Category: Reflection
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NOVA Focus Group: Initial Thoughts
On Friday I visited Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) to run an OER focus group with instructional designers and teachers. We’ll be using the data collected as part of the project’s ever-increasing dataset, but I thought it would be worth gathering some of my initial reflections here. I was a guest…
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Greetings from Stillwater, Minnesota
Greetings from Stillwater, Minnesota where Bea de los Arcos and I are at FlipCon13 – the annual conference for the Flipped Learning Network (FLN). The conference is being held at Stillwater Area High School. The Flipped Learning movement is growing at pace with over 500 physical attendees and 500 virtual…
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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known: nine surveys for OER research
Astronomer and writer Dr Carl Sagan is probably mis-credited as saying that ‘somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’, though the sentence did feature in a 1977 interview with him in Newsweek magazine. Irrespective of whether Sagan or a magazine reporter made this statement I think it’s fair to say that Carl Sagan’s research…
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'Through a glass darkly' Part 2: reflection and the agile researcher
In Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus (173-174), Socrates talks about the philosopher whose mind is not in the city, where his body is, but is instead ‘in the heights above the heaven’, far away from ‘what lies near at hand’. Socrates’ observation on the dynamic between the real world and the world of philosophical…
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An Agile Hypothesis Sprint: what do we know about learner performance?
The structure for the research for OER Reserach Hub is built around 11 hypotheses that we are testing through our work with collaborating organisations, fellowships and background studies. We are now at a stage where the collaborations are well underway and surveys are producing data and we want to bring…
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#oer13 liveblog – Policy Recommendations
Darco Jansen (Programme manager, EADTU) spoke about policies affecting OER use in higher education, questioning whether higher education has ever really changed that much in response to policy innovation. The full title of his talk: “Policy recommendations in the transition to open and online education: business models, policy incentives and…
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Critiques of Open Education
I’m at #oer13 today and tomorrow and I’ve been doing a bit of live-blogging and monitoring Twitter activity. A pretty interesting resource just cam around on Twitter and I thought I should share it here for the benefit of the rest of the team… To defend, sustain, develop Open Education,…
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About flipped learning
Picture this: you are a Chemistry teacher in a school in Colorado; it’s Friday and you give kids a test; some kid fails, what do you do on Monday? You move on –“I’m sorry kid, I hope you can figure it out between now and the next test”. It sounds…