Multilitteratus Incognitus

...Schoool's out...until January... OK, OK,... maybe my take on Alice Cooper's "School's Out" isn't as catchy...but it is indicative of the situation right now :-)  EDDE 803 is over, and I am waiting for EDDE 804 to begin.  Well, technically the course is over tomorrow, however all assignments are done and submitted, and I am not in maintenance mode  in the forums. The final assignment was really a reflection on the internship, what I got out of it, what things that I learned in the course I applied, and what I foresee applying to my own professional practice. As I wrote in my reflection, both for the course and for the internship, I wasn't really sure what I was going to get out of it that I didn't already (somewhat) know when I came into the course.  My background is in instrucitonal design, and I have been teaching for a few years.  It's not that I think I'm perfect and that I can't improve, but sometimes you don't know wha...

Well, semester is almost over!  I think that I only have about 10 more days left in my 3rd EdD semester.  There must be a punchline joke here, but I am not finding it at the moment ;-)  Need some more sleep! That said, for the third assignment I decided to tackle a topic that I was fairly familiar with - connectivism.  My buddy for this assignment and I worked together to put together this NPR-style interview introducing connectivism to the class, and to other people.  We had both read about connectivism before, and had a variety of articles cross our desks over the past few years, both the in the EdD program, but also through various cMOOCs I had taken.  It was just a matter of collecting the info and determining the appropriate presentation. We both wanted to get some sort of OER out of this, so if people wanted to use the product they could.  That said, we did try other types of OER makers, the free type that allow you to create self-paced eLea...

One of the presentations this week in EDDE 803 was from a fellow classmate that talked a bit about simulations.  In the ensuing discussion I was reminded of a course I took as part of my MBA which used simulations.  I thought that this would be a worthwhile post for here (as well as class) - at the very least it's one chronicle of my learning journey prior to the EdD. Queue flashback visuals and music When I was doing my MBA, one of my courses was a supply chain management course (fun with math and probability). One of the course activities was for us to break up into groups of 4 (so we had 4-5 groups in the course) and we were manager of a widget making factory. We needed to pick production size, route to retail, and predict demand (given certain finite factors) in different stores. The goals was (of course) to maximize profit. The game sort of looked like SimCity - sort of-, so for some of us it was also a bit of nostalgia (having grown up with that game). The game...

It feels like it's been a long time since I've written here.  Well, still here, still alive, still cracking away at those books, and articles, and assignments for 803.  Initially, before this course started,I thought it would be a walk in the park given my background in instructional design.  Maybe that was my error.  While, content-wise, it is a walk in the park (given my background) I think I swung the pnedulum a little too hard in the other direction looking to make this course more challenging for me. So for one of my big assigments I picked gamification as a topic - a topic I knew a little something about thanks to two xMOOCs I completed.  However, instead of resting on my laurels and using what I had learned in those MOOCs, I decided to try and read at least 5 of my (unread) books on gamification and games in the classroom (self-imposed goal) to gain some greater understanding on the topic before I wrote about it. In the end, a lot of what I picked up...

Well, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I get a lot of energy from seeing students in 620 participating the forums! That said, I am feeling pretty tired! I don't know it it's just "hump-week"  - you know, that week in the middle of the semester when you feel that you are climbing a steep hill and you just want to sit down, but you gotta keep moving - or just that I really need a vacation (or this damned cold that doesn't want to go... ) :-).  Either way, I hope that once the current project is done that I will feel like I am on a skateboard rolling down hill to the finish line - i.e. lots of fun, and a rush, and not ...

Time seems to be on fast forward these days.  Either that or I have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them in.  When did week 5 just end?  Time flies when you're having fun, and when you have a ton of your plate I guess.  The past couple of weeks on EDDE 803 have been relatively 'quiet'.  We haven't had discussion forums, and our live session was cancelled due to unforeseen events.  The internship is fast and furious with a lot of discussion forum posts, and I assume that the short gradeable assignments will start to come in at some point soon in that course. In the internship I actually ended up partly grading the first of the papers that came in. I grade it first, and the instructor of record looks it over does the final actual grading, this way the learner gets feedback and I get feedback as well. Since I've been teaching for a few years I am approaching this as an opportunity for peer review, so I am approaching my role as an intern...

If I think about it long enough... I would say that rubber has met the road, with week 2 of EDDE803 almost over. People have started being active in the course forums, interesting perspectives and illustrative stories are shared and discussed, and projects are in progress! This semester we are joined by two members of Cohort 6, who I think will be added to our cohort, and thus adding to the diversity of our small EdD group. Metacognition and reflection seem to be big in this course, so as inspiration strikes I think I will keep some notes and thoughts as blog posts, in addition to whatever I keep in evernote. They might come in handy at the end of the semester. 803 Ponderings and News The first assignment has us going into teams to develop a competency profile for a distance education instructor.  Once our teams develop a competency profile, we collaborate with other teams to develop one of the entire course.  This seems to be part delphi process, part a way to be m...

I think  my interactions with Autumm in virtual connecting made me want to create  a little trailer with dramatized highlights from my doctoral studies thus far.  Alas, no budget for extras, scripts, sets, and green screens, so I guess I'll leave it to plain text for now ;-) This week marks the beginning of my second year at Athabasca's EdD program (survived year 1!), and I just began EDDE 803: Teaching and Learning in Distance Education . At the risk of sounding like an overachiever, when I received my textbooks for in June I ended up reading through them while I had some free time in the summer.  Luckily (it seems) that the bulk of the reading for EDDE803 is those two textbooks, so (with any luck) I won't be buried under a ton of additional articles to read.  This course seems to focus a lot on distance education teaching and instructional design, both areas that I am familiar with already due to my background in instructional design and my own teaching ...

This month I decided that it was high time I started preparing for the fall semester.  Sure, my third class  - EDDE803 -(and third semester) of my EdD program is 2 months away, however since I have the books (thank you Athabasca for planning ahead! :-) ), why not start now that I am a little more relaxed?  The first book that I just finished is by Diana Laurillard Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology . This book was on my to-read list on Goodread for a while, so I am quite happy to finally get an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The book makes, in my mind, a valid point that teaching should be approached from a design science perspective, implementing, analyzing, tweaking, analyzing some more, tweaking again, and so on. As I was reading this book I was thinking back to the process of instructional design. Instructional design is iterative in nature and there are many elements of this book (if not all of...