This is a proposal on how an approach to community resource building called  “Choral Explanations” could be used to increase retention, based on recent research into the relationship of “belonging” and “mindset”. But we need to cover some background first. Mindset, Motivation, and Belonging We’ve long known that a sense of belonging is crucial to student … Continue reading Choral Explanations for Student Success: A Proposal

Once you start to see this “choral explanations” pattern, you start seeing it everywhere. I’ve mentioned before how you see it on sites such as Stack Exchange, and in the dialogue of accomplished tutors. In all these situations, people are not given the “one best explanation”, but rather, they are provided with an array of … Continue reading Choral Explanations on the (Not-So) Cheap

For the past few months I have been talking about “choral explanations” and how they might transform our approach to OER. This is an outgrowth of my work on federated wiki and Wikity, but is a much more specific and immediately applicable idea. In fact, as I will show below, choral explanations are already in … Continue reading Choral Explanations and OER: A Summary of Thinking to Date

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 Prism: A Proposal for a Choral Approach to OER

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 Choral Explanations

From a great New Yorker article that ran last month: In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the … Continue reading The Power of Explaining to Others

Keynote given at Metropolitan State’s TLTS conference in Denver, CO.  A Sense of Audience I’m going to start by telling a story about how I got here. I’ve mentioned this on my blog once or twice, but this is the first time I’ve told this end to end in this way. I got here because … Continue reading New Directions in Open Education

The newest release of Wikity is up on GitHub. There are a few bugs knocked out, but the major change is a shift from “Path” functionality to “Cardbox” functionality. This shift is partial — mostly about terminology at the moment — but will eventually work a bit different as well. Paths in Wikity were sort … Continue reading Wikity Updates (0.4)

My daughters get frustrated with trying to explain to friends what I do for a job. On a daily basis it looks a bit like faculty development, a bit like instructional design, a bit like strategic IT management. But of course, that’s not the part I talk about, despite it being the majority of my … Continue reading The Simple Vision

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 The Textbook Duet