Academics and Academia
The "Academics and Academia" category covers topics related the ways in which colleges and universities function that are relevant to technology-supported education. One key aspect covered here is pedagogy—how people teach—and how technology impacts teaching and learning.
But this category also includes more institutional aspects that are relevant to technology-supported education, such as how campus leadership supports (or doesn't support) new initiatives, politics and bureaucracy that impact these efforts, and so on.
Finally, "Academics and Academia" covers commercial and non-profit services that provide support for technology-supported education initiatives, such as Online Program Management (OPM) companies.
Chris Correa has a thought-provoking post on something called “signature pedagogies.” Here’s an excerpt: Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation, shared some of the preliminary results from the foundation’s studies of professional education (including the education of lawyers, doctors, clergy, teachers, and others). He introduced the notion of signature pedagogies, or (as I understood it) […]
Small Tools/Big Ideas: Integrating Technologies for Teaching Art and Art History
FIT will be hosting a great conference this October on teaching visual topics online using tools that afford social learning. The conference is just a bit of a misnomer, since much of the content will be relevant and valuable to a more general audience than just art and art history instructors; it’s really about teaching […]
"An excess of teaching presence will limit student-student interaction"
Joe Ugoretz has a
Learning Activity Management Systems
SUNY has a home-grown Lotus-Notes-based learning management system that has some truly remarkable features. I’ll be posting about some of these innovations over the coming weeks as I get to know the system better. What I want to focus on in this post, though, is a feature that I have only ever heard of one […]
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.
Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part II
In my last post, I agreed with Stephen Downes that we have to be careful not to take our analogies too literally and specifically pointed out flaws in the “learning-object-as-software-object” analogy. Sometimes the best way to make sure an analogy doesn’t get too deeply rooted is to counter it with another analogy that causes just […]
Learning Objects Aren't Legos, Part I
I’ve been looking forward to having the time and energy to respond to Stephen’s most recent response to the whole pattern language of educational experiences conversation. Stephen writes: Even so, [Michael] effectively finds the source of the tension: “I believe that the rules for re-using experience patterns and the rules for re-using content are respectively […]