Beyond The University

I think there is evidence to believe a “reflective, self-organizing, constructivist and collaborative pedagogy” is already practiced by many people organized into communities that make use of “legitimate peripheral participation.” So, to paraphrase Shirky: It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a University industry, because the core problem Universities solve — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of building knowledge and making it available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Not your father’s Portfolio

Understanding an ePortfolio should not focus on the technical survival of a specific thing at a specific URL. Thinking about a specific collection of artifacts in a specific system at the specific URL is too narrow a focus for our understanding of an ePortfolio. An electronic portfolio is both more durable and more tenuous than its paper predecessor. Its also more powerful. Its not a thing or a place, its a practice.

Crowd-sourcing feedback

David Eubanks commented on our recent Harvesting Feedback demo. I’ll save replying about inter-rater reliability to focus now on his suggestion of using Mechanical Turk and the very insightful comment about the end of “enclosed garden” portfolios. I think David correctly infers that Mechanical Turk is a potential mechanism to crowd-source the Harvesting Feedback process [...]

Harvesting feedback on a course assignment

This post demonstrates harvesting rubric-based feedback in a course, and how the feedback can be used by instructors and programs, as well as students. It is being prepared for a Webinar hosted by the TLT group. (Update 7/28: Webinar archive here. Minutes 16-36 are our portion. Minutes 24-31 are music while participants work on the [...]

Blackboard + Angel = reason for open learning

In response to the Wired Campus article about Blackboard’s acquisition of Angel Learning,  Scott Leslie commented about moving beyond the LMS to networked learning options. His comment led me to this 2005 post where he saw the social software light and a later post looking for help making the case for “fully open” content. I [...]