Day: November 30, 2011

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A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses | Kop | The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041/2025

This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning through the active creation of resources and learning places by both learners and course facilitators. This pedagogy is based on the building of connections, collaborations, and the exchange of resources between people, the building of a community of learners, and the harnessing of information flows on networks. This resonates with the notion of emergent learning as learning in which actors and system co-evolve within a MOOC and where the level of presence of actors on the MOOC influences learning outcomes.

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What Is Publishing? A Report from THATCamp Publishing – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/what-is-publishing-a-report-from-thatcamp-publishing/37420

THATCamp Publishing provided a forum for three stakeholders in this changing industry: traditional academic publishers, libraries-as-publishers, and faculty. While traditional publishers are interested in the bottom line, libraries-as-publishers are focused on the problem of access. Faculty, on the other hand, are concerned with how their publications will lead to promotion, tenure, and the advancement of knowledge. THATCamp Publishing highlighted how the evaporation of funding for scholarly publishing and the rise of the Internet as a low-cost, easy-access means of dissemination are radically changing the nature of this industry, and the inter-relationships of these three stakeholders.

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Do You Need an Email Sabbatical?

We all need time off. Like serious time off. Time when we feel like we’re able to truly rejuvenate without the little panicked voice chirping away in the back of our heads fretting about the backlog of things we are going to have to deal with when we come in. Information overload can be a very taxing issue for many people. Luckily, many services allow us to go zen without making us feel guilty. Most of us can scan Twitter without obsessing over all that we missed. And there’s simply too many blogs to think about all that we haven’t read. Unfortunately, email is the one app that we feel guilty about turning off. Why? Cuz the interface is designed to put you on a hamster wheel, rarely ever succeeding at letting you reach empty. You feel accomplished when you get to inbox zero. And then you sleep and it’s all back to haunt you. For this reason, I recommend taking an email sabbatical.

danah boyd  – How to Take an Email Sabbatical

This article lays out danah boyd’s excellent plan for getting away from your email and recharging your batteries. It is the sort of thing we should all probably do more often than we do.