Skip to content

Category Archives: learning

Open, connected and social learning: a call for participants

Alec Couros and I are in the midst of putting together a course for the University of Regina. Officially, the course number and name is EC&I 831: Computers in the Classroom: Appropriate Curriculum and Instruction Related to Computer Technology but Alec and I are referring to it as Open, Connected and Social Pedagogy. We’ll be [...]

Lockdown and Firefox Portable

{begin sarcasm}Oh how I do love the lockdown on my ability to customize my account with our new Windows computer system at my school. I’m so happy that the IT folks are preventing me and my students from doing useful things that might interfere with their ability to manage the system. We wouldn’t want students’ [...]

Online learning and horses with snorkels

Working on two online course projects has given me the impetus to take a look back at some of the things I learned and some of the work that I did while working on my M.Ed. I think I have learned a few things about online learning and instructional design. One of the constant themes [...]

Endings, beginnings, renewal

I’ve been mostly neglecting this blog for a while. Sorry about that, but it has been a season of endings, beginnings and renewals. First – some endings. I suppose the biggest ending has been the conclusion of my M.Ed. I don’t have the official piece of paper in front of me conferring that esteemed title [...]

Learning tools, not teaching tools

I’ve been reading a few blog posts from the Building Learning Communities conference, mostly from Dean, but Will’s post Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning? hit on a topic that I’ve been trying to gain some perspective on for a while. We have a lot of terrific free [...]

What you really need to learn – some thoughts

I’m letting myself take a distraction break from marking and entering numbers into the grading program (Good old numbers … what would school be like without them?). In OLDaily Stephen has posted about his presentation “What you really need to learn“. Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the audio. Here’s a tasty little morsel from [...]

Alas, no Twitter

I am sitting in a mind-numbing meeting. I was planning on Twittering to make my way through the morning. Sadly, Twitter seems to be ignoring me. What to do, what to do … I understand why students spend their time in classing texting each other instead of listening. Hey, there is a “Write Tweet” tab [...]

Seymour Papert injured in motorcycle accident

I’ve just read this post from Andy Carvin about Seymour Papert – Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: Prayers for Seymour Papert. Seymour Papert was hit by a motorcycle and “gravely injured” while in Hanoi for a conference. According to a report at boston.com, the accident on Tuesday left Papert, 78, in a coma. An e-mail [...]

A guide to writing essays

I’ve shared this link with my students, but neglected to put it here for everyone else to see. Stephen Downes has put together a guide to writing essays. II recall many teachers and instructors in high school and university explaining in many different ways how to write an essay – this simple, common sense guide [...]

Presentation Screencast: Personal Learning Environments – Live at Edinburgh

Graham Atwell has published a screencast of his presentation Personal Learning Environments – Live at Edinburgh. There’s just so much I like about his presentation, but two main ideas stand out in my mind: A personalized learning environment is not an application. It is a suite of services which could be, I suppose, web based [...]