I’m the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it’s more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be. – The Phantom Tollbooth Dave Cormier has written a couple of great posts on our failure to take learner motivation seriously and the difference between improving learning and […]
Stephen-Downes
Dammit, the LMS
Count De Monet: I have come on the most urgent of business. It is said that the people are revolting! King Louis: You said it; they stink on ice. – History of the World, Part I Jonathan Rees discovered a post I wrote about the LMS in 2006 and, in doing so, discovered that I […]
Massive, Open, and Course Design
Martin Weller has a great blog post up about course design responses to MOOC completion rates. He starts by arguing that, while completion rates are not everything in MOOCs, they are not nothing either. A lot depends on whether you think completion is an important metric to meet the course goals because, for example, the […]
MOOC history as presented at AACN13 conference
With all of the great discussions spawned by the “greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs” (MRI13), it seems a good time to share a segment of a keynote presentation I gave last year on MOOC history. This presentation was at the American Association of the Colleges of Nursing (AACN) conference in April 2013. For context, I […]
Changing the Narrative
As Phil mentioned, he and I were both lucky to attend the MOOC Research Initiative conference, which was a real tour de force. Jim Groom observed that even the famously curmudgeonly Stephen Downes appeared to be enjoying himself, and I would make a similar observation about the famously curmudgeonly Jonathan Rees. If both of those guys can […]
How to Keynote an Unconference
A while back, I had the privilege of being the keynote speaker at the NERCOMP LMS Unconference. I had never attended an unconference before, nevermind keynoting one, and I found the prospect to be fascinating and exciting. And nerve-wracking. On the surface, a keynote appears to be the antithesis of the unconference spirit. I needed […]
Bring On Da Noise: The Backchannel Panel
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. Barry Dahl has a great post analyzing the back-channel comments from our recent panel discussion with Stephen Downes and Robbie Melton. He concludes that only 31% of the posts were productive, by which he means on-topic questions or comments. This issue came up during the […]