Flax and Flip your language classroom

The term “Flipped Classroom” was originally coined by two high school science teachers, Jon Bergman and Aaron Sams (Their book – Flip your classroom – Reach every student in every class everyday). The story was that the teachers discovered that lecturing to students was not an effective mean of teaching, so they started recording their lectures, […]

CSSE Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2014

My presentation on the instructors’ roles and challenges in a technology-mediated learning environment at CSSE 2014, Brock University http://prezi.com/embed/rmkmkolewwe2/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined Purpose: The aim of the current research is to first examine to what extent instructors in a language institute partake in newer roles associated with using learning technologies and social media; second, it is to identify […]

Incorporating digital literacies into an EAP curriculum Part 2 – How

Recap: The last post defines digital literacies as the ability to to comprehend information in a variety of digital environments to create and remix content to communicate appropriately in digital contexts to develop more confidence and comfort in online participation to be able to evaluate and critique resources. (Belshaw, 2011) This post will examine how […]

Change barriers in higher education

In his 2008 book, Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner pointed out 3 important changes in the contemporary world that the modern education system fails to adapt to – the rapid change in the knowledge economy, massive availability of open online content, and the influence of new media technology on the way younger generations learn. Since […]

Print or digital

In the discussion of ebooks or paper books, it’s once been said that “Digital is best for accessing, and print is better for reading”. But, tools like Smart Pen, Next Gen Digital Book, and Paper Tab, seem to have blurred the distinction between digital and print technologies. Livescribe Smart Pen Livescribe Smart Pen, for instance, makes […]

Today’s tech geeks are not really geeks anymore

Today’s “tech geeks” are not really tech geeks anymore, when the knowledge threshold is set so low that it requires neither skills or dedication. First, there is the iphone much like a flatscreen TV designed to be not only touch sensitive but the touch movements also correspond to how we manipulate physical things in the […]

Dropbox vs Google Drive

I love Dropbox. But to compete with Google Drive, Dropbox will need to work on promoting collaboration, allowing simultaneous editing, moving away from the idea that one file can only be saved in one folder (like physical objects), and adopting some kind of a tagging system for organization. To compete with Dropbox, however, Google will […]

The sad truth is that many bosses don’t get millennials.

The proposed distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants, or the generation bound definition of millennials is unlikely to withstand scientific scrutiny. (Listen to the Myth of the Digital Natives on CBC’s Spark) In fact, most “digital natives”, as Douglas Rushkoff pointed out, actually can’t read computer codes and fail to understand how they are […]

Various degrees of “nomadness”

The Rhizomatic Model and language learning Dave Cormier used the idea of a nomad to illustrate his Rhizomatic Model of learning, which is characterized by a number of elements include open-ended learning outcomes, learner-driven, chaotic conditions and knowledge construction through negotiation. In explaining his model, Cormier points out that the model may not work for […]

The blind review process of the blogosphere #change11

In “Digital scholarship”, Weller (2011) explores many ways that digital technologies are transforming scholarship, i.e., allowing scholars to network, socialize, collaborate, make their ideas known efficiently and in finer granularity, removing the filters establishing by traditional authority, and ultimately democratizing knowledge. And yet, one of the questions hanging over the establishing digital scholarship remains the […]

Not Worth Printing

Technology