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 […]
Note: What follows is a 6 page account of the 24 days that Susan and I spent as tourists in Italy in April 2017. Hopefully it can be used by ourselves to recall those names and dates we too easily forget and for others to help plan similar vacations. Introduction: Despite the numerous personal and […]
Sorry, but I couldn’t resist spoofing, in the post title, the unfortunate sound of the acronym for the “new” model proposed in this article. Now, I’ve got it out of the way and can only suggest that if this “divergent fork of the Community of Inquiry model” is to survive, it needs a new English […]
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 […]
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 […]
Unlike most of our voyages, this month I was accompanying my wife Susan on a trip to her conference. She registered in the 16 European Symposium on Suicide Prevention that took place this month in Oviedo, Spain. We took the opportunity to rent a car and bought a GPS with European maps (thank god!) and travelled […]
My Little Free Library celebrated its birthday with a party for its patrons on Saturday. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t terrific, but the rain held off long enough for cake, music and wine! The only challenge is that the party goers each bought books and the Library is already FULL! I had to open Riverdale Little Free […]
The good news is that Stephen Downes has posted the full text from a chapter he wrote for New Models of Open and Distance Learning in Open Education: from OERs to MOOCs, Editors: Mohamed Jemni, Kinshuk, Mohamed Koutheair Khribi, 2016. This is good news for two reasons – the first is that the full Springer book […]
Susan and I were really pleased to host a fine evening of music last evening here in Riverdale. Our neighbour Cam Neufeld is touring this summer with Jez Hellard & The Djukella Orchestra (Jez and bassist Nye Parsons). Jez and Nye are from the UK and royally entertained us with a rich collection of origional and traditional tunes. […]
