Landing : Athabascau University

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  • Thanks to Tony Bates for pointing to and providing a fine review of this interesting article which shows evidence of learning gain in people who were taking an xMOOC.  I have little to add to Tony's comments apart from to mention the very...
  • The Pew Research Center is responsible for some of the most fascinating and well-conducted research about America and Americans today. In this study, they looked at the relationships between political learnings (conservative vs liberal) and media....
  • Slides for my EDDE 801 session, during which I will be talking about (and hopefully hearing about) what teachers do, why they do it, whether there are other ways of doing it and what the future might hold for education as we move further and further...
  • Interesting! I'd be wary of any generalized claims that all learners would benefit from this in all circumstances. On the whole, teaching (or even the expectation of having to do so) does appear to improve learning, not just of memorized facts as...
  • A nice clear and very graphic explanation of why wifi, especially public wifi, is a very dangerous thing to use. And no, it has nothing whatsoever to do with radiation - if that worries you, and it absolutely shouldn't, you should be a lot more...
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  • Jon Dron commented on the blog Researching things that don't exist October 17, 2014 - 6:15pm
    Thanks Jeff. I like that. Sad that CourseFork flipped, though wouldn't it be nice if someone had forked it before that happened :-) Actually, I do notice that it has a github repository that appears to contain the code for various things, including...
  • Jon Dron published a blog post x-literacies October 4, 2014 - 2:05pm
    x-literacies that focus on media and tools miss the point. It ain't what you do, it's how you do it and why you do it that matters. Literacy is the minimum set of skills needed to participate in a culture, not a description of our ability to use...
    Comments
    • Susan Bainbridge October 5, 2014 - 4:03am

      Hi Jon,

      I wish, I wish, I wish . . . I had the time to respond to your thoughts with the same depth and insight as you have presented them.

      But I wanted to tell you how valuable these ideas are to me and my research in Nepal. After reading your post I find myself asking: “What is Nepal?” With over 92 languages (and therefore cultures) in the country and less than half the population speaking the national language of Nepali; what binds this country together? If not literacy, then what?

      If Nepal were a new country then one might consider it simply a political alliance of a peoples caught between the two giants of China and India. This in fact may be a factor but Nepal is an ancient country and the people display a pride in their extreme diversity and literacies.

      You have me thinking at such a fundamental level which I believe is extremely important as we make progress with the Open University of Nepal (OUN). Higher education most certainly depends on literacy as a necessary component.

      In terms of the OUN, how should we define literacy? Can it be applied universally in Nepal? Are there common denominators throughout the region that I have as yet to identify?

      Your proposed definition of literacy as the prerequisite set of technological skills needed for participation in a culture.  And, of course, we are all members of many cultures. There are other things that matter in a culture apart from technological skills, such as (for example) a playful spirit, honesty, caring for others, good judgement, curiosity, ethical sensibility, as well as an ability to interpret, synthesize, classify, analyze, remix, create and seek within the cultural context, has me contemplating the ‘remix’ Nepali citizens must apply and understand to function within their own small cultural community and the larger Nepali culture.

      This is important! For my own work and the OUN initiative.

      Thank you!

      Susan

  • I understand why such things happen - it does save a lot of time and money to wilfully ignore part of the population!  On the bright side, the potential of 3D-printed technologies aside, slow but steady improvements in voice interfaces are...
  • Jon Dron bookmarked Waterfi Waterproofed Kindle Paperwhite September 24, 2014 - 2:44pm
    There are companies that will do such waterproofing for most electronic portable devices, but this one comes ready-sealed, albeit at a notable premium. With the ability to take it almost anywhere, in the bath, rain and sea (which would not be a good...
  • Jon Dron bookmarked Dining with an overweight person makes you eat more September 22, 2014 - 6:40pm
    It looks like one mechanism for the already observed spread of obesity through social networks may be extremely simple: people tend to eat more when dining with people who are fatter. Thanks to an ingeniously simple experimental design, this paper...
  • A totally fascinating study of students conducted using a massive amount of automatically collected data from smartphones along with other data collected from other systems and via surveys to come up with a large set of correlations relating to...
  • Jon Dron commented on a bookmark Professor forces students to buy his own $200 textbook September 19, 2014 - 12:21pm
    There's money in them thar MOOCs! Food for thought though. This doesn't seem at all unethical to me because participation in the course is entirely voluntary and, even if you do choose to participate, it is up to you whether you take up the offer...
  • This article is actually purportedly about the very unsurprising discovery that students who can't afford textbooks are downloading them illegally, even for ethics classes. Shocking! Not. However, the thing that really shocks me about this article...
    Comments
    • Mary Pringle September 19, 2014 - 11:46am

      I have to admit that I like Coursera, and for the course I'm currently in the professor gives us the option of purchasing a PDF file of his book for $4.99. I can live with that. Of course, if 300,000 students buy the book at $4.99, he will be a rich man.

    • Jon Dron September 19, 2014 - 12:21pm

      There's money in them thar MOOCs!

      Food for thought though. This doesn't seem at all unethical to me because participation in the course is entirely voluntary and, even if you do choose to participate, it is up to you whether you take up the offer to buy the book or not. Moreover, your future career probably doesn't depend on passing it. It's also an acceptable price, even though it would be better if it were free. One of the real big benefits of MOOCs, perhaps their defining characteristic, is that people do them because they want to learn, not because they want credentials. Dropping out is at least as easy as dropping in, which means learners are in control, not teachers. The problem with doing this in a paid-for university course is that, in all likelihood, you have a captive audience, that needs your course for more than just the knowledge it provides, that has already invested substantially in it and its prerequisites, that you will assess, providing credentials that really matter. Moreover, you've also got a wealth of hierarchies, structures, rules and norms on your side that place you in a distinctively unequal relationship that goes far beyond simply being the one that knows something and that knows how to teach it. It's a very different power relationship. MOOCs from Coursera look like university courses and talk like university courses but, as I've mentioned once or twice before, they're not the same animal at all.

       

  • Report on an interesting study showing how rote learning of some things results in increasingly creative interpretations of what we have tried to learn, which means it actually gets in the way of remembering, even though more details are recalled....
  • Jon Dron bookmarked Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media September 17, 2014 - 9:48pm
    The free PDF preview of the new book by me and Terry Anderson is now available from the AU Press website. It is a complete and unabridged version of the paper book. It's excellent value! The book is about both how to teach crowds and how crowds can...
  • Jon Dron posted to the wire September 17, 2014 - 9:25pm
    Free PDF of our new book #TeachingCrowds, at http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120235 - print and ebook formats due soon
  • Jon Dron published a blog post Researching things that don't exist September 11, 2014 - 2:21pm
    As the end of my sabbatical is approaching fast, I am still struggling to develop a research methodology around tinkering (or bricolage, to make it sound more academic). In brief, what I am trying to do is introduce a little rigour into exploring...
    Comments
    • Anonymous October 17, 2014 - 2:38pm

      Interesting post, Jon. It reminded me of Mike Caulfield’s post on eLiterate, describing Jon Udell’s idea that innovation occurs via collaboration between suppliers and the lead users (i.e. the tinkerers) of their products. Udell’s research challenged the long held belief that suppliers research and develop innovation. Caulfield argues that “what smart companies do, for the most part, is not ‘innovate' but find what 'lead users' are hacking together and figure out how to make that simpler for the general population to tap into.”
       
      Web 2.0 tools can help crowd-source this general process. Diigo, for example, has an “Improve Diigo” page wherein users request features and vote on features they’d like built. Diigo then reviews and accepts or rejects popular requests. Granted there's a difference between asking for a feature and hacking one together, but one of those approved requests was for access to an API, meaning Diigo is now much easier to tinker with.
       
      The interplay between design & evolution is also exhibited when startups pivot. I was chasing a rabbit, trying to see if anyone had ever used GitHub for courses, and came across an article on a company called CourseFork aiming to do just that. Despite that article only being a year old, by the time I got to the company's web site I found they had pivoted to offering an online course in python. Even those who set out to design one thing can end up tinkering.
      - Jeff Pinto

    • Jon Dron October 17, 2014 - 6:15pm

      Thanks Jeff. I like that.

      Sad that CourseFork flipped, though wouldn't it be nice if someone had forked it before that happened :-) Actually, I do notice that it has a github repository that appears to contain the code for various things, including a link with no code in it for forkable.org (that appears down right now). Github for education would be neat though, of course, Github itself could be used that way as it is. I see oerpub is making use of it and there's a brief snippet at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLLpO1Wsje8 which looks pretty hopeful too.

      Jon

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  • Jon Dron uploaded the file Duchamp Fountaine September 9, 2014 - 4:09pm
    Public domain image by Alfred Stieglitz of Duchamp's 'Fountaine'
    Comments
  • Jon Dron commented on the blog Three glimpses of a fascinating future September 9, 2014 - 12:03pm
    Thanks Jim - now corrected. Yes, it would make the addictive nature of existing media seem very tame. Which makes me wonder - the potential for games is truly awe-inspiring, but this raises a whole bunch of deeply frightening possibilities because...
  • Jon Dron commented on a bookmark Have we all been duped by the Myers-Briggs test? September 8, 2014 - 10:12am
    Absolutely. As real as Spike's English accent in Buffy. Maybe more so.