Writing About Writing
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Going Mobile: Part 1 Getting Connected
Read more: Going Mobile: Part 1 Getting ConnectedThis blog post is part of a series of posts based on a couple of 90-minute hands-on technology workshops for education grad students. The first workshop, Going Mobile introduced students to mobile technologies that would help support their learning. The second workshop Getting Your Head in the Cloud introduced the concept of the Cloud and a few…
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Are MOOC platforms designed to stifle learner-learner conversations #mri13
Read more: Are MOOC platforms designed to stifle learner-learner conversations #mri13Having recently completed the WideWorldEd open educator MOOC, the first week of the MOOC the platform (based on Desire2Learn) allowed learners to view the discussion forums as threads – not dissimilar to gmail or google groups (or old fashioned discussion forums) you could easily see the title of thread and visually see the flow of…
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MOOCs as textbooks for flipped classrooms – a business model
Read more: MOOCs as textbooks for flipped classrooms – a business modelNed Hall's guest post "We need MOOTs, not MOOCs!", brought to the forfront of my mind an idea that has been brewing for a while. Recently, there has been a flurry of press around the refocussing of Udacity in order to respond to the needs of the venture capitalists that backs it. Udacity, like most…
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Conflicting identities – privilege and exploitation
Read more: Conflicting identities – privilege and exploitationReading Bonnie Stewart's blog post reflecing on Scrooge and Academia, I am reminded of a constant struggle I have with holding the dual identities of a self-employed consultant and a PhD student. My entrepreneurial background has taught me to seek ways to monetize my work – to avoid giving away for free the value I bring to…
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Looking for creative and not difficult ways to make presentations
Read more: Looking for creative and not difficult ways to make presentationsI figured I'd put a call out to my network. I'm creating a short overview of technology for a couple of courses that I'm designing. I'm looking for an interesting / creative tool that will allow me to present the information – note that both courses are online, and ideally, I'd like the presentation to…
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Teaching Technology – Which Comes First Replacement or Enhancement?
Read more: Teaching Technology – Which Comes First Replacement or Enhancement?In looking at the "best" ways to teach a new technology, I'm seeing a conflict between the need to start with familiar applications (replacement) and the need to show learners the value in adoption (enhancement). In my model, replacement refers to applications that replace existing methods or technologies. For example, using an eBook to replace…
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Looking for advice on class collaboration tool
Read more: Looking for advice on class collaboration toolI am designing an online course for a college certificate program on Engaging Mobile Learners. One of the activities in the course is to have learners investigate different mobile learning pedagogies, based upon the framework I start to described here – specifically – pedagogies that: replace, enhance, or transform learning activities. What I'm looking for is…
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Video and synchronicity in online courses #wweopen13
Read more: Video and synchronicity in online courses #wweopen13This week's reflections for #wweopen13 are coming a little early. The activity asks for us to create a two minute video on some content for a MOOC. One of the big benefits of the hyped MOOC has been the encouragement to innovate in online classrooms. For me personally, MOOCs have encouraged me to try the use…
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Are professional education master’s programs broken?
Read more: Are professional education master’s programs broken?Education is a weird field of study (at least in North America). The undergraduate degree in education is a professional degree, intended to provide certification for those wishing to teach in the K-12 school system. It is very much "teachers college". If one wants to learn to teach adults, especially in the context of workplace…
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Going Paperless: Using eBooks in Faculty Development Workshops
Read more: Going Paperless: Using eBooks in Faculty Development WorkshopsGoing Paperless: Using iBooks in Faculty Development Workshops from Rebecca Hogue Going Paperless: Using eBooks in Faculty Development Workshops Full paper will be available soon in EdITLib as part of the AACE eLearn 2013 conference proceedings.
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Emerging Technology Pedagogy and MOOCs #wweopen13 #MOOC
Read more: Emerging Technology Pedagogy and MOOCs #wweopen13 #MOOCI'm playing with a new model to help both describe emerging technology pedagogy, but also to help teach mobile learning (as an emerging pedagogy). The model divides the emerging pedagogy into three categories: (1) Replacement: Using the technology to replace what you are currently doing, without changing how you do it. For example, using eBooks…
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Using Siri to Create a Note in Evernote
Read more: Using Siri to Create a Note in EvernoteI have found the latest Evernote app for my iPhone not as intuitive as I'd have liked – such a that it was taking me too long to figure out how to open a new note, such that I forgot what I was going to write down! I miss having the Android thing that stayed…
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Poststructuralism and Rhizomatic Learning #wweopen13
Read more: Poststructuralism and Rhizomatic Learning #wweopen13In reading this weeks’ posts by David Cormier at the University of PEI, I found myself saying but … but … but … It then occurred to me that we were approaching education from a very different worldview. This is one of those times where I am exceedingly thankful that one of the required courses…
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Issuing my first open badge #wweopen13 #openbadgesMOOC
Read more: Issuing my first open badge #wweopen13 #openbadgesMOOCLately I have become interested in the idea of digital badges – how they might be used for credentially, micro-credentially, and learner motivation. I posted my initial inspiration about Open Digital Badges and Medical Education (http://rjh.goingeast.ca/2013/10/16/open-digital-badges-and-medical-education-openbadgesmooc/). I’ve been sneaking some time now and then to work through the Open Badges MOOC. It seems to be doing…
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Hubs and Spokes in a Connected Age #wweopen2013
Read more: Hubs and Spokes in a Connected Age #wweopen2013In reading Bonnie Stewart's blog post on "Learning to unlearn: Building networked identities in education" I was reminded of the concept of hubs and spokes in relationships. The idea that some people are hubs and others are spokes in the network of relationships. Hubs are people that bring people together and connect other people, spokes…
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MOOCs and Online Learning #wweopen13
Read more: MOOCs and Online Learning #wweopen13Various discussions at the MOOC symposium and eLearning, highlights that one of the side effects of the popularity of MOOCs in the US has been the equivalence of MOOCs to online learning. Those who don't know any better, assume that MOOCs and online learning (such as courses offered for credit by universities and colleges) are…
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What drives MOOC design #wweopen13 #elearn
Read more: What drives MOOC design #wweopen13 #elearnOn Monday I attended the MOOC symposium – a pre conference day all about MOOCs at eLearn. I found that at times people were almost religious about their preference or opinions about MOOC types – with the xMOOCers often questioning the “massiveness” of cMOOCs, and the cMOOCers question whether xMOOCs were just didactic content presentation. …
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MOOCs as Gap Year Activities
Read more: MOOCs as Gap Year ActivitiesIn a recent blog post by The Ed Techie, the authors suggests that MOOCs could be used to replace the 1st year of an undergrad program. I'm not sure I completely agree, but I definitely see value in MOOCs, especially for those who don't exactly know what they want to study in college. In my…
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Open Digital Badges and Medical Education #openbadgesMOOC
Read more: Open Digital Badges and Medical Education #openbadgesMOOCThe idea of Open Badges in the context of continuing medical education first occurred to me during a project meeting where I am a consultant responsible for developing an eLearning module in Articulate Storyline. The LMS that is being used by the organization is dated, such that it only allows me to send a pass/fail…
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MOOC Teaching Philosophy and the Conflict with Learner Control #wweopen13
Read more: MOOC Teaching Philosophy and the Conflict with Learner Control #wweopen13This week I began another MOOC – this one is called Online Instruction for Open Educators and is presented by Wide World Ed (http://wideworlded.org/online-instruction-for-open-educators/) and it officially started today. The first week talked about teaching philosophy in online education. The article we read presented useful principles to consider when designing/facilitating online courses (see http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/179/177), but…
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MOOCs helping you figure out where to go from here
Read more: MOOCs helping you figure out where to go from hereFrom the early days of xMOOCs, I have seen them as useful marketing tools for universities – capturing their most engaging professors on film for all to see. I have also seen MOOCs as useful for professional development, especially in a world where more people are self-employed and where employers are no longer paying for…
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Which iPad should I purchase?
Read more: Which iPad should I purchase?I am frequently asked by colleagues and friends "which iPad should I buy?". I was asked again last week, and so I decided that I it would provide a good chapter for the iPad Essentials course that I'm developing (and of course a blog post). Please let me know if you find this useful or…
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eLearning Project Management Triangle
Read more: eLearning Project Management TriangleIn project management, engineers have long told project managers that they can have it: Fast, Cheap, or Good – pick any two. The idea is that the creation of a new product requires trade-offs between these three elements. For each element that you want more of, you need to compromise by having less of another.…
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Our fading academic communities
Read more: Our fading academic communitiesLately I've been reflecting on my lack of connection to the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education. I resently spent some time back at the University of Victoria, and very fondly remember my time wondering the halls of the Engineering Office Wing (effectionity known as the End of the World). Even as an undergrad, I…
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Auditing and learning squads #DTActionLab
Read more: Auditing and learning squads #DTActionLabOne of this week's assignment in the Design Thinking Action Lab MOOC is to join or create a learning squad. Learning squads are small groups or teams of up to six people that agree to work together for the group challenges in the course. Exactly what this will entail isn't yet clear. I didn't make…
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Summer is MOOC time
Read more: Summer is MOOC timeI'm not sure if it's that the courses I'm most interested in are offered in the summer, or that I just seem to have more time in the summer, either way, I'm starting to associate summer time with MOOC time. This year, I signed up for a couple of courses on Coursera and one on…
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eBooks, Paper, and the Net Generation – Are we asking the right questions?
Read more: eBooks, Paper, and the Net Generation – Are we asking the right questions?A recent article on the Wired Campus blog in the Choronicle of Higher Education reported that Students Prefer Print for Serious Academic Reading. I am amazed at just how viceral my reaction is to this type of research. My issues with this article are the authors' attempt to generalize and the authors equating serious academic…
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Tips for emerging scholars from #edmedia – getting published
Read more: Tips for emerging scholars from #edmedia – getting publishedLast week I ended the Ed Media conference in beautiful Victoria British Columbia. Although I signed up to attend the conference because of the content, when I got there I found mysel drawn to a lot of the sessions in the emerging scholars stream. My take home message from the Getting Published in Educational Technology…
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Learning new software – fast
Read more: Learning new software – fastThis week I'm learning to use Articulate Storyline. It is a fun software package for rapidly creating eLearning. When learning a new software package, I find scanning the documentation to be useful. I also find that video tutorials are particularly helpful. If the company doesn't provide video tutorials, then I can often find a bunch…
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Creating eBooks for Faculty Development – Poster presentation at #CCME
Read more: Creating eBooks for Faculty Development – Poster presentation at #CCMELast week I presented a poster at the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME) about my experiences creating eBook participant guides for faculty development workshops. I talked a little bit about my experiences in the blog post Getting an eBook published in the iBookstore. Below is a copy of the poster.
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Tweeting at #CCME13
Read more: Tweeting at #CCME13For the last few days I've been participating in the Canadian Conference on Medical Education (CCME, twitter hashtag #CCME13). The conference involved a lot of hype around the use of social media. I saw many people stretching beyond their comfort zones to explore social media, and specifically, Twitter. People want to know what this twitter…
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Critical distance in design-based research
Read more: Critical distance in design-based researchIn a meeting with my committee to review my research proposal, I was told that I needed to consider how I would maintain a ‘critical distance’ as my research proposal had me performing several roles, but more specifically the roles of designer and evaluator. Joseph (2004) argues that a researcher who is place in multiple…
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Technology for technology’s sake
Read more: Technology for technology’s sakeIn education, technology for technology sake is often thought of a bad thing. You will often hear that technology in education "needs to start with the problem not the technology" or "needs to start with the pedagogy not the technology". There was a time that I would have agreed with those statements. I have often…
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Getting an eBook published in the iBookstore
Read more: Getting an eBook published in the iBookstoreI am happy to announce that I have successfully published my first eBook in the iBookstore. It isn't really a "book", rather it is a participant guide for a four-hour workshop. The process itself took longer than expected because I was missing some key information about the process, so I thought I would share the…
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Tablet use in Medicine
Read more: Tablet use in MedicineLast week at IADIS mLearn in Portugal, I gave the above presentation (click image to see the presentation), based upon my short paper "Tablet use in Medicine" published in the conference proceedings.
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California Dreamin’
Read more: California Dreamin’This entry is a cross post from http://goingeast.ca/blog On days like this … I find myself California Dreamin'… Back in early February (Feb 6-11), we spent a few days in Mountain View California and spent a day in San Francisco, exploring a little bit of what the city has to offer. We drove up into…
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Ethics of self-publishing and self-plagiarism in academia
Read more: Ethics of self-publishing and self-plagiarism in academiaYesterday, I presented in a panel discussion about ethics, equity, and plagiarism. I was encourage to talk about technology and how that related to the topic. In reflecting on the topic, the two areas where I felt I could contribute the most were that of self-publishing, self-plagiarism, and the relationship between the two. Here is…
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Online teaching presence: It’s about being there when they are
Read more: Online teaching presence: It’s about being there when they areA couple weeks ago, I finished teaching a short course at Simon Fraser University in their Technical Communications program. The course is 100% online. As someone who has taught online but also someone who has been an online student, I can attest to the importance of the facilitators "presence" in the online classroom. I was…
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When outcomes aren’t outcomes
Read more: When outcomes aren’t outcomesOver the last couple of days I've had a few ah-ha moments relating to my thesis proposal. The first leap occurred when the picture of my proposal, that is my conceptual framework, appeared in my mind. I had been struggling with it for weeks, and then, all of a sudden, it was there. I've since…
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Using Screencasts to teach MS Word online
Read more: Using Screencasts to teach MS Word onlineFor the last three years, I've been teaching a 5-week Advanced Microsoft Word course for technical writers. The course is taught 100% online as part of an online technical writing certificate program. The first year I used online text content and enhanced it with various video clips from the Microsoft Office website and a few…
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Getting your head into the Cloud – Part 1
Read more: Getting your head into the Cloud – Part 1Tomorrow, I’m giving a short 90-minute workshop introducing ‘The Cloud’ entitled “Getting your head into the Cloud”. I thought the information that I’m writing might be of interest to my readers, so I’ll be making a series of blog posts with the content of the workshop. Here is the introduction slide: Part 1: What is…
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Producing my first eBook
Read more: Producing my first eBookIn December last year I was given a challenge. My supervisor had a textbook that she wanted to self published in time for the start of classes in January. The content was written. It had been through various iterations of proofing and was ready for publication – however, it was not ready for self publishing.…
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iPad Mini and accessory review
Read more: iPad Mini and accessory reviewShortly after they became available, I bought myself the new iPad Mini. In my quest to find the best combination of tools to reduce the weight that I carry around whilst providing all the functionality I need on the go, I wanted to see if this new smaller and lighter iPad would work for me.…
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The research question – training wheels for new researchers?
Read more: The research question – training wheels for new researchers?Back in my undergrad, I and many others, were given the advice not to cram for exams. We should focus on the "knowing" the content and that would be much more effective than cramming. Unfortunately, I took that advice and as a result didn't have particularly good marks in my first two years. By the…
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What makes a good critical friend?
Read more: What makes a good critical friend?In my post about my comprehensive exam writing strategies, I mentioned the importance of a critical friend. During my online Master's program, they strongly recommended that everyone find a critical friend before we went into the thesis writing phase of the program. Although I had two "critical friends" during my master process, they were "critical…
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Passwords, passwords, and more passwords
Read more: Passwords, passwords, and more passwordsLet me start by staying, getting your blog hacked sucks. Getting your blog hacked when you use the same password for your blog adminstration as you do for many other critical things on the Internet sucks even more. Last year, our http://goingeast.ca blog got hacked. The hacker ran some scripts on the system that messed up…
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Was NaNoWriMo the first cMOOC?
Read more: Was NaNoWriMo the first cMOOC?For those who are not familiar with it, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It takes place in November each year. It is a challenge to writers around the world to write a 50,000 word novel. The structure is simple, put the challenge out there and let participants register their daily word counts. The premise…
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Comprehensive Exam (and Literature Review) Writing Strategies
Read more: Comprehensive Exam (and Literature Review) Writing StrategiesIn April, I wrote my comprehensive exams for my PhD. In the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, our comprehensive exams involve writing two 15-page essays in the span of four-weeks. One of the essays is based upon an epistemology or methodology related question. For the second essay, you get to choose between…
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National Writing Month
Read more: National Writing MonthNovember is national writing month. A couple of years ago, before I began my PhD, I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). NaNoWriMo is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel within the month of November. I chose to use that time to write reflections on the 16-month bicycle trip that my husband…
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Why is there only one level of participation in xMOOCs?
Read more: Why is there only one level of participation in xMOOCs?One of the biggest criticism in the media about xMOOCs is the large number of drop-outs. I've just signed up for my first xMOOC, "Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society" at Coursera. It didn't take long (within the first day) for me to decide that I wasn't going to follow the course the way it…
