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Thinking out loud

Narrating my Learning

This is a sandbox for ideas, subject to revision, and in perpetual beta.

Candidacy Presentation

Candidacy Presentation

Approaches to Assessment in Online Higher Education

Colin Madland, M.Ed.

Ph.D. Candidacy Oral Presentation, University of Victoria

Thursday, August 26, 2021

Acknowledging the Land and the People

I acknowledge with respect the Lekwungen (Le-KWUNG-en) peoples on whose traditional territories...

30th Sep 2021
Summative Assessment in Disarray

Summative Assessment in Disarray

Well, my updates here have stalled. There's actually, I think, a pretty good reason for this, and that is that SARS-CoV-2 has wreaked havoc on my dissertation plans. If you've been following along, my original intent was to explore the intersection of Indigenous Education and technology, from the pe...

30th Sep 2021
Our Finest Hour

Our Finest Hour

The President of Trinity Western University recently tweeted a brief recognition of the work that educational technologists have been doing over the last few weeks.

30th Sep 2021
Mere Learning

Mere Learning

Published 2013-05-02

So, this is a blog about learning. I use the term 'mere learning' to refer to the idea that I try to avoid hype, even if I may choose to talk about it from time to time. I think that now, more than ever, or maybe more than sometimes, there is an excessive amount of hype in...

5th Feb 2013
Welcome

Welcome

Hey there!

I'm a PhD student in educational technology at the University of Victoria on the beautiful southern tip of Vancouver Island in British Colulmbia. By day, I'm the Manager of Online Learning and Instructional Technology at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC.

I'll be using this site to narrate my thinking.

27th May 2018
We Make the Road by Walking

We Make the Road by Walking

The next several years of my life are going to be filled with more writing than I have done in a long time. Actually more than I have ever done. So, in an attempt to begin to get into a rhythm of writing and thinking, and thinking by writing, and writing while I read, here we go. Last night, I ordered We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change featuring Myles Horton and Paulo Friere 'talking a book' in 1987.

27th Jul 2018
Multi-Access Learning

Multi-Access Learning

One of the significant drivers for many in the open education field is that of increasing access to higher education, often through reducing costs for course materials. Another approach is to scaffold multiple points of access to higher education through what Irvine, Code, and Richards 2013 call multi-access learning.

24th Jul 2018
Watching Strangers

Watching Strangers

The task:

Find a public space (mall, library, coffee shop) where you feel comfortable observing a person or small group of people - people you don't know. Write for 10 minutes as a field note. Use descriptive language and work for accuracy. Write about you notice: see, hear, smell, feel. How did you approach this task? What was difficult for you and what will you do about it? How might describing a person relate to your role as a researcher? What did you learn about yourself?

30th Sep 2021
My Top Ten Tech Tools

My Top Ten Tech Tools

I learned from Bonni the other day that Jane Hart compiles a list of top tech tools for learning each year. Apparently one of the things to do is to write a blog post about your individual take. Here goes...

23rd Jul 2018
The Future is Forked

The Future is Forked

It's been a while since David Wiley first talked about the reusability paradox which basically posits that the more detailed and localized a particular resource is, the harder it will be for others to use it. And the more a particular resource is designed to be shared, the less useful it will be.

7th Jul 2018
Roles in Action Research

Roles in Action Research

I read two articles this week, each of which described an AR project, but with very different approaches and, I think, different outcomes. My rough notes on each article are available here (Pedretti) and here (Wakefield).

Pedretti describes an action research project grounded in what I have co...

30th Sep 2021

Reflexive Analysis of Action Research

Our group engaged in a digital storytelling project using a process that has turned out to be similar to a photovoice method. As might be expected in a 3-week group project, data collection was somewhat rushed. We faced challenges with the seemingly simple process of forming a group and contacting e...

30th Sep 2021
Questions

Questions

By this time next year, I need to have zeroed in on a research agenda for this PhD.

Here are my thoughts as of now...they're a little rambly, so bear with me.

30th Sep 2021
Processing Action Research

Processing Action Research

...post a brief response that articulates your growing/changing understanding of action research in education (or some aspect of it) in the context of your own research area.

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer.

30th Sep 2021
Community Assignment

Community Assignment

Community Interaction

The community with which I chose to engage was a selection of faculty from the Indigenous Education (IE) department at the University of Victoria. This is a community with which I have a previous, though brief, relationship. In July 2019, I was invited to participate as a pan...

30th Sep 2021
My Lit Workflow

My Lit Workflow

[embedly url="https://twitter.com/raulpacheco/status/1100659069126365184"][/embedly]

A tweet showed up in my timeline, thanks to @_valeriei, from @raulpacheco talking about how he manages his workflow for printed papers. Here's my digital workflow. It takes a bit of technical setup, but it's worth it.

7th Mar 2021
Learning is hard

Learning is hard

Yesterday, Herbert Tsang and Qinqin Zhang from TWU hosted a colloquium on Academic Integrity at our Langley campus. I learned a bit about learning after my presentation...

2nd Jul 2018
Keeping Track

Keeping Track

I'm making an effort to be as open as possible during this PhD. In doing so, I've moved most of my draft work to GitHub, and I'm publishing most stuff from there to Grav.

30th Sep 2021
Interviewing as Listening

Interviewing as Listening

Chattopadhyay, P. (2018). Fighting hate with friendship—One Exalted Cyclops at a time | CBC Radio. In Out in the Open. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/cut-through-hate-1.4450415/fighting-hate-with-friendship-one-exalted-cyclops-at-a-time-1.4450891

Our task this week was...

20th Oct 2019
Features of Public Spheres

Features of Public Spheres

Features of Public Spheres

For this blog discussion post discuss any 2 features of Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon's 10 Features of the Public Sphere found (or not) in any of the 5 papers Collins, Kaukko, Tuck, Conrad, and McLeod/Emme. List the Key Feature and describe the feature using the research from your chosen papers (this week and last week's) as an example. If you find that some Features are noticeably missing, or that it is clear that the authors explicitly chose not to consider that feature, this could also be the substance of your post. You could discuss one feature from one paper (last week's) and another feature from the other paper (e.g. this week's). Two features in total.

30th Sep 2021
Git, Grav, and and a Little Nerdery

Git, Grav, and and a Little Nerdery

Sometimes, things happen in ways that are nothing short of serendipitous. Yesterday was a good example.

I am in the middle of envisioning and building the technical infrastructure for what is intended to be a world-wide initiative.

30th Sep 2021
Magical practices among the Nacirema

Magical practices among the Nacirema

The first reading for week 3 of EDCI 614 is

Miner, H. (2012). Magical practices among the Nacirema. In D. J. Hodges, The anthropology of education : classic readings.

After the break are some questions provided to guide our thinking as we read the article...

20th Sep 2018
The Anthropology of Teaching and Learning

The Anthropology of Teaching and Learning

Pelissier, C. (1991). The Anthropology of Teaching and Learning. Annual Review of Anthropology, 20, 75–95. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/2155794

This post is just a lot of thinking out loud. There is no coherent argument found here. Consider yourself warned.

21st Sep 2018
Epistemic Beliefs

Epistemic Beliefs

In class # 2 of EDCI 681, we were assigned some homework to work through this Epistemic Beliefs Inventory based on

Adapted from Wang, X., Zhang, Z., Zhang, X., & Hou, D. (2013). Validation of the Chinese version of the Epistemic Beliefs Inventory using confirmatory factor analysis. International Education Studies, 6(8), 98-111.

30th Sep 2021
Efficiency

Efficiency

This post is a sidebar conversation and may be removed.

Is efficiency a virtue?

30th Sep 2021
Crafting a Question

Crafting a Question

I'm a few weeks into my second course in my program, this one being Advanced Research Methods. the topic du jour this last week was about crafting research questions. Here are some exercises we've gone through this week.

22nd Jan 2019
Conference Proposal

Conference Proposal

Conference Proposal—30% The format for this assignment is roughly similar to the Conference Abstract assignment, except that it offers you more space and hence the opportunity to provide a degree of greater detail regarding what you imagine you might present. Length: 3 pages double-spaced (maximum), excluding works cited

As submitted.

30th Sep 2021
Conference Abstract

Conference Abstract

Conference Abstract—20% Write a 200 word (maximum) double-spaced description of an imagined presentation you wish to make that identifies a philosophical or theoretical problem, articulates a purpose or thesis statement, and from that point describes how you will respond to the problem.

30th Sep 2021
Conceptions of School Culture

Conceptions of School Culture

Erickson, F. (1987). Conceptions of School Culture: An Overview. Educational Administration Quarterly, 23(4), 11–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X87023004003

As I get into this course and seek strategies for writing while I read, I'm finding that this blog is a decent spot for doing that. It is one thing to doze your way through readings and presume that you have caught enough of the argument to have an intelligent conversation in class, but it is another to actively consider prompts and questions (conveniently provided by our prof) and write responses that can be exposed to a wider community who might actually respond!

Here is the first prompt for this article:

Why/how is knowledge about (un)familiar school cultures important?

30th Sep 2021
Atom FTW

Atom FTW

One of the things that has driven me a little batty ever since my MEd work, when I first started having to use PDF versions of articles is that copying text from a PDF for my notes and pasting into Werd works relatively fine except for the fact that the line breaks are copied too.

30th Sep 2021
Anthropology of Everyday Life

Anthropology of Everyday Life

Ling, M. 1999. The Anthropology of Everyday Life: Teaching about Culture in Schools. In R. Case & P. Clark (Eds.), The Canadian Anthology of Social Studies: Issues and Strategies for Teachers, pp. 51-58. Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press.

30th Sep 2021

What is Anthropology

McGranahan, C. (2015). What is Ethnography? Teaching ethnographic sensibilities without fieldwork. Teaching Anthropology; Vol 4 (2014): Learning by Example. https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v4i1.421

The primary focus of this paper is a discussion of what seems to be a controversy about how and when to teach ethnography to under-graduates. As such, it's a little peripheral to my needs right now, but there are some very interesting examples of ways to get students thinking ethnographically that I found compelling.

30th Sep 2021
Analyzing Open - Draft

Analyzing Open - Draft

test

Well, 'meeting' #1 of my PhD journey is done! As this is a seminar course focussed more on empowerment and conversation, our prof likes to call our weekly get-togethers 'meetings'. Ok.

As is standard in the first introduction to a course, there was the typical conversation about the course outline and where we would be headed and such things....

30th Sep 2021
LGBTQ youth activism and school

LGBTQ youth activism and school

McGlashan, Haley, & Fitzpatrick, K. (2017). LGBTQ youth activism and school: challenging sexuality and gender norms. Health Education, 117(5), 485–497. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1108/ HE-10-2016-0053

Inclusion and cultural acceptance of LGBTQ students and staff is still a problem and this article highlights some of the challenges faced by members of the LGBTQ community infinding support, promoting acceptance in public, and avoiding 'outing' those who need confidential support but who may be harmed if the broader community is aware of their identity.

30th Sep 2021
Back in Class

Back in Class

Updated: June 22/19 (scroll down)

Tonight marks the fourth meeting of our class exploring discourses in education at UVic. We are a fairly small class or 14 new PhD and 3 MEd students who meet for 3 hours per week. We are a diverse group with people from Tanzania, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Barbados, Canada, and other countries I can't recall. Many of the group have moved themselves and their families from far-off places to study in Victoria, and at least one is still unsure about being able to secure a study visa. It's an expensive prospect.

30th Sep 2021

2020 options

Option 1

...
Semester Activity Progress
Jan-Apr 2020 DS re: digital technology, corporate surveillance in the classroom, multi-access courses @ UVic, leading to a publication Ch 1-2 of dissertation for candidacy prep
May-Aug 2020 On Leave and teaching EDCI 335 online
30th Sep 2021