This is my second and final post on my winter-buster visit to Open Universidat Aberta in Portugal and my visit last week to the University of South Africa (UniSA). Although I have been to South Africa before I had never had the opportunity to visit the world’s oldest distance education university! Unisa is HUGE – […]
Reflections from Lisbon, 2019
Life is full or irony. I’m reflecting on a number of these ironies here on my last night in Lisbon. I’m also posting this on both my blog and Facebook and Twitter for a number a number of reasons I note below. It has been three years since I retired from active life as a […]
Seven Editors Best Picks
From the special issues of Distance et Médiations des Savoirs -Sous la direction de Martine Vidal This post is designed first to celebrate this multi-journal innovative and cost effective means to enhance Distance Education (DE) scholarship. Secondly, I provide a very brief overview and annotation of each of the 7 articles in the special issue. […]
Hiking the Austrian Alps with the Bros
The pack is loaded, done with 3 weeks of walking the Edmonton River Valley daily, wondering what else I should be worried about and then the plane takes off and away you go. Thus, this 10 day hike in the Alps begins with my older brother and hike leader Dennis (71), and younger twin brothers […]
Just about North Country Fair time.
I am getting pretty exited about the summer solstice and the 40th ANNUAL North Country Fair. The North Country Fair is celebrated along the shores of the Lesser Slave Lake – the largest lake in Alberta. I moved there in 1971 with 6 dear friends and a $600 investment to be a “one seventh equal and […]
New Book from AUPress – An Online Doctor
I was pleased to receive in the post a hard copy of a new book in the Issues in Distance Education book series, for which I continue to serve as the series editor. Now of course you can read all of the books in this series as they are available for download under Creative Commons […]
Qualitative Research Rebooted 2018
For the past two months, I’ve been occupied with a qualitative study of teachers’ use of digital technology in Alberta Schools. The study is sponsored by the Alberta Teachers’ Association. It has been very useful for me to get down to actually doing a full scale qualitative study after years of teaching grad students research […]
More on Distance Education Journal Ranki...
Both academics and administrators love to argue about the value (impact) of their academic work. The old adage of “Publish or Perish” still has currency. Despite the many distribution opportunities besides and beyond publishing in scholarly journals, the bean counters (myself included) love citation indexes. The basic idea is that the more your work is […]
Our Guatemalan Adventure
Our long time friends Ted and Joanne Koopmans invited us to come along and house-sit a house that a friend of theirs had made available for 4 weeks in February. The prospect (and reality) of -30 weather in Edmonton in February, was but one reason we accepted their invitation. We also hoped we would learn […]
Finished building my 2nd hammer dulcimer
Although I’m still quite liking the current dulcimer I am playing that I bought off Ebay, I was curious how much time and effort is required to build one from a kit. As a previous post notes, I crafted a 16/15 dulcimer from ‘scratch’ a couple of years ago, but found that although it sounds […]