Athabasca University's Digital Governance Committee recently got into a heated debate about whether and why we should support Zoom. It was a classic IT manageability vs user freedom debate and, as is often the way in such things, the suggested resolution was to strike up a workin … | Continue reading
Brilliant. The short answer is, of course, yes, and it doesn't do a bad job of it. This is conceptual art of the highest order. This is the preprint of a paper written by GPT-3 (as first author) about itself, submitted to "a well-known peer-reviewed journal in machine intelligenc … | Continue reading
Anne-Marie Scott joins a long line of weary edtech illuminati who have recently expressed sadness and disillusion about life, the universe, and, in particular, the edtech industry (she has plans to do something about that - good plans - but her weariness is palpable). One of the … | Continue reading
Not just any exams: ethics exams. These are the very accountants who are supposed to catch cheats. I guess at least they'll understand their clientele pretty well. But how did this happen? There are clues in the article: "Many of the employees interviewed during the federal inves … | Continue reading
In the convocation prayer offered by Elder Maria Campbell each year for Athabasca University graduands, she asks for blessing that their journeys be "rich, gentle, and challenging". I can't think of a more perfect wish than this. Each word transforms and deepens the other two. It … | Continue reading
icemi22 These are the slides from my invited talk at the 11th International Conference on Education and Management Innovation (ICEMI 2022), June 11th. The talk went down well – at least, I was invited to repeat the performance at a workshop (where I gave a very similar presentati … | Continue reading
Having spent a while researching the literature on ways that visual landmarks and other text enhancements (and deliberate obfuscations) affect comprehension and recall, I am a little sceptical about the underlying theory for this patented product that is based on the assumption t … | Continue reading
This is a preprint draft of a paper that has been translated by the exceptionally talented Junhong Xiao (he always gives the best and fastest feedback I’ve ever received on any of my work, and he does the translations) for publication in a forthcoming (likely August) edition of t … | Continue reading
This is the second of two chapters by Terry Anderson and me (the other being on the topic of pedagogical paradigms, that I shared a week or two ago) from Springer's Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education.The 'paradigms' chapter more or less wrote itself - we've churned … | Continue reading
This is a chapter by me and Terry Anderson for Springer's new Handbook of Open, Distance, and Digital Education that updates and refines our popular (1658 citations, and still rising, for the original paper alone) but now long-in-the-tooth 'three generations' model of distance le … | Continue reading