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

All I wanted was a Pepsi, just one Pepsi! Jim Groom has a sort-of-reply to my post on bringing student-produced OER into the heart of the institution, and Stephen Downes has a reply as well. Neither seems to buy the idea that open practice should be institutionalized. I find this very odd, frankly, and wonder if… Continue reading

I’ve mentioned the Persona Project a few times in passing here. It was for me a major turning point in my life. I had been on a track to get a PhD. in linguistics, and, it being 1996, I ended getting an assistantship as a web developer, building the college’s first web site. At the… Continue reading

From FiveThirtyEight, Arvind Narayanan on the expansion of Internet tracking and fingerprinting (h/t @hypervisible): There is research that shows that when people know they are being tracked and surveilled, they change their behavior. We lose our intellectual freedom. A variety of things we consider important for our civil liberties — say, marriage equality — are things that would… Continue reading

This is a short note — the second I suppose — that follows up on a conversation I had yesterday with George Siemens and David Kernohan. In that conversation I stated I had a technique of using the web that helped to overcome bias rather than push us further back into it. It has, at… Continue reading

This is a story about cognition and social media. But it begins with a bird. Our family has a bird, a green-cheek conure named Derp. His brain is about the size of an M & M (original, not peanut). Derp is a quick learner. You can say “Tidy up, Derp” and he’ll gather all the bottle… Continue reading

The future belongs to architectures that move beyond the single-server, domain-based model towards federated solutions. More specifically, we’ll see a move from server-centered networks to content-centered networks. Both models will remain, but the pendulum will swing. You see this in SOLID’s decoupling of data from server applications, in the InterPlanetary File Systems use of a… Continue reading

I read this heartbreaking story today about the U.S.’s current opioid epidemic. The surgeon general was having dinner with a friend, a cardiologist. Then this happened: “I was having dinner with him and I said, ‘Can you believe that we were taught that these opioid medications weren’t addictive in our training?’ ” Murthy told a… Continue reading

We love using Slack for our communications here, and I think the idea of using Slack for classroom communication is sound. Some might say it’s not open enough, but I say pshaw, some conversations are better behind closed doors. Not every statement has to be a public stand. Twitter has been a seminar in that… Continue reading

Some people think that notices like this are proof we should all be running our own instances of Kifi, blogging software, or whatnot. I’m lazy, and I don’t want to do that. I just want my data somewhere that I own, in a format any application can read. I don’t want to have to export… Continue reading