Category: Uncategorized

Being a graduate student in the all-but-dissertation (ABD) stage is stressful, but not without its joys, for I have time to listen and learn from other scholars presenting their research. For instance, I really enjoyed connecting to KMDI’s live ePresence webcast of John Willinsky’s talk, The Access Principle: The New Economies of Knowledge as a…

In CTL1608 this week, we’ve been discussing design principles for online environments, and it’s great to have Jim Hewitt as a guest because we’re reading a couple of his papers. I read these papers last year, but really appreciated getting his expansion on the earlier findings on “Why Threads Die,” as it helps me better…

I was pretty excited when I logged in today after Easter weekend away from the computer and saw that Wendy and Laura had commented on a couple of my blog entries. Wendy pointed to the importance of aggregators in creating community using blogs, and I agree that aggregators certainly help, but they might comprise just…

In More on multiple communities, I worried about extreme right-wing groups forming networks, and actually found an article about this by Luca Tateo in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (JCMC). On a more positive note, check out the other interesting JCMC articles at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/ .One is about how teens explore their identity in blogs…

Wendy showed me the affordances of Bloglines for aggregating weblogs in November 2004, but hadn’t taken the time to actually take advantage of it myself. Partly, was waiting for Brian to construct the GRAIL aggregator, but these kinds of technological projects always take much longer than one hopes! More recently, I read about how Laura…

I’m about two hours commute from OISE, and I haven’t made the trek into campus this week because it’s spring break, and I don’t have to go in for any meetings. Besides, I have a lot of thesis research to work on. Still, I’m a social person, and exchanging emails with other students and faculty…

I re-read Barab & Duffy (2000) again. Each time I read it, and I’ve re-read this chapter several times in the last three years, I get a slightly different reading of it. Before, my focus in reading it had been on the psychological–learning theories and how they had changed over time. This time, I was…

Well, it’s been a week since I got back from Phoenix, AZ where Clare and I were presenting a couple of papers in a symposium at SITE 2005, and I’m finally getting back into my regular routine! I get a lot out of going to academic conferences. Admittedly, at some you get overwhelmed with the…

Hodgson & Reynolds’ (2005) assertion that networked learning can support the possibility for overlapping subgroups, formal and informal, to coexist appeals to me. Subgroups would offer students who “felt they had less speaking time than others” more airtime, by blurring the private and public spaces, which should result in the design of a more equitable…

Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right…If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a…