In technosolutionist circles, the belief is that given the right algorithm we can make use of the massive amounts of information on the web to predict and solve problems. To the technosolutionist, the recent failure of advanced epidemic detecting tools to spot an ebola outbreak until a day after it had been announced by Guinea’s Continue reading

The video below, entitled “Why the Blackboard Wiki Is Not a Wiki”, shows how amazingly boneheaded Blackboard’s wiki tool design is. At the heart of the boneheadedness? The core idea of a wiki is that collaboration happens by way of making things quick, and seeing error and omission as community-creating opportunities, and encouraging iteration Blackboard, on Continue reading

One of the persistent issues in using a networked learning approach to things is the workflow. I’m a couple weeks into using Federated Wiki in my edtech course, and I thought I’d share my methods. Visualizing Participation Currently, I load up students into the neighborhood by clicking on group pages, and then hit the Recent Continue reading

Is it ironic that I’m posting on this topic partially to avoid the mundane process of setting up Blackboard trainings for a bit longer? Probably not. In any case, Jared Stein has a post up about the LMS and his personal perspective on why it turned out the way it did, and the crux of Continue reading

D’Arcy Norman’s blog has a great policy which I may go back to soon — you can’t comment on his blog, only trackback to it. So here’s me commenting on his blog. In a recent post, D’Arcy expands on this idea, among others: Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable Continue reading

Had a great lunch today with Michael Berman in Portland, and boy am I glad I got down there. We talked about my recent fascination with the idea of Learning Design Patterns, and more broadly with agile methods in learning design. I mentioned that one thing that was a struggle was getting the pattern at the Continue reading

I’ve discovered Chris Alexander’s work on architecture, and I cannot read it without hearing every line as a statement on problems in course design.  Alexander approaches architecture not through top-down design or bottom-up chaos, but through generative constraints, that is, he begins with the environment and then runs through a “grammar” of building. The design emerges Continue reading

Bonnie Stewart has a great post over at her TheoryBlog on the state of Twitter. The post attempts to pull together the problems of the New Orality of social media, which seems to have somehow combined the worst aspects of conversation and print: Because lately secondary orality via digital media seems like a pretty nasty, Continue reading