e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • A New Job

    I have some personal news that will have an impact on this blog. After 8+ years in the consulting world, I am moving over into the world of higher education. I am delighted to announce that I have accepted a position with the State University of New York (SUNY) as part of the SUNY Learning Network (SLN). (more…)

  • Interview with JotSpot Co-Founders

    Update: I have now posted a new (printable) version of the PDF with all DRM turned off. Note that it is located at a new URL.

    Here it is [PDF]!

    As you read the interview, I want to suggest that you think about the following words from Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community (which I quoted once before when discussing pattern languages and learning objects): (more…)

  • The Value and Politics of the Unsaid in Instructional Design

    This post on Rick’s Caf矃anadien is just a teaser for an article that hasn’t been published yet. (Not fair!) But one point he makes really caught my eye:

    Designs too often try to meticulously define all of the content, whereas a big part of the aesthetic experience is leaving room for the viewer/participant. Artists do this intentionally — they leave some things unresolved.

    I once did a study for a graduate class in which I correlated the accounts of the Vietnam War in high school history texts with the pedagogical techniques they employed. What I found was that those texts that largely stuck to the pre-Pentagon Papers account of the war (often including versions of events such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that were flatly contradicted by reliable documentary evidence) also stuck to review questions that were largely multiple-choice regurgitations of fairly low-level reading comprehension and retention skills. In contrast, the texts that presented a post-Pentagon Papers account of war events tended to ask far more high-level interpretation questions. For example, they might show a relatively ambiguous photograph of a Vietnamese native along with some textual context of where the photograph was taken and ask the students to discuss the perspective of the person in the photograph. (more…)

  • Registration No Longer Required for Comments

    Several people (most recently James Farmer) have complained that the registration requirement for commenting on e-Literate discourages them from posting comments. Obviously, this isn’t good. So I’m turning off the registration requirement.

    For the moment, I’m viewing this as an experiment. As a result, I’m going to leave the various text warnings about needing to register before commenting up for at least a week. (You can ignore them; I just don’t want to futz too much with my templates until I’m sure this will be permanent.) However, if I don’t get any comment spam over the next week or so, I will make the changes permanent and remove said warnings.

  • A Bug in the RSS Feed

    In the new site design, the RSS feed is supposed to display a “read more” link at the end of a paragraph rather than cutting off mid-sentence. It doesn’t yet. What this means is that you will occasionally get a post via the RSS feed that looks like a complete thought but is actually just the first piece of the entire post. We’re working on fixing this and should have it repaired some time next week. In the meantime, please be wary of posts that look short. I usually don’t do short.

    Sorry about this.

  • JotSpot Interview Coming

    I just did a phone interview with the guys from JotSpot. The more I learn about the application, the more I am impressed. And I think it has direct implications for online learning. In past posts, I have raised the issue of the conflict between enterprise and Internet worldviews in LMS’s and other tools and looked specifically at concerns raised by others (as well as my own) regarding whether Sakai and similar enterprise-centric systems strike the right balance. As we continue to learn how to teach online, it’s important for teachers to be able to move the chairs around the virtual room, so to speak.

    JotSpot may have actually managed to thread the needle. I’ll be curious to hear what others in the community have to say about it.

    I’ll have the interview written up and posted some time next week.

  • Ethnoclassification, Pattern Languages, and MERLOT

    Something clicked for me when I saw the reference on elearningpost to Peter Merholtz’s piece on the bag of keywords approach. The word Maish highlighted was “ethnoclassification.” This made me think of how you could unearth pattern languages in a learning object repository like MERLOT, MLX, or Pachyderm. (more…)