Ponderings about teaching, learning, instructional design, edtech, and academia 🧐. I've got no answers, just lot's of questions😎
XKCD 1403 It's hard to believe, but five years have passed since the successful defense of my dissertation. Where does the time go? My defense was on July 7, my final accepted manuscript was published on August 11th . I guess that's my pubaversary? 🤔 The degree was ultimately conferred in October, given university timelines, so I guess I also have a degreeaversy coming up😂. Anyway, I count July…
When I first started teaching graduate courses back in 2012 (wow...time flies), my hallmark course was titled The Design and Instruction of Online Courses . Most of my students were folks who were learning to be instructional designers, or faculty who wanted to learn to teach online and had some years of teaching in person under their belt. One of the most common things I heard in that class was…
It's been about five years since I defended my dissertation (oh my! How time does fly!), and I caught myself thinking about my evolving relationship with academic writing. While I've been somewhat active over the past few years, I also find that I'm a lot less interested in producing academic/journal writing as a genre of writing. And, when I want to engage in such an activity, 'going at it alone'…
High School Hallway by Matt Dempsey CC BY-SA "You don't know what you're consuming!*" It's a loose translation of what my grandmother used to say to me when I refused to eat something 'exotic' (in my view) that she had cooked, like rabbit stew or cuttlefish. My sophomoric response was "I know exactly what I'm eating" since I didn't want to even try what she'd cooked. I suspect that Grandma meant…
I didn't realize it, but here is my 1,000th post on this blog 🙃. I've been going back to my drafts folder to see what I saved over the years to comment. Most things I just deleted because I didn't have an interest in commenting on those topics any longer. Most were pre-pandemic, and things that seemed interesting while I was working on my dissertation proposal. Others were going to be reflections…
When it comes to reading trade magazines, I tend to have an on-again, off-again relationship. I think that I am now in the "on-again" part of that relationship with TD Magazine. In a recent(ish) issue of TD, I came across an article titled " Prompting is the problem ," which piqued my interest (edit: archive link didn't work - saving placeholder in case I find a solution). I think there are pros…
Old Timey School House ( Lego version ) I came across a post on LinkedIn the other daaaay (read this in a Letterkenny cadence, if you know what that is 😆 ). Here's a direct link to that post if you'd like to engage with it and its author . Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to get my mojo back when it comes to discussing issues like this. For a brief time, we had MOOCs (well, cMOOCs)…
Last fall, I got to design and teach a course that I've been wanting to teach for a very long time : Language Learning and Technology (or, in other words, Computer-Assisted Language Learning - if you are in the language education field). It was a lot of fun to design, and a good experience to teach. I really enjoy design work (even though I don't get to do it often), and it's been ages since I…
It's the winter break, and now that I have some actual downtime, I decided to do some Microsoft training. I think the last time I had the mental space to do any of this on the Microsoft Education was sometime in 2021 (if the last badge earned is any indication). Anyway, I went through the course offerings to see what's on tap at Microsoft, and I came upon a whole load of AI-related things. Cool.…
Academic AI-Slop (ChatGPT Produced) Happy end of the semester, and almost the end of the calendar year! Alright, I'll own up to it. The title of this post probably doesn't hit the mark ;-) One more calendar year is in the can, and for me, it was a year of (potential) endings, a year of (potentially) new beginnings, and a year where things changed much more so than I expected in my teaching…
A great number of years ago, I was part of an edtech team tasked with evaluating learning management systems to move to after WebCT was essentially EoL'd by Blackboard. Long story short, despite our recommendations, management went with Blackboard, which I guess now is classed "Classic," and it too has been EoL'd. I wasn't a big fan of Classic, but it worked fine for what we needed it to. When the…
This semester, I am helping co-facilitate a course somewhere new. More details of that in the future (maybe), but for the time being, I wanted to reflect a bit on technology use. Since this is a new institution for me, I have to click on the technology acceptance pop-ups, see policy dialog boxes that I no longer see at my institution, and so on. One of the assignments I am grading this term…
A few weeks ago, I saw this posted on a friend's social media feed, and the response was also repeating the "oh wow! I would have never thought of doing this! This is so nifty! Well... my first thought, knowing how ChatGPT works, is that this is a complete bunch of bullshit, and I immediately jettisoned this idiocy from my brain. Over the last few days, I've been thinking that I really should try…
Well, it's been a hot minute since I last jotted down some thoughts. Don't worry. blog, it's not you, it's me 😂. I also have a daily meditation/reflection journal that I used to jot things down in, even though sometimes it was "Doogie Houser style," that only gets an entry twice or thirce a week. Gotta take a step back and do some more reflecting. On the plus side, the weather is finally nice…
ChatGPT Patch of the Wise Owl Recently, I've been playing around with image generation in ChatGPT, not so much to create output that I plan on using seriously for something (although some output do end up on this blog as post images), but more to see how easy (or hard) it is to get something from my mind's eye into some kind of machine output. I am also curious to see how the LLM interprets what I…
Happy Friday, to all! This past week - well, even a few weeks before that, if we're really counting - I've been contemplating my academic work. Part of it is because I am working on one collaboration with some really awesome folks, and reading proofs for another collab from last summer (that should be published later this year). However, it's worth noting that all of these academic pursuits are…
A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it... Annnyyywhoooo🙄 The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly…
I came across Sarah's post on blogging questions (which I think was something started on the Reclaim Discord, so I thought I'd jump in. I was a bonus opportunity to post this Super Simple Badge , which I also created a while back, but didn't have a place to put it that made sense ;-) I guess this is a "tag you're it" sort of thing that I am just butting into. Why did you start blogging in the…
Alright...alright... bad pun 😅 But to be fair, CALL (computer-assisted language learning) does lend itself to some bad puns... And that's before I even get into other acronyms like TELL and MALL😹. I promise to spare students the dad jokes in the fall😅 Anyway, last week I decided to answer my pondering as to what my course redesign should cover, and I settled on designing an Introduction to CALL…
New Year, New Projects! I am taking this spring term off from teaching, partly to re-energize my batteries which have been rather low on account that I've been going full speed (🚌) since 2018; the pandemic didn't help because teaching increased around that time (not that I am complaining, the cosmos provided something I needed at the time). Another reason for the break is partly to work on a new…
With the US elections now settled, and a second Trump term being a reality, I guess many (most?) of the remaining hold outs on Twitter are finally migrating. I decided to keep my personal account, for now, and just promote pro-union, pro-education, pro-left, and anti-war messages, while posting my regular content on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I am also in the process of shutting down my…
All right! With all that pondering and throat-clearing done (see my previous series of posts), I was wondering what piques my interest in this LLM-hyped world from a practical side . I've been somewhat active in critiquing this whole thing over the past two years, but beyond creating AI images for the blog (or to amuse myself), or using ChatGPT to make silly little genre-busting poems (again…
Part VI of my ponderings on all the things and wayfinding in academia. This is the last part of this series - at least for now. I don't know. I think it's time to move from retrospection to some kind of next phase 🤓 Anyway, I saved the most controversial topic for last hahaha 😂 OK, so before I get the rotten tomatoes🍅🪰, hear me out!😅 I am a big proponent of lifelong learning. In fact, I joke,…
Miseristhenes the Socialmediaite This is part V of my all the things(!!!) blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional hobbies. In this post, I turn my attention to social media! The topic that connects us, and divides us, and has gotten the "it's complicated" label since Elon Musk…
This is part IV of my all the things(!!!) blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional hobbies. Yes...yes... I know that Kondo is no longer Kondoing and has given up the practice, but I am aiming for the gives you joy part. This particular post tackles teaching, a topic, and an…