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Review of the Shallows by Nicholas Carr, 2011 Excerpt from one review: "Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic - a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is the ethic of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption - and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes - Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive - even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

article by Cathy N. Davidson, The Chronicle Review, December 10, 2012 Excerpt: "The lab means to remake education from preschool onward, adding in such fabulous open-source learning experiences as Scratch, a free online resource that has enticed more than a million kids to create and share animations, and mix and remix narratives and games while learning basic programming skills. In the words of Joi Ito, the dynamic new head of the lab, himself a famous college dropout, the key to 21st-century learning is "antidisciplinary," not just "interdisciplinary." Ito's goal is "a world of seven billion teachers," where everyone on the planet has something important to teach to someone else, and everyone does." Excerpt: "Read against Wired UK's story, the opportunity Forbes describes seems revolutionary but, in its DNA, is the opposite. The MOOC model depicted here ossifies the already outdated mission of 19th-century education. Far too many of the MOOC's championed in the article use talking heads and multiple-choice quizzes in fairly standard subject areas in conventional disciplines taught by famous teachers at elite universities. There is little that prepares students for learning in the fuzzy, merged world that Negroponte sees as necessary for thriving in the 21st century. Making courseware "massive" may dangle the eventual possibility of trillion-dollar profits (even if they have yet to materialize). But it does not "fix" what is broken in our system of education. It massively scales what's broken."

Amazon reviews of The Extended Mind collection of essays edited by Richard Menary and how far an accessible, reliable, and fully trustworthy object can "produce effects/results that are sufficiently comparable to those of components of the natural (internal, biological, original, classic) mind; in essence, it's about multiple realizability/functionalism." The examination of the extended mind, to me, relates to connectivism learning theory in how we expand our minds by belonging to learning networks that exponentially increase our knowledge or access to it through objects or people sharing their understanding.

Blog post by Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle Review, December 2, 2013 This post on stratification of the teaching role in HE reminds me of our conversations from 1-2 years ago. Imagine a diorama in an American Museum of Occupations showing the evolution of the professor. The exhibit starts in the early 1800s with an austere, black-suited man in a minister's collar, perhaps looking over the shoulder of a student at a rustic desk, with a Greek text open in front of him. In the next scene, from around 1900, he morphs into a pince-nez-wearing gentleman in starched collar and cravat, at a podium delivering a lecture. The professor of 1950 adopts the rumpled bearing of a tweed jacket, pointing with his pipe to a poem or a physics equation on a chalkboard. In the next frame, circa 1990, she wears jeans and is sitting in front of a computer screen. How would the diorama represent the professor of 2020? Some observers predict that she won't exist: In the memorable phrase of Frank Donoghue, a professor of English at Ohio State University, we are living in the age of "the last professors." Less apocalyptic commentators say the professor has experienced "deprofessionalization." Both views try to capture the squeeze on professorial jobs, but they misrecognize fundamental aspects of the changes that have occurred. Rather than extinction, we have seen the steady expansion of academic labor over the past century, and rather than "deskilling," we are undergoing more rather than less professionalization. What has been going on is what sociologists call "differentiation" and "stratification." We are in the era of the Great Stratification. We have tended to see the professor as a single figure, but he is now a multiple being, of many types, tasks, and positions. Given that there are more than 1.4 million college faculty members in the United States, it is clear that they are not disappearing. But the all-purpose professor has faded. We have tended to see the professor as a s

Review by Rob Jenkins on the Chronicle, 3.18.13, on why MOOCs are a massively bad idea for wait-listed community college students in California as proposed in new legislation there. Excerpt: "We know that succeeding in online classes requires an extraordinary degree of organization, self-discipline, motivation, and time-management skill. A simple Google search of "how to succeed in online classes" yields a plethora of Web sites-including many college and university sites-offering students such gems as "be organized," "manage your time wisely," and (my favorite) "stay motivated."" Excerpt: So to recap, California's plan (or to be fair, one senator's plan) is basically to dump hundreds of thousands of the state's least-prepared and least-motivated students into a learning environment that requires the greatest amount of preparation and motivation, where they will take courses that may or may not be effective in that format. Here's a prediction: Those students will fail and drop out at astronomical rates. Then the hand-wringing will begin anew, the system will pour millions more dollars into "retention" efforts, and the state will be in an even deeper fix than it is now. (Virtual cheating will probably run rampant, too, followed by expensive anticheating measures, but that's another blog post.) Look, I'm not a politician or an economist. I don't know the answer to California higher education's budget woes. But I'm pretty sure herding community-college students into MOOCs is not it.

Preview of Google PLus's value to HE Excerpt: "Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and a consulting faculty member for computer science, says he plans to use Google Plus to collaborate on research projects: "Probably every project in my lab will have its own circle." Mr. Littau is even more enthusiastic. He posted an item to his blog on Thursday titled: "Why Lehigh (and every other) University needs to be on GPlus. Now." "I want to start using this in my class next term," he says, adding that he aims to expose his students to the latest communication technologies in all of his classes. He plans to try the video-chat feature of Google Plus, called "hangouts," to hold office hours online. The new system allows up to 10 people to join in a video chat. Mr. Littau may also hold optional review sessions for exams using the technology. "I can host chats a few nights a week," he says."

Very interesting qualitative analysis framework offered by Patrick J. Tierney, Brock University, Canada, in December 2012 issues of IRRODL. I did not get through the entire article to say that I fully comprehend it but the coding method described seemed to resemble the three stages we have gone through as qualitative analysts of dialogue in CPSquare.

excellent article by Terry Anderson, Athabasca University--Canada's Open University, October 2003, IRRODL, on creating optimum learning conditions online. Makes me want to see an update.

Excellent article on MOOCs and creating pedagogy for human beings to learn

Wonderful blog by George Siemens from 2010 enriched with good comments and exchange on teaching in social and technological networks. He reviews the traditional role of a teacher in a classroom (role model, encourager, supporter, guide, synthesizer) and shows how this model falls apart in a distributed learning network with multiple educator inputs and peer-based learning. Instead he says the roles teachers play in networked learning environments are to amplify, curate, find the way to help students make sense of information fragments, aggregate, filter, model (to build apprenticeship learning), and provide a persistent presence (place to express herself and be discovered).

George Siemens on the role of the teacher