On Jan. 17 George Siemens and I will launch the third offering of our online course called 'Connectivism and Connective Knowledge' -- or CCK11. We use the term 'connectivism' to describe a network-based pedagogy. The course itself uses connectivist principles and is therefore an instantiation of the philosophy...

The Idea of Fairness

If we were asking questions of the children in a classroom, we wouldn't ask just one person over and over, right? We would want to spread the questioning around. Or if we were running a class debate, we wouldn't let just one student speak for the...

How often do we read about the importance of teachers in education? It must be every day, it seems. We are told about "strong empirical evidence that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement" again and again.

The problem with...

Note: I wrote this a few years ago and it has had an enduring presence on my web site. The work here fits as well in the progression of articles I am offering on The Huffington Post.

Guy Kawasaki once wrote an item describing "10 things you...

Why is the Republican Party now represented by red, when conservative parties in all other places -- and even the United States, in the past -- were represented with blue? Ben Zimmer suggests (via The Language Log) "Democrats may have wanted to appropriate the positive connotations...

While a great deal of virtual ink has been spilled over the need to reform our schools and universities, I think we need to question how we manage education altogether. For it is manifest that the institution, the form in which we have managed education and society in general, has...

Through the last few weeks I have been engaged in an online conference sponsored by UNESCO on the topic of the production and use of open educational resources.

There's a whole movement behind the concept of open educational resources (or OERs). It involves not only UNESCO, but...

This week I am in week five of an online course called PLENK, which I'm offering with three colleagues in the research community here in Canada.

As we reach the midpoint of the course, enrollment has just passed 1500 student mark. The discussions are reasonably active, we're aggregating...