Recently, a slogan I created went viral. Since my area of (day job) expertise is how we use networks to learn and collaborate, I thought I might talk about how that happened, and what its path to fame can tell us about information flow in networks. Today, I want to just set the story up. Continue reading

In instructional design “gating items” are items on tests which, if not answered or performed correctly, cause failure of the test as a whole. As a simple example, imagine a driving test that starts in a parking lot with the car parked. The driving test has a lot of elements — stopping at stop signs, Continue reading

From an interview on the World Economic Forum site (which is surprisingly good). A description of how a small change to an invitation email increased pass rates on police recruitment exam: Small, contextual factors can have impacts on people’s performance. In this particular case, there is literature to suggest that exams for particular groups might Continue reading

I’m a person that generally doesn’t spend much time predicting the future. I’m more comfortable trying to imagine the possible futures I find desirable, and that’s mostly what I do on this blog, talk about the futures we should strive for. But two and a half years ago, at the encouragement of the folks at e-Literate, and with Continue reading

It’s likely that Eisenhower said the above lines, but it’s actually Richard Nixon who reported them. Nixon, in “Crisis 4” of his “Six Crises” writes about his Kitchen Debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and it’s from there alone that Ike’s saying enters the written record. Nixon’s prose in that article is a bit self-congratulatory, but Continue reading

Our current process for provisioning courses with OER looks like this: Identify course content needs Find materials that support those needs Chose the best material for each need Pull those materials into a coherent whole In practice, items two and four take an awful lot of time, so many people punt and get an open Continue reading

From @brackenm: The core idea of Choral Explanations is that we benefit more from multiple parallel explanations than the “one best explanation”, and that educational materials should utilize this pattern more fully. As I’ve argued, choral explanations are how people tend to reach mastery of difficult areas, whether they are a programmer on Stack Exchange Continue reading

The most important thing I do as an edtecher is try to teach myself things outside my comfort zone. When you get into your thirties and forties (assuming you’re out of your PhD program) you get pretty ensconced in a discipline, and are able to leverage previous knowledge to acquire new related knowledge. This is Continue reading

If you’ve read Choral Explanations, you know that I’ve proposed a new (well, as much as anything is ever new) approach to OER use and production that is based on trends in both wiki and question and answer sites. (If  you haven’t read Choral Explanations, you can read it here). In the time since I Continue reading

So I’ve been doing this Wikity thing for a while now. I use it as a personal learning environment. When I learn something new, I try to capture it and connect it. This usually comes in stages. First, I’ll just capture some text, usually with the Wik-it bookmark (but sometimes with “Share to WordPress” when Continue reading