Author: admin

“What I’ve learned” from this is complicated for me as well, and not all of it is coherent enough to put out here. I am both inspired by and concerned about the prospects of liberal learning, which makes it hard to come up with a cogent precis of where I’ve been and where we all might be headed.
But with so many partially-written posts on my dashboard I decided it was worth at least putting something out there. As you say, it’s a place to start. The real challenge ahead, to my mind is how to fulfill the charge of the collaboratives project to “build capacity and a network of faculty.” Potential abounds.Easy answers, not so much.
Thank you, Gardner for asking me to join this project. I’ve learned so much and hope to carry the experience forward to wherever the next adventure leads us. Thanks so much for your vision and leadership — it’s been absolutely essential and I’m counting on you to carry the beacon for the foreseeable future.

I hope that’s right ;-). The trick for me is to give them the space and support they need to find something they are genuinely interested in to write about. Once they are motivated by curiosity rather than the instruction to “find a topic” it usually goes well.

I understand the skepticism! And students coming from our K-12 system have not typically been encouraged or allowed to do much in the way of free range learning.
But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much motivation increases when students have more responsibility for their learning and more flexibility about which topics and interests they pursue. I do give them some guidance — the rough parameters of the topic, or some suggested readings, and I point them at high value material they might not find on their own. But I try to leave the rest of it pretty open.
I use blogging in most of my courses these days, and have found that a bit of encouragement and genuine interest on my part, combined with feedback from peers makes for posts and F2F interactions that are richer and more interesting than what I used to experience with more traditional formats.

Good question! (And I’m sorry to be so slow responding to your comment — it was stuck in the spam queue, of all places). Anyway — I think the answer might be “sometimes.” Yes, change is incremental and the process of transformation often proceeds at a moderate pace. But at times the shift is really dramatic — even if you can’t quite see what the future holds, there’s a sense that much is in the balance, that big changes are underway, and that things are moving quickly. I remember having that sense in 1989, which I experienced as a graduate student doing research in Moscow. Every day I emerged from the archive to find the world perceptibly changed, and by fall it was clear that there would be no going back. Things had shifted dramatically and in short order. I do wonder if that’ s what happening now — I’m worried about that in the political sphere, and more intrigued (but also a bit concerned) about the rise of the internet of things.

Oh, I really was not thinking about something akin to Reddit. I think I’m imagining something that hasn’t been invented yet much less groked. You would need to intuit the contours as well as the essence of those trail markers / blazes first. I’m still working on the latter. By “context sensitive” I mean specific to the user’s (let’s say my) interests and previous annotating habits (so, algorithms) AND something like the “expert writer” designation on Wikipedia for certain trails. But there would also be something still ineffable that would make locating the networked annotations one wanted more natural and intuitive.
Maybe this will come with the next “paradigm shifting wave of innovation” that will help us solve the world’s increasingly complicated problems? (Where are you Doug Engelbart?)

Thanks, Alan! Let the games begin. Also, thanks for the sweet set-up on the course hub – and Happy New Year!

Thanks, Alan! Let the games begin. Also, thanks for the sweet set-up on the course hub – and Happy New Year!

These all sound like great ideas, Chad. My students research and write their posts independently and then we work with them collaboratively online and in our F2F meetings. I bet peer mentoring, peer-reviewing activities might work well in your composition classes? Also love the idea of “thought experiments.”

These all sound like great ideas, Chad. My students research and write their posts independently and then we work with them collaboratively online and in our F2F meetings. I bet peer mentoring, peer-reviewing activities might work well in your composition classes? Also love the idea of “thought experiments.”

New comment for the new year. Time to prime the RSS pump!