The creative potential of hand-crafted learning

In which I might be onto something, and in which I make an initial stab at trying to pin it down.
I’ve been journeying rather far from home for quite some time to explore a strange but compelling land where “learning” and “technology” and “education” and “change”… and people… seem to converge.
I travel with biases. We [...]

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CCK09: Considerations of Aggregate “Openness”

In which I recognize the irony of benefiting from openness on one front while still questioning its implications on another.
The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge ‘09 forum is currently working through a conversation on the concept of openness.  Since, as usual, my thoughts require lengthy text, I’m posting here.
The question at hand: Does the fear of [...]

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A totally unconventional approach to tackling connectivism

In which educationalists should feel free to roll their eyes….
CCK09: Guilty as charged– lurking. It’s a factor of time, schedule, and attention, but also perhaps one of sloth. While writing for academic and literary purposes needs to be approached as regularly as any serious work  (a friend compares it to laying pipe), writing about something [...]

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Unstable ground

It is, on one hand, a small thing in an otherwise farsighted interview response, but it did give me pause upon an initial reading. The utterance of concern:
Pre-constructed models like courses are useful for fields where information is somewhat stable. History, for example, hasn’t changed significantly (other than our interpretation of it). The heroes of [...]

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Learning around the corners

We learned last week that the Four Corners Monument  isn’t quite at the four corners of the southwestern states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. (The site is also known as marking the convergence of six governments, including the Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.)  The early surveyors, using some pretty basic technology [...]

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Live bodies

In which it is quiet on the blog, but I speak in public. 
In early February I had the opportunity to talk to and with a few K-12 teachers about the potential of open education resources and personal learning environments. It was a sizable conference, with an attendance of about ten for my particular session, and [...]

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A semiotic interlude

Once upon a time, I went off to Austria as an exchange student. Having limited travel experience, it seemed a pretty big leap. Many years later, it’s clear to me that the Austrian and Minnesoto-American cultures are, in broad and relative strokes, much more similar than they are different. But as an inveterate researcher of [...]

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Terms of engagement

I’ve been doing more listening, and seeing some familiar patterns. Here are some related comments from the last few weeks (rephrased for speaker privacy):
Kids just want to know what’s on the test.
Students don’t want to think critically; they just want the answers.
When I give kids a chance to choose their projects, a lot of them [...]

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Uninspected baggage

The last time I traveled, the Transportation Security Administration managed to inspect every single bag from every single person in the family… at least according to the little cards they left behind inside the suitcases. Were they bored, or were we a suspicious lot? We’ll never know.
The thought of strangers rummaging through all those undergarments [...]

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Fig leaves and openness

Somehow, what I thought was a draft of this post got caught up in the WordPress revamp and hit the public tag feed, although it’s listed on my site as “unpublished.” Undoubtedly this is user error on my part, but it forces my hand a bit. So I’ve change the tag to “published,” and will [...]

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