If you use an Adobe product (I don't know why you should - they are over-priced rubbish) you will find that some old Pantone spot colours in your own images (no matter how old) will be replaced with black when you load files using them, unless you pay Pantone US$21/month for the … | Continue reading
Voluntourism, geoarbitrage, and digital nomadsReasons to be Cheerful is among my first ports of call for news most mornings because I hate to start the day on a negative or banal note. The news is mostly good, but it's never trivial, cute, or frivolous. This article from a few we … | Continue reading
Students are now using AIs to write essays and assignments for credit, and they are (probably) getting away with it. This particular instance may be fake, but the tools are widely available and it would be bizarre were no one to be using them for this purpose. There are already f … | Continue reading
The staff and students of AU are currently on tenterhooks, awaiting the results of the AU Board of Governors' briefly postponed deliberations on how it responds to the Albertan government's demands on AU's future, so I have (personally) held back a bit on further commenting or ad … | Continue reading
Today I sent this letter from staff at Athabasca University to the Albertan Advanced Education Minister and Board of Governors of the University, cc'd to various government & opposition politicians in Alberta, and a few selected journalists:I strongly support the university’s con … | Continue reading
I've said this before but it needs more emphasis. In the past week or so it has become increasingly clear that the real agenda of the Albertan government is not (directly) to forcibly move 500 unwilling AU staff to the town of Athabasca. That's just smoke and mirrors intended to … | Continue reading
My heart briefly leapt to my throat when I saw Thursday's Globe & Mail headline that the Albertan government had (allegedly) dropped its insane plan to force Athabasca University to move 65% of its workforce to the town of Athabasca. It seemed that way, given that the minister fo … | Continue reading
This is my latest paper, Learning, Technology, and Technique, in the current issue of the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (Vol. 48 No. 1, 2022). Essentially, because this was what I was invited to do, the paper shrinks down over 10,000-words from my article Educationa … | Continue reading
Dear Demetrios NicolaidesYou say,“I’ve offered to provide any kind of assistance that the university needs. They haven’t asked for any.”This is very kind! I am sorry for all the very, very, very bad thoughts I have been thinking about you and your party. So, all we had to do was … | Continue reading
This video from Peter Scott, president of Athabasca University, is a clear, eloquent, and passionate plea to save our university and the education of its students from imminent destruction at the hands of a brutal, self-serving, short-sighted government. Please watch it. Please a … | Continue reading
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