My 4 week trip to China is a week done, and I thought I would document the trip to date (you know us old guys have trouble remembering the details!). Four years I received a request to host and sponsor a PhD student from Bejing Normal School. Zhijun Wang soon worked her way into our […]
A major goal of net-based mass media is to customize the feed that is delivered to each viewer received a unique screen that matches their interest and more importantly their likelihood of purchasing some product or viewing some paid for message. This phenomenon was labeled as “filter bubble” by author Eli Pariser – meaning that certain results […]
I was asked to do a video conferencing talk to a meeting of three Mexican Universities yesterday. They are attempting to come up with a common set of criteria to define and measure the quality of their online courses. Perhaps I was not the best person to ask, as I have very mixed feelings about […]
Yesterday at Convocation in Athabasca, I was deeply honoured by my former colleagues at Athabasca by being installed into the Order of Athabasca University. Most other members have been individuals from the community who have made exceptional contributions to the University. I was the first Faculty member (other than Dominique Abrioux, who also served as […]
My Google Scholar alert notified me that one of my articles was cited in an as yet not publisher preprint in Educational Researcher. I don’t usually bother with articles hidden behind paywalls, but I was intrigued by the title: Coburn, C. E., & Penuel, W. R. (2016). Research–Practice Partnerships in Education: Outcomes, Dynamics, and Open […]
I’ve been fascinated by the role of interaction all of my career as both a student, a researcher and a teacher. Michael Moore’s famous article details the role of the ‘big three’ (student-student, student-content, student-teacher) interactions and influenced Randy Garrison and I to explore the other 3 possibilities (teacher-teacher, teacher-content and content-content interactions). I’ve written a […]
The Community of Inquiry has emerged as the most widely referenced (the seminal 1999 article approaches 3,000 citations) and arguably the most widely used model for constructivist based e-learning design and research. I’ve always thought that it’s greatest strength is its simplicity (only 3 major, but interacting components) and the way the model can readily […]
As my first “academic” term as a retiree draws to a close, I’m reflecting on what it actually was like to be retired. We hear all the stories (about men especially) who get terribly bored, follow their wives around the house, get addicted to golf or some other bad habit – but it hasn’t been […]
Thanks to Rick Reis’s Tomorrow’s Professor newsletter I bumped into an instrument that I think can be a very important addition to or replacement for teaching evaluations and/or student course evaluations. This Teaching Practices Inventory was developed by the Noble Prize winning Physicist Carl Wieman who was hired at the University of British Columbia to […]
My friends at the Open University of Catalonia asked me to do a guest blog on learning analytics for their Open Thought 2015 series. As always, a deadline got a little creativity and some energy going even though I am no expert on analytics. Not deterred, I gathered a few thoughts for the post at http://openthoughts-analytics.blogs.uoc.edu/big-data-learning-analytics-and-distance-education/
