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Jon Dron
Jon Dron
February 2019: Sorry for the downtime Tuesday, 12th February. It was caused by a fix gone wrong. Should be OK now.
(February 12, 2019 - 3:16pm)
General info
Brief description: professional learner
Location:
Contact info
Email address: jond@athabascau.ca
Website: https://jondron.ca/
Personal Website: https://jondron.org/
Country: Canada
Twitter ID: jondron
Occupation
Occupation: teacher and researcher
Industry: Education
Company / Institution: Athabasca University
Job Title: Professor & Chair, School of Computing & Information Systems
Job Description:
I teach in the area of computing (mostly the softer side of things) and research in the field of learning technologies. I manage the School of Computing & Information Systems
About me
I am a full professor and former Chair of the School of Computing & Information Systems, and a member of The Technology-Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University. I am one of the creators of the Landing. I am also an Honorary Faculty Fellow in the Centre for Learning & Teaching at the University of Brighton, UK. I am a UK National Teaching Fellow and member of the International Federation of National Teaching Fellows.
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Power, responsibility, maps and plans: some lessons from being a Chair
By Jon Dron February 9, 2019 - 2:15pm Comments (5)Some rambling reflections on being a Chair of a school -
Strategies for successful learning at AU
By Jon Dron August 15, 2017 - 7:02pm Comments (3)Earlier today I responded to a prospective student who was, amongst other things, seeking advice on strategies for success on a couple of our self-paced programming courses. My response was just a stream of consciousness off the top of my head but... -
Our educational assessment systems are designed to create losers
By Jon Dron July 4, 2017 - 7:37pm Comments (2)The always wonderful Alfie Kohn describes an airline survey that sought to find out how it compared with others, which he chose not to answer because the airline was thus signalling no interest in providing the best quality experience possible,... -
Athabasca's bright future
By Jon Dron June 21, 2017 - 8:46pm Comments (4)The always excellent Tony Bates provides a clear summary of Ken Coates's Independent Third-Party Review of Athabasca University released last week and, as usual, provides a great critical commentary and useful advice on next steps.I am much... -
The cost of admission to the unlearning zone
By Jon Dron December 1, 2016 - 1:21am Comments (1)I describe some of what I do as 'unteaching', so I find this critical article by Miss Smith - The Unlearning Zone - interesting. Miss Smith dislikes the terms ‘ unteaching’ and ‘unlearning' for some well-expressed aesthetic and practical reasons:... -
When cats play sax
By Jon Dron October 29, 2016 - 2:16pm Comments (1)This is what happened when Beelzebub the Cat decided to try to play my saxophone after I had foolishly left it on its stand without its mouthpiece cap. He seriously needs to work on his embouchure. I seriously need to disinfect my mouthpiece.
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PISA and irony: The 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education
By Jon Dron 27 March 2015 @ 10:51amwww.ewa.org - It probably comes as no surprise that I have an extremely low opinion of PISA, the well-intentioned but operationally horrific international testing framework used to compare schooling (I use the word advisedly) in different countries. PISA matters... -
Top 20 in Educational Technology to Connect with through Social Media - AACE
By Jon Dron 23 March 2015 @ 1:59pm Comments (1)blog.aace.org - Well this is nice - I (only just) made the top 20! Nice to be counted among the notably more luminous folk even if my feeble contributions are orders of magnitude smaller. Of course, this is just about people who write about educational technology... -
Understanding transactional distance in web-based learning environments: An empirical study - Huang...
By Jon Dron 20 March 2015 @ 12:51pmonlinelibrary.wiley.com - This is a very important paper examining and verifying Moore's theory of transactional distance. Sadly it is not open but those with AU accounts will be able to access it via AU Library. The paper mostly confirms an inverse relationship between... -
Ivy League For Free: What One Man Learned By Crashing Elite Colleges For 4 Years
By Jon Dron 11 March 2015 @ 1:53pmwww.fastcompany.com - A thought-provoking article on a man who gate-crashed some top tier US university courses as well as here in Canada. This was both politically and personally motivated. The man not only attended lectures and seminars but also got access to... -
Four Reasons to Worry About "Personalized Learning" - Alfie Kohn
By Jon Dron 25 February 2015 @ 12:29pm Comments (2)www.alfiekohn.org - Alfie Kohn is one of my favourite writers and this is a good example of why. Kohn's basic concern with personalized learning is that "Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else" but he drills... -
More Than 60 Dartmouth Students Charged with Cheating in Ethics Class
By Jon Dron 11 January 2015 @ 2:20pmgawker.com - I think this speaks for itself. It would be sad if it weren't so funny. -
Challenge Propagation: Towards a theory of distributed intelligence and the global brain
By Jon Dron 4 January 2015 @ 2:24pmcleamc11.vub.ac.be - Fascinating paper from the always thought-provoking and often inspirational Francis Heylighen, in which he draws together various models of distributed intelligence, distributed cognition, evolution and complex adaptive systems, incorporating... -
For Sale: “Your Name Here” in a Prestigious Science Journal
By Jon Dron 18 December 2014 @ 7:23pm Comments (4)www.scientificamerican.com - A Scientific American article on the prevalence of plagiarism and contract cheating in journal articles. The tl;dr version lies near the end of the article: "Now that a number of companies have figured out how to make money off of... -
Investigating student motivation in the context of a learning analytics intervention during a...
By Jon Dron 7 December 2014 @ 5:46pm Comments (1)www.sciencedirect.com - Very interesting, carefully performed and well articulated study that seems to suggest that showing students their data from early warning systems (learning analytics systems designed to identify at-risk student behaviours, usually through their... -
Constructivism versus objectivism: Implications for interaction, course design, and evaluation in...
By Jon Dron 18 November 2014 @ 1:52pm Comments (1)vrasidas.intercol.edu - I'd not come across this (2000) article from Vrasidas till now, more's the pity, because it is one of the clearest papers I have read on the distinction between objectivist (behaviourist/cognitivist) and constructivist/social-constructivist... -
Instructional quality of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
By Jon Dron 18 November 2014 @ 11:34am Comments (4)www.sciencedirect.com - This is a very interesting, if (I will argue) flawed, paper by Margaryan, Bianco and Littlejohn using a Course Scan instrument to examine the instructional design qualities of 76 randomly selected MOOCs (26 cMOOCs and 50 xMOOCs - the imbalance was... -
7 traits of online graduates that trump campus colleagues
By Jon Dron 16 November 2014 @ 11:30amdonaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca - The excellent Donald Clark pinpointing some of the main reasons why it is great to be a graduate of an online university. I'd humbly suggest that Athabasca University is way ahead of the game here: Donald highlights how wonderful it is that these... -
Multiple types of motives don't multiply the motivation of West Point cadets
By Jon Dron 3 November 2014 @ 11:24am Comments (2)m.pnas.org - Interesting study analysing the relationship between internal vs instrumental (the author's take on intrinsic vs extrinsic) motivation as revealed in entry questionnaires for West Point cadets and long-term success in army careers. As you might... -
50 theorists in 50 days from Donald Clark
By Jon Dron 27 April 2012 @ 12:56pmdonaldclarkplanb.blogspot.ca - Donald Clark's ongoing series of 50 blog posts in 50 days on (very loosely speaking) learning theorists. I've been tempted to bookmark the majority of Donald's posts in this series so far but it's hard to single any out and there are just so... -
The Cost of Knowledge: petition and pledge
By Jon Dron 22 April 2012 @ 8:56pm Comments (3)thecostofknowledge.com - An opportunity to join over 10,000 academics (so far) protesting against publisher exploitation of a lucky advantage that puts them in a position of abusable power. This particular petition is aimed at Elsevier, whose abuses are worse than most. -
Leon Wieseltier: Going To Melody | The New Republic
By Jon Dron 17 April 2012 @ 3:01pmwww.tnr.com - Brilliant comments on browsing vs search: "Browsing is a method of humanistic education. It gathers not information but impressions, and refines them by brief (but longer than 29 seconds!) immersions in sound or language. Browsing is to Amazon...
