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The future of blogging is blogging
I need to learn to do a selfie face… Another of my annual goals was to write one blog post a week. Unlike the books and film challenge, I fell short with this one, with 48 posts (including this one, may do another one yet). But I definitely upped my blogging game this year. It had rather drifted the past couple of years, and making myself write a post a week got me back into the habit. And I relearnt all the things I had discovered in those early years of blogging, such as the small, incidental thoughts are worth getting out there, that once you’re in the habit it…
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A year of films – the good, the bad & the unsubstantiated
Continuing my review of my annual goals, my last post looked at my ‘book a week’ challenge, this one will see how I fared with my ‘cinema visit a week’ challenge. Warning: Not ed tech related and may contain occasional swears. First up, I rather early on decided it didn’t have to be an actual cinema visit. I watched films in a variety of ways: cinema, on an aeroplane, via on demand, etc. But it did have to be a film on current release. I watch a lot of films, so I probably saw three times this number of other movies. I just about managed it, with a couple of…
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A year in books, with pointless charts
At the start of the year, I set myself a number of goals, so by way of end of year round-up, I’m going to review how I’ve done against these. I realise this is a) self-indulgent and b) of absolutely no interest to anyone else, but hey, blogging. First up, my goal of reading a book a week. I enjoyed Jane Rawson’s post at the end of last year “My year in books, unnecessarily charted“, so thought I’d just do a wholesale copy of that idea, rather than, you know, anything original. I set myself the goal of reading a book a week. This sounds easy, but days soon get…
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2016 – the year of MOOC hard questions
We had 2012 as the year of the MOOC, 2014 was probably the year of the MOOC maturation, and I’m calling it for 2016, the year that university Vice Chancellors and Principals start looking and saying “what are we getting for our investment again?” This critical questioning has started somewhat, but largely money and university cooperation is still flowing. But I think we’ll have had long enough in 2016 to see if those investments have paid off. Here are five key areas that I predict we’ll see reported on, and will cause an investment rethink: MOOC education won’t be as cheap as envisaged – now we are seeing pricing models…
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Open Ed – All growed up
(Open ed is not about two teams battling it out. Plus – ice hockey!) Following on from my previous post, another reflection on the OpenEd conference. I went to two types of presentations – I’ll label them “hardcore research”, and “philosophy of open” to make distinctions, but I don’t mean to imply research is not involved in the second type. In the hardcore research group there were some excellent presentations from Rajiv, Tidewater college, and the Z-degree projects. I’ve labelled these hardcore research, because they did all those things you’d want to control for in examining the impact of OER. They tested pre-knowledge, controlled for demographic effects, compared across control…
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You yell barracuda
I went to OpenEd in Vancouver a couple of weeks back (well done Clint, Amanda and the team for an excellent conference), so thought I’d do a quick couple of posts before I disappeared beneath a morass of mince pies and end of year lists. My colleague Rob Farrow wrote an excellent piece on the two cultures he saw emerging which he labelled “colonizers and edupunks“, with colonizers seeking to move into the established higher ed system (eg with open textbooks) and edupunks desiring a more wholesale change (eg in pedagogy, or assessment). This followed a theme from many of the conversations I had, and blog posts since the conference.…
