Hapgood

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

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