the competitive advantage that open source environments have as labs for creating and evolving new technologies. He suggests that for-profits run into the challenge of a “fitness landscape” that encourages settling for the first and easiest solution and discourages further exploration for more creative or elegant solutions.
“Cheap failure, valuable as it is on its own, is also a key part of a more complex advantage: the exploration of ...
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A recent presentation at C2C's SIDLIT (Aug. 1, 2008) addressed the physical prototyping of a high-tech classroom in order to make it the most flexible and functional possible. The idea was that once this prototype had been experienced by many different types of users that that feedback would be assiduously collected and then applied to a brand new government building, with standardized classrooms.
Here, the prototype classroom was built to specs in a warehouse…after an initial planning process ...
Continue reading Prototyping a Physical Classroom for Hybrid Learning
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
20 August 2008
Dr.Michael Wesch’s "digital anthropology" presentation to the Library of Congress resulted in a thought-provoking video that has garnered a lot of airplay.
http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=179
Some of his observations about virtual “community” showed people with the art of mimicry and highly suggestible in terms of following others’ actions (something like lemmings).
Seeing Dr. Wesch’s presentation and then reading Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” (2007 ...
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In a continuing endeavor to understand how people use visuals for learning, I came across a curious idea—that of “change blindness”. I know people who say that they can tell if even one item in their work space is moved an iota. Personally, I can relate more to the majority of people who apparently fall under the phenomenon of being blind to small changes.
This phenomena comes from an interesting human feature—that of their small visual working memory ...
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Surely, most people have received invitations to join professional social sites. Almost invariably, these come from people that one has met fleetingly at a professional conference. Or a person whom one hasn’t spoken to for years because of differing interests and divergent lives.
The idea is to maximize professional relationships as busy professionals by highlighting the relationship and taking advantage of each other’s connections. It’s like how people scaffold relationships through mutual acquaintances… It’s a kind ...
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In literary critique, there’s the idea that an author does not fully know what his or her writing is about. There’s a subconscious level of production that may reveal hidden psychological insights. That was always a nifty principle to help students feel more comfortable in their interpretations—as long as they could find evidence of their interpretation in the text itself.
This approach has fine value, too, in analyzing nonfiction. Recently, I went through a chapter to identify ...
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by Eruditio Loginquitas
18 June 2008
Game Cultures By Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy New York: Open University Press 2006 171 pp. hardcover
Many have suggested the use of digital games for educational purposes, whether these are games seconded for learning or games designed explicitly for learning.
J. Dovey and H.W. Kennedy’s Game Cultures takes an academically sound approach to analyze the role of games in meeting human needs.
Learning or “decoding” is a main computer game activity. “Playing requires this decoding of ...
Continue reading Understanding Game Cultures for E-Learning (Brief Resource Review)
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IGI Global has a book coming out titled "Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning" this July 2008. This is edited by Drs. Ugur Demiray of Anadolu University and Ramesh C. Sharma of Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Main Book Site http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985
Table of Contents http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7985&v=tableOfContents
This book takes more of an international and global perspective.
Continue reading Ethical Practices and Implications in Distance Learning
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A number of times now, various departments have approached this office with a common lament: their grant applications got positive feedback except that they were asked to shore up their pedagogical research, reasoning and execution. An ID then gets called in.
Few professors want to change their teaching approach. And for online learning, what many want to do is the same-old same-old (they’ll videotape everything).
At a meeting last month, the group wanted to learn about ...
Continue reading Supporting the Pedagogical Piece to a Grant Application
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One requirement of being a geek is to enjoy reading pretty technical articles about what people are doing in their respective fields.
For me, with a background in more of the “soft sciences,” that means forays into IEEE and ACM to see what developers have been working on and how their technologies are being applied in various e-learning endeavors.
By the time I get to reading these articles, I can pretty much assume that the research is ...
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A colleague generously set up a campus tour for me, and during this tour, we visited a state-of-the-art e-learning lab.
The lab itself looked like any other set of academic offices, with a mixture of computers, papers and books….and students…and comfortable furniture. We all crowded into a small meeting room to see some of the work of this office (which has a strong track record of federal educational grant funding as well ...
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In the quest for high learner retention and high participation, one strategy in the building of CSCL spaces (computer supported collaborative learning) has been to encourage the building of so-called “back channels.”
In all sorts of communication environments, having such informal back channels is useful. It allows for richer interchanges without people having to necessarily go on the formal record. And if vetted, such information can be highly useful and pro-social and pro-learning.
One example of such ...
Continue reading Developing Back Channels for Online Learners
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It seems to be a basic truism that people need to practice shared endeavors. Coordination requires tight communications and cooperation.
At a recent conference, a presenter from the Department of Homeland Security described some desktop “spiral” exercises that brought together various offices to deal with shared potential large-scale disasters.
For example, one involved a pandemic sequence broken down in vignettes for a chronology of interactions and decision-making. Another involved flooding. These virtual simulated experiences involved various ...
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Those of you who may wish to propose a chapter in e-learning in CTE (career and technical education) are welcome to do so. More information follows via the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=401
The title is as follows:
Handbook of Research on E-Learning Applications for Career and Technical Education: Technologies for Vocational Training
This will be edited by Dr. Victor Wang.
Continue reading Handbook on E-Learning for Career and Technical Education
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As part of a parallel to a recent high tech conference, one of the participants set up a discussion on data portability. While quite a few were invited, there were just three of us in addition to the organizer and his assistant. I’m told that most people headed off to enjoy the sunshine and local shopping, and many certainly did even during the main conference.
Well, I went running in late, which meant I couldn’t make too much ...
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I have never been very sympathetic with those who go to conferences with a product to sell. That might be a new book or a company name or a new product or themselves, for a career change. Now, I’ll have to sheepishly re-evaluate and come up with a strategy for attracting talent for a book that I’ll be editing on digital imagery in e-learning.
While the concept itself is solid, and there’s plenty of strong academic writing ...
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The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching just released its Mar. 2008 issue (Vol. 4, No. 1). Please find the current issue at the link below.
http://jolt.merlot.org/currentissue.html
Check it out.
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An essential assumption of education is that it can change people's mindsets and their abilities and behaviors. On the face of it, this is a fair enough assumption. People seem to have all acquired different skills and learning.
However, if one were to look at statistics about high-risk human behaviors - regarding smoking, drinking, HIV/AIDS prevention - it doesn't seem like education or knowledge has that great of an effect on human behavior. It seems that people may regurgitate ...
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A provocative new book by Dr. Mark Andrejevic called iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era offers a dark vision of a digital enclosure in which everything an individual does leaves an electronic trail that can be read and tracked and cross-referenced by others.
He offers dystopian visions of politicians tailoring different messages for different observers to garner votes. He sees intrusive uses of private information by marketers. And he sees a populace lured into believing an illusion of ...
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After a year immersing in studying sims, I only recently (a month ago) came across a concept that helps tie the elements together in a basic way. For me, that concept is one of "mental models." This frame has given me some new understandings that have grounded some learning about sims for me.
A mental model is a person's internal conceptualization of a certain paradigm or situation or phenomena, built around pre-existing knowledge. It's that person's sense-making ...
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Whitepapers are not usually much in the purview of instructional design, except maybe as a way to understand a new pedagogical method originated from private industry or a commercial whitepaper to understand a new software product.
That said, whitepapers can be so helpful in in-house learning and decision-making. For the office where I work, whitepapers are authoritative reports used to educate not customers per se but all of us in-house staff.
Instead of the very brief whitepapers that ...
Continue reading Using Whitepapers to Change (My) Mindset(s)
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So one of my unofficial goals for this past year was to collaborate with a colleague on a piece of published writing.
I tried to do that with an article for an online newsletter on retrofitting a course for accessibility. That fell through when one of the advisory board members nixed my choice of a colleague. I tried again recently with a colleague at a different university who suggested that maybe we could find areas of shared interest for writing ...
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"It's a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why?" -- Janet Rae-Dupree, Dec. 30, 2007, "Innovative minds don't think alike," The New York Times
In 1990, as a doctoral student, Elizabeth Newton apparently conducted research while at Stanford on "the curse of knowledge." Her research was intriguing. Rae-Dupree describes it as follows: "She gave one set of people, called 'tappers,' a list of commonly known ...
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We're nearing the end of 2008, and I'm coming up short on ideas. I want to comfortably segue to 2008 with plenty of blogs on tap, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen currently.
And I've started brainstorming a list of topics for something even more challenging - future research. Part of this is inspired by emails I've been getting from a faculty member at another institution of higher education who thinks that ...
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IDs are in the business of handling information. They strive to turn information into actionable knowledge by using what they know about human motivation and learning. They do this in a technology-mediated environment. They do it in fields that they are almost invariably outsiders in. They do this in conjunction with various faculty, administrators and graduate students.
This issue of information comes up in intriguing ways - from academic papers to novels. This musing originated with a couple pieces of writing ...
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There are times that I feel a little guilty for making off like a bandit with the ideas in an academician's article. One of the many perks of work at a university is the freeflow of new information here. Various professors and their graduate students share their ideas. If one could just glean at a library daily, one could be quite happily fed intellectually for a time.
I came across a conceptually intriguing concept in an article recently titled ...
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Some of those who've contributed greatly to different creative fields seem to have idealistic motives. They see room to make a difference, and they contribute where they can. The research literature also has plenty of apparently selfish motives by those who would change an industry. And of course, there's happenstance occurrences that have led to social betterment.
I ran across a recent article and model that examined the motives of those contributing to Wikipedia to see what their ...
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One of the coolest things about reading other people's research is how immersed people may be in their respective fields and how maybe even a part of their learning may have impact on what I do (or even think).
Most of us have likely engaged with informal learning. Learning...to rollerblade...about the real estate market...how to cook a particular type of food...and how to use a new software program...often is ...
Continue reading Informal or Untaught Learning ... and eSpaces
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Late last year, I engaged in a research project that involved the use of online surveys. Ostensibly, the contents could apply to any number of instructors who teach f2f and those who teach online. I was going to use a non-reward strategy for the simple reason that I didn't want to pay out hundreds in gift cards for research that itself was not directly funded and would only get small play at a small C2C Fall Forum in Hutchinson ...
Continue reading "Nah": Rallying Interest in "Mirror" Online Surveys
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Academics and theorists have discussed the self-organization theory of (informal) learning communities, with these creations identified as critical to lifelong learning. These grow not by any designed infrastructure per se but evolve on their own as people pursue their individual and shared interests. This concept relates to the one of the Internet evolving like a "tree," with its main trunk and branching off until the tips, where there are no nodes but tiny petioles. It's a form of ...
Continue reading Stigmergy: Digital Crumbs a la Hansel and Gretel
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"Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all; amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat. Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is simply a question of subdivision; concealing courage under a show of timidity presupposes a fund of latent energy; masking strength with ...
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by Brent Anders
12 July 2006
Learning Styles have become exceedingly common at all levels of academia, yet are Learning Styles real and if so, are they so important that instructors should spend time addressing the issue? The answer is a bit complex but attainable through a thorough understanding of the real issue at hand. The phrase "Learning Styles," is generally defined as a "model [that] classifies students according to where they fit on a number of scales pertaining to the ways they receive and process ...
Continue reading Are Learning Styles Simply A Myth? - If not, are they really that important?
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How much is enough? It is said that we Americans have a hard time defining sufficiency. In research terms, enough is when one can draw a statistically significant conclusion (for quantitative research). It's when triangulation of data seems to point in a particular direction with some measure of confidence (for qualitative research). With so much data available online, it's not that hard to find another mother lode of relevant information. One twist to a term may open up ...
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"I tend to try to help people to address whatever it is they need to address...I like to make assignments where people have a way of making it their own, whatever it is. I want them to make it their own." -- Gail Tremblay
"In the Indian community like in all communities, different people have different interests and strengths, and just like among European-Americans, there are great physicists and mathematicians...I make sure my students know that they are not ...
Continue reading A "SME" for Building Curriculum for Native American Learners
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Those who are in the freelance writing gig know this. One seldom starts writing a work with an editor who has a place for that work and possibly a check in the mail. Usually, a freelancer ends up maybe with a semi-encouraging response, if that. Then, it's all about writing the work and hoping it finds a home.
I think freelancers all have had articles written that got accepted but never appeared---or at least the editor never did the ...