C-Map after weeks 1 and 2

Yes, I realize this is near the end of week 3 of the connectivism course, but I’ve fallen a little behind. Still, I want to make an effort to keep up with the course and its assignments and activities, so here is what my concept map looks like after completing the readings for weeks [...]

Appy Trails

The Google Apps bus came to Charlottesville yesterday and I was there!
For more information about the Appy Trail, you can go to the official site.

Dino Maniacs and Social Objects

Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an  online course about Instructional Technology for an audience of pre-service teachers at Brigham Young University.  I’ve taught the face to face version of the course twice before and have been interested to see how this couse would unfold.  Instead of a traditional course management system, I’ve [...]

Focused Conversations for Schools

The Art of Focused Conversation for Schools describes a questioning method for facilitating classroom (or faculty meeting) discussions.  I found the book pretty light-weight. It only takes a few pages to describe the method, which revolves around four levels of questioning: objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional.  Most of the book’s pages provide detailed templates of [...]

Educational uses of wikis

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
Jude Higdon in an article entitled “Teaching, Learning, and Other Uses for Wikis in Academia” defined wikis as websites that are “fully editable from a Web browser.”  Higdon intentionally omits any mention of multiple authors from his this definition.  Higdon argues that the “egalitarianism of the tool” was not the [...]

Becoming part of Wikipedia

David Wiley suggested that my New Media classmates and I try improving a Wikipedia article.  At first I couldn’t think of a topic that I wanted to write about that would be appropriate for an entry in an encyclopedia (I like being able to insert my own opinion).  After some thought, I decided to see [...]

Learning Networks

During the winter semester of this year, I took a course on distance education and discovered Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning On-Line by by Linda Harasim, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lucio Teles, and Murray Turoff.  I finally finished reading the book earlier this month.
I was excited by the title, “Learning Networks”.  [...]

Student Conferences using Skype

Image via Wikipedia
This past week I held Skype calls with 14 out of 16 of the students enrolled in my online “Teaching with Technology” course.  I have two more scheduled for next week.  I wanted to have a video call over Skype with each student early in the course for several reasons.

Since I grade [...]

Survival Strategies

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
Taking a course on New Media, Social Media, and Learning means sifting through a lot of information. Simultaneously participating in a distance education course with nearly 2,000 participants means sifting through a lot more information.
To cope with the flow of information, I’ve subscribed to the RSS feeds of the [...]

What is connectivism?

Image via Wikipedia
The first week’s topic in the Connectivism course was “What is connectivism?”.  To help us answer this question, George Siemens and Stephen Downes provided us with some readings and asked us to record our reflections on our blog.  If you are curious, these were the readings:

Little Boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism (.pdf)
What [...]