Knowledge Networks

This week, I came across a blog post from Tony Bates where he poses the question: does technology change the nature of knowledge? As usual, Tony’s brilliant yet practical observations drew me in and once I read Stephen Downes’ comment in response, I was hooked.
Rather than making a feeble attempt to re-state the arguments each [...]

Brainstorming or bust

In this case….bust! A couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel to discuss information and digital literacy and share some examples of resources we are developing in the Office of Learning Technology. In preparation for the panel, my colleague Trish Rossel and I tried to collaborate on a Prezi – [...]

Community and temporal gatherings

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while now – finally have a few moments to get something down.
A couple of months ago, my neighbor (Bill Jeffries) who also happens to curate the SFU Art Gallery organized a gathering of neighbors for a showing of some sort (having something to do with art, [...]

Things I learned at opened09…

Brian Lamb, Scott Leslie and collaborators pulled off a fab Opened09 Conference in Vancouver!  Not only were many presenters engaging and thought provoking but participants held up the true spirit of “open” in their contributions to the conference.
On the downside – the “boys club” was supercharged and came across (at times) as exclusionary – which [...]

Learners and PLE’s

I’ve been reflecting on a panel I facilitated last week at the 2009 Canadian eLearning Conference.  Three UBC learners (Andre, Angeli and Zack) talked about their concepts of PLE – what they think is important and what they think about the relationship between learning, university and their own personal goals and explorations.
Here are some of [...]

Digital Tattoo: What’s Yours?

Digital Tattoo: What’s Yours? I’m really happy to say that I had a hand in the learning design for this project and it’s near completion now.  It’s a self-guided tutorial, built in WordPress with a focus on digital literacy (at least a beginning).  And the work of the students on this project was nothing short [...]

Fellini’s wind

Italian artists seem to understand and embrace the living spirit, emotion and feeling in a way that seems otherworldly and completely awe-inspiring. You can see it in the carved eyes of the marble lions just as clearly as in the paintings and frescoes of some of the great masters.  Italy inspired me in many ways, [...]

Digital Literacy, Stress and Summer

What do these things have in common you ask?  It’s all about “what I did on my summer non-vacation!”.
Project 1:  Digital Tattoo:  This is basically a self-guided tutorial all about digital literacy for students.
Still a work in progress but getting close. My role was learning design and student wrangler on the web design and content [...]

Distributed Publishing Framework: a couple of ways to look at it…

My excellent colleagues and I have been mapping out a few ways to describe what is essentially a framework for authoring content that gets the most bang for the buck in terms of re-usability. If you want to know how we are leveraging the concept of embed code across blog and Mediawiki environments, Brian [...]

Will using Facebook, IM, Skype, etc. make me a better teacher?

Probably not. Though your choice of tools should probably be related to the kind of communication network you want/need to establish with your learners. For some this will be as simple as e-mail or online discussion forum in WebCT/Vista. For others, it may involve a range of instant messaging for office hours, Wimba for online [...]