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Natural online learning is just natural learning

Online Community Enthusiasts Vancouver Gathering June 14, 2012 I posed the question of what constitutes natural online learning to an open space session during a SCoPE event at SFU recently. What emerged to me was an over-arching and very simple commitment – that good practice is good practice. Good practice physical equates to good practice…

A Permaculture of online learning

I’ve been trying to identify a ‘natural’ approach to the design and facilitation of online learning. That is, how does learning most naturally take place in real world and how would this look within the emerging sophistication of the web? The stumbling block is that we have barely been able to answer this question pre-web…

Dealing with difficult customers

I just facilitated a short communication strategies course for working professionals for a business training firm. The second day was a dream with real discovery of attendees’ communicative bottlenecks, uncovering of Johari ‘blind spots’, and some real and actually quite thrilling transformation. The first day was blighted by an attendee who, well … , we…

The beauty and absurdity of duolingo

Fascinating talk by Luis von Ahn on TED. I had no idea about the scope of CAPTCHA, or rather RECAPTCHA, in helping to interpret text in printed sources too old for Optical Character Recognition to accurately decipher. So all the time wasted typing in those wobbly words presented to you when trying to authenticate something…

Do teachers act on the findings of educational research?

Do teachers act on the findings of educational research? The divide between research and application was brought home to me recently in a 2 day meeting in which a discussion of the role of grammar played a large role. On the flight I lapped up parts two and three of Ellis, only to find that…