Lit Review Twitter Essay

This is the sort of thing that might otherwise be relegated to an aggregated Storify or series of screenshots. But as this afternoon’s series of Tweets was intended to partially sketch out the main ideas in what will be a much larger – Master’s thesis-sized – work, expanding on some of these points seems well-suited […]

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The HS Music MOOC

While it hasn’t blossomed with a wealth of open online participation (yet…?) this semester, the blended and open structure of #introguitar – as well as the new site design and digs courtesy of Alan Levine‘s WordPress blessings – has created an anthology of learning about guitar for both my own block of Introduction to Guitar, […]

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Learning on (and of) the Web

“…ds106 is not just ‘on’ the web—it is ‘of’ the web.” Alan Levine The advent of the web enables a type of individual inquiry and collective synthesis that makes new experiments in constructivism possible. But creating the conditions for such epistemological emergence can be a challenging possibility to consider. As Osberg and Biesta note, “…if […]

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Pedagogy for the Oppressor: Cease to do Evil, then Learn to do Good

In an essay collected in Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, Derek Rasmussen introduces Paulo Freire and those who would introduce his critical praxis to victims of oppression in foreign countries as “rescuers” attempting “to ameliorate the conditions of the oppressed.” This is, Rasmussen admits, “certainly a worthy aim.” However, the blind spot in this well-intentioned […]

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An Open Learning Project

Each spring the TALONS undertake an In-Depth Study, a five month “passion project” wherein they are asked to document their growth and learning toward personalized goals in learning a skill or craft. There are two universal goals for the In-Depth Study: 1. Know something about everything and everything about something. In school you are usually […]

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Identifying a Research Problem

Identifying a research problem consists of specifying an issue to study, developing a justification for studying it, and suggesting the importance of the study for select audiences that will read the report.  John W. Creswell While it acknowledges that “Participating in elections is the essential starting point of any democratic system,” Elections Canada’s own working paper […]

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Reclaim TALONS

While I attempted to introduce the new academic year in a blog post that wound up meandering into too many of my thoughts and feelings on the culmination of BC teachers’ recent strike action, here I intend to share my initial guiding interests and projects setting out into the 2014-15 school year. As I alluded […]

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This year’s new Dylan: Design Thinking

I’ve quoted D’Arcy Norman’s MSc thesis here before. However, newly immersed in the introductory strides of Design Thinking, courtesy of UVic and #TieGrad’s EDCI 335 course, I think the following bears on our emerging discussions: …educational technology can be prone to cycles of hype and fetishism, where new tools and applications are rapidly adopted by individuals who are […]

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