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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

There’s a lot wrong in this statement from Mark Zuckerberg on machine telepathy: While some of these ideas might seem more like the stuff of sci-fi, Zuckerberg says there is scientific research going on in these fields right now. Telepathy is one such area. “You’re going to be able to capture a thought in its […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]