One of the reactions people are having to the new Blackboard report on design findings is that it “doesn’t represent online” because many of the students and the findings show students are taking a mix of online and face-to-face courses, and this, people claim, is not your average online experience. Why are we pretending that students Continue reading

Jeff Selingo has a helpful summary of some recent research that attempts to add some nuance to our “grit”-crazy times: “Things like grit and 10,000 hours are mindsets that are very misleading because they are consequences not causes — they are lagging indicators of performance,” said Todd Rose, who is the author of The End Continue reading

Rolin Moe points me to the pointlessness that is another study that finds massive, temporary forums are not as engaging as smaller online groups. This is why I spend zero time publishing academic articles, frankly, besides the obvious Reviewer #2 junk. The state of knowledge among people who have actually run large online communities is Continue reading

One of the ways we kill reusability is through layout and markup. In fact, this was one of the realizations that started me on this path eight years ago. Looking at the practical barriers to remix it became clear that highly formatted web pages, PowerPoints, and Word documents were not really remixable, because of the Continue reading

People with broadly similar goals often operate under different theories of change. Some people believe change comes from moving fast and building things, and a lot of it does. Some people think it comes from laying the intellectual and policy foundations that nurture desired results, and that’s true too. Most massive changes require approaches at Continue reading

Quick note: after writing the last post on choral explanations I’ve gotten more deeply into Quora. And while there are a number of things that would have to change to make a Quora-style site a viable OER collaboration tool the base interaction is amazingly on target for how collaborative OER repositories should work. Again, I Continue reading

I mentioned in a recent post that the collaborative web is moving away from the “one best resource” model, but didn’t go into much detail on that point. I’d like to talk a bit more about that, and hopefully relate it to newer models of Open Educational Resource (OER) use and courseware design. When people Continue reading

I drive my oldest daughter to high school everyday. She goes to a magnet STEM school in the district that’s on the campus where I work. I’ve been brainwashing her into liking indie rock one car ride at a time using carefully planned mix CDs. Last week she tells me I need to get more Magnetic Continue reading