I recently had to re- introduce myself to a colleague regarding where my current research interests are, and I thought it may be interesting to share with a wider audience, as I do get asked to explain what I am interested in (since I cannot oversimplify this, however hard I try).

One of the things I learned about myself in the module at Lancaster I just finished is just how much I love qualitative methods. Not just qualitative studies in my own content areas, but the rich methodological particulars in themselves. Yes, I couldn’t believe it when I first said that a few weeks ago – I knew I was interested in application to practice, but now find myself loving the complexities and issues around selecting, using, and assessing various qualitative methods. I can see myself really exploring this more in itself . . .

Since my background is adult education, I tend to think of myself as an adult educator. I like critical theory and constructivist frameworks, and am fond of Wenger’s Community of Practice model, as well as Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning framework. I am a proponent of postmodernity, and as such am interested in identity development, especially in online blogs and other forms of social media where narrative inquiry and autoethnography can be used.

Now, to see how all this can develop toward a thesis direction . . .

I just learned about a new 3-week online seminar that just began at SCoPE: Re-Thinking E-Learning Research. I purchased this text after reading about it earlier in the year, and this is a great opportunity to begin reading it, especially given that my doctoral studies are in E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning. As I take such a broad view of what elearning and e-research are, this session may be just the thing I am looking for.

I am really interested in the 3 topics that will be covered and discussed:

1. Introduction to e-learning research: What is it? Where are we?
2. Narrative: What is the case for narrative methods in e-learning research?
3. Critical Theory: How can methodologies associated with critical theory contribute to the field of e-learning research?

Perhaps I will see some of my colleagues online during this event, and we can experience how all this works within an online community of practice as well!

I recently stumbled across Ron Chenail’s The Qualitative Report website at Nova Southeastern University while I was doing some research for a proposal I am working on for the 6th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2010). Ron has a wonderful weekly newsletter, as well as one of the more current lists of references for Teaching Qualitative Research: Updated November 9, 2009 (with this document being exactly what I needed to assist with my research). If I were not currently engaged in my doctoral studies at Lancaster University, I would have been interested in Nova’s new Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research–this looks rather comprehensive and very timely indeed.

Nice to know there are so many useful references out there that are being shared. One of the things I have learned about my increased focus on qualitative research in the last few years, is the more that I share, the more I receive back. From this framework, there seems to be a lot of collaborative possibilities for the future!

A colleague of mine, Catherine, had a wonderful blog post this week entitled ADDIE Deconstructed, which is somewhat related with my own recent posting on this topic, and is nicely juxtaposed with the work my students are doing with my online PPOCCID course.

This area around ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate), which is an instructional design model I use all the time, constantly reminds me of issues of power and positionality that arise when we determine how others have to learn this or that. In many ways, this reminds me of a blog post that really stopped me to think about these issues, Why you want to focus on actions, not learning objectives. For those of us in the learning field, it is easy to either get so wrapped up in learning objectives that we neglect the learners as people, or to get so vague with our objectives that we can never really measure (or determine) if anything is learned at all.

All of this consideration of whose objectives we have to consider, and how that balance works within organizational dynamics, leads me to the text that Catherine pointed out and I just ordered, Constructivist Instructional Design (C-ID). This looks like just the right text to help consider some of these issues around ADDIE, which increasingly seems to be a simple model with grate implications.

More to follow . . .

If you are planning to submit a paper for the 2010 Networked Learning Conference, you better hurray–the date for submissions is only a week away. Key dates and submission specs are listed here.

I am busily revising a paper that I am co-authoring, and hope to submit it by Thursday. Planning for the best!

I am starting to be a little restless with my blog byline recently; perhaps it no longer fits me or I have outgrown it. The wonderful thing about websites is that they can grow and develop with us.

My current one is:

Research and Practice in Postmodern Learning

This combines my educational research focus with my need to integrate my learning with practice, coupled with a worldview that is increasingly postmodern. Now, almost a year into my doctoral studies, with my professional practice filled with project management, teaching, conferences, and publishing; it may be time for a change.

I want something that will integrate my degree focus, E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning, into this, while still allowing for my academic interests in qualitative research designs, autoethnography and narrative inquiry, and transformative learning as an experience in critical identity formation. Having recently been influenced by the term postmodernity in the text Identity in Question, I am considering:

(Online) Identity in Postmodernity

This feels right to me; what do you think?

I asked my students in my a PPOCCID class to do some searching for online references / discussions about the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) instructional design model. I find this model very useful in many applications (especially in project management of learning initiatives), though have recently been more intrigued with the A as in Addie.

What does it mean to Analyze the needs of the audience? Well, I have to make sure this is a need the training or learning or education or development can address. Who needs to learn what? Why do they need to learn this? What are the obstacles? Who are the proponents of this (often these are not the learners)? What do they want (and why)? Are the goals the learners have (if they even have any, and if they can be articulated) and the goals of the proponents of the learning the same (or at least close enough that they are not opposed)?

What roles does this power play, especially within organizational dynamics? Can what works for one be transferable to others? Have you ever found it is easier to analyze the needs of others rather than ourselves? Always more questions than answers; while this can be frustrating at times, I find this endless interest quite enlivening and engaging!

I suppose I am considering these issues right now as I am beginning a Module 3 in my doctoral program at Lancaster University. Nice how various parts of my professional, academic, and personal elements of my life tend to fit together from time to time!

The boom camera is preparing to video Turandot tonight at the Met.

No sooner am I starting to get used to the new version of the APA Style Manual (APA 6), but there are now so many errors and corrections that the American Psychological Association is offering TO REPLACE the first versions of APA 6! Not sure how many errors there were (sickenly ironic, being a style guide we are talking about) in this recently revised edition? Check out the Corrections to the First Printing of the Publication Manual (July 2009) of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, subscription is required) and Inside Higher Education both reported extensively on these issues, in turn helping the APA to recognize that the extent of these problems really required the previously sold editions of APA 6 to be replaced.

Now, to re-learn the styles that were just relearned.

One of the weekly assignments I have for the online class I am teaching, Principles and Practices of Online Course Creation and Instructional Design (#PPOCCID), is for my students to have a weekly blog post about something to do with the content of our class. I make the assignment rather broad, as I know that learning can take place at odd times and in unlikely ways, so I want my learners to feel flexibility in what they write about and explore.

With this in mind, I wanted to follow my own assignment and discuss something I found interesting in one of the readings from this past week’s class (where I ran out of time and did not discuss), Tools for Online Engagement and Communication by Richard S. Lavin, Paul A. Beaufait, and Joseph Tomei. In this chapter, the authors do an excellent overview of a number of current web-based technologies that are useful to help people  develop their online identities, communicate their stories with peers, and begin to engage in online community.

With the focus on blogs, wikis, and technologies to assist with digital storytelling, I am reminded of how I started blogging several years ago to explore my own thinking, and still use it to help me process my work, usually with the benefit of getting additional feedback that in turns helps me move my thinking forward.

With this in mind, I like how the authors of this chapter (who do one of the better introductions to blogs and wikis) begin it:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are

few.” (Suzuki, 2006, p. 21)

In Zen Buddhism, there is a notion of beginner’s mind (shoshin in Japanese), in which a person seeking enlightenment is asked to look at things as they are, without preconceived notions. A goal of looking at things from learners’ perspectives is to see things the way new students do, and to anticipate problems and bottlenecks that they might face, a task that takes on added significance in light of the relative newness of online education. Online education acts as a universal solvent, dissolving many of the notions and axioms that we have taken for granted.

I have thought a lot about blogging, and have engaged in it for so long that my perceptions about it may be different from how those new to the concept of blogging may perceive it. I have seen learners grow in their sophistication, professionalism, academic prowess, and even reflective practice, and am so look forward to seeing how my current learners experience this.

At long last, here is my outfit for the 2009 New York City / Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

I uploaded a bunch of pictures in a my Renaissance Merchant outfit to Flickr.

Let’s just hope for no rain!

I am hoping to attend the Networked Learning 2010 conference in Denmark in May of 2010 (as long as my paper gets accepted, of course!!), and this conference is doing something different from most other conferences — it is actively engaging potential participants, presenters, and those who are just interested in pre-conference conversations about networked learning.

Very smart.

These Hot Seats are described here, and are free and open to the public. What better way to prepare for a conference on networked learning, than by engaging in this learning medium itself? Right now I find myself engaged in a great conversation with George Siemens ( this week’s facilitator, Athabasca University member, and Connectivism advocate) and the other distant colleagues about how technology changes the possibilities and dynamics in teaching online.

A few months ago I blogged about Johnny Saldana’s new text, The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, and I just read a great review of it by Robin Cooper at The Weekly Qualitative Report. It may be worth a look if you face an upcoming coding project and may need an overview of Saldana’s excellent primer.

A colleague on Twitter Tweeted about this, and I thought it was just wonderful! As I love things Medieval, I wanted to share this animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry. This is quite a clever and engaging way to show something so richly historical.

I created a simple blog rubric for my online class, and am interested in some feedback on it.

The assignment, as stated in my syllabus:

Reflective Practice is a critical aspect of teaching and learning, and a fundamental element of teaching online involves acquiring a comfort with technology to communicate and collaborate.

Online learning is a more networked experience than traditional face-to-face (F2F) learning. Thus, students are required to use a blog for this course. Students may use their own blog (if they have one) or create a new one (WordPress.com, Blogger, Epsilen, or elsewhere). Blog posts should be done at least once a week discussing some learning or a reaction to anything in the course.

Making at least two comments every week on other course attendee blogs is required.

As I am intending the student (all of whom are adults) blogs to consider any issue in class and then relate it to their practice, this is the rubric I created:

For your own weekly blog post(s), be sure to:

• Post your blog entry before the due date ~ 0.5
• Post a link to your Blog posting in the Forum  ~ 0.5
• Discuss and develop some aspect of online learning / education ~ 1.0
• Demonstrate that you are able to apply what you are learning to your professional practice ~ 1.0

Total = 3 points

I will ask them how this feels and if it works after we do our first assignment of this, so until then, I am open to other considerations for verbiage or total point (3 points / week) re-distribution. Thoughts?