A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins.  Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like.  While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things.  One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14)

So, the other day I was at the NERCOMP annual conference.  I heard a few people speak (cool stuff), and I also got an opportunity to chat with people, and be a nosy eavesdropper on other people's conversations.   One of the things that came up, as has come up elsewhere in the past three or so years, has been the concept of MOOCs as OER and MOOCs as OCW.  We've actually seen this

Back at the end of 2011 I started collecting research on MOOCs, pieces from Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle, "news items" from other popular media outlets (like wired.com and forbes) as well as blog posts from certain notable people who commented a lot on the subject of MOOCs.  The idea was to spend a year (2011 to end of 2012) and see not only what the research says, but also what the sentiment

Just before the spring semester starts and I start getting really busy with the day-job, teaching my class, working on a couple of conference presentations and working on the FutureLearn course on Corpus Linguistcs, and P2PU course with Dave Cormier, I thought I should really jump into a couple of Udacity course offerings to give the platform a real try out. In years past I stayed away, as a learner,

Apple's Clarus the cowdog;and his "moof" 'bark Well, it's the end of 2013 and it's been a MOOC-kinda year, so before I head off for a small break (which is probably going to involve a lot of MOOCing), I thought I should write a summative post for my year's exploits in MOOCs. 2013, other than it being the year of the Anti-MOOC (according to some) was really the year of the xMOOC for me.  I

So, we are at the end of Week 2 of #edcmooc and we are wrapping up the unit on Utopias and Dystopias, and everything in between (because thing is really that black and white). As with the week before there were some videos to watch and think about. I think that the no-lecture-videos format works well.  I like to see what people do with certain conversation starters and where they go with them.