Hi folks This coming year marks the 40th North Country Fair – the Annual Solstice Celebration held in Northern Alberta. A very long time ago, I had the idea of turning our annual community celebration of the Solstice into a more public and BETTER celebration. The vibrant community of “back-to-the landers” in the Lesser Slave […]
I’ve just finished watching two films about, paid for and watched – with interest, by many Canadians. The first film, TransCanada Summer takes the viewer across the country in 1958. Throughout the trip the film celebrates the industrialization and progress resulting from the construction of the Trans Canada Highway – the longest highway in the world at that […]
Jon Dron and I have received funding to enhance social networking amongst the distributed students and staff at Athabasca University. This is a two year position and requires programming skills and communications abilities to help create and sustain AU’s system and contribute to the elgg community. For more details check Athabasca Human resources listing
A couple of months ago I was honored to be asked to give the annual Ernest Boyer lecture at an all -college gathering of Empire State College– State University of New York. I had heard about Empire State for some years, as it was founded in 1971 – about the same time as the Open […]
This is the second book in the series Issues in Distance Education from Athabasca University Press. I am the series editor, and wrote the forward to this text, so obviously there is lots of room for conflict of interest (though no pecuniary gain) in this review. The book is edited and contains an introduction by […]
Larry Ragan, Director of Faculty development at Penn State’s World Campus has put his flip camcorder to good use over the past few months, cornering various ‘experts’, practitioners and generally experienced online teachers. He asked each to describe one core competency for successful online teaching. He has uploaded about 30 of these 1-3 minute videos […]
I’m sitting in the Rio airport one leg down and three to go on my way home from the Canadian-Brazil International Seminar on Distance Education, just concluded in Goianas. The seminar featured presentations and lots of questions from about 200 Brazilian delegates and Canadian DEers Heather Kanuka, Griff Richards, Elizabeth Murphy and myself. I did […]
I feel less engaged in shameless self-promotion, with this announcement of the 9.3 issue of the International Review of Research on Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), as Jon Baggaley was the editor in charge of this fine issue. The issue features a video as well as text editorial by Jon, neither of which should be […]
My friend Jon Dron has finally nailed his own (and no doubt others) ideas about the collective nature of Wikipedia. His recent post notes: the individual actions that create most of the articles, the groups of administrative types who manage the overall infrastructure and set in place the algorithms that manage the look, feel and […]
Here at Athabasca University we are finally getting serious about ELGG and bringing our instance (Me2U) inside the single signon set of apps we provide to all staff and students (portal, library, Moodle, etc.). This means all new login names and thus all data from the old version is lost (sigh…..) It is annoying having […]
