classroom

Some rough notes of some ideas I hope to work on, potentially as part of my PhD program. My Masters degree thesis was based on the use of social network and discourse analysis in an online course to attempt to understand the differences in student activity and interactions in two different online platforms and course designs. Tools like Gephi and NodeXL are available to anyone teaching online, to feed the data (system-generated activity logs, raw discussion text, twitter hashtags, search queries etc. [Read More]

UCalgary made the national news, with this segment titled "Calgary professor bans modern technology in his classroom" ((although it's clear that the professor is a woman, so whoever titles segments at Global National obviously doesn't watch the segments, and has a strong sexist bias when it comes to professors, who are certainly all men of course)). I really don't know what to say about this. My gut reaction is something like " [Read More]

...a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1993. pg 138

My copy of Will's book "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" just came in. Looks like it's going to be a pretty good read, providing the perspective of an in-the-trenches teacher, rather than just the geek echochamber I usually expose myself to... The book is definitely on top of my nonfiction reading list (my fiction reading, on the bus ride commute, is currently another Gregory Benford book I'm deliberately reading out of sequence. [Read More]