Betwixted, Bothered and Bewildered

As you can see from the title of the post, I’m betwixted, bothered and bewildered. Why is that? you ask. Well, I’ve been playing around with the WebCT‘s e-portfolio tool. I’ve already have onsiderable experience with using PebblePAD; if you haven’t already seen what the PebblePAD e-portfolio tool looks like, there is a rather nice […]

The Quantum Chimera

Once again, we have been blessed (in my humble opinion) of some fantastic reading material on this course. I have particularly enjoyed most of the e-portfolio readings. We have just literally, this year, brought in the Blackboard e-portfolio tool to support a number of Institutional initiatives such as personal development planning (pdp), continued professional development […]

Textual Meditations – Volume II

The latter half of Feenberg’s (1989) paper becomes a rather confused and muddled mess; whilst there are some interesting ideas, he doesn’t quite pull them off. I noted some intriguing points in the discourse section where Feenberg refers to Marshall McLuhan’s 1960’s announcement on the “end of literate culture and the rise of a new […]

Visual Sensations – An Interlude

Crikey! This blog is getting all heavy and doomladen and I haven’t even written “Textual Meditations – Volume 2” yet! I’ve caught sight of this very funny book called “The Internet Now In Handy Book Form!“, which spoofs a number of well-known websites like “Facebook“, “Google” and “Apple“. There’s even hilarious version of popular website […]

Obsolescence Anxiety

The thing that struck me the most about the Feenberg (1989) and Herring (2004) papers was how so out-of-date they were; Herring by a mere three years! It is also indicative of the “instant” and “throw away” culture that we live in. This rapid (rabid sic) technological obsolescence is an anathema. Things are being built […]

Textual Meditations – Volume I

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.. We start this post with a quote from William Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It“, which conjures up the image of acting a part in front of […]

Whoops, Apostrophe

A few years ago, I use to be quite a heavy user of ICQ and MSN Messenger. My online conversations would be peppered with emoticons, iterative punctuation and prominent capitalization. Unbeknown to me, I was using what Garrison & Anderson (2003) called “affective responses” to replace those non-verbal communication and voice intonations that we all […]

First Week Impressions

I’ve done my tasks for week 1. I’m making my blog entries frequent-ish. I’ve read scores of discussion boards entries and posted some stuff up myself and I am talking to some of my virtual class mates. All in all, so far, so good. Though, the special Facebook group doesn’t seem to be exploding in […]

Inside the Rabbit Hole

I started using Second Life (SL) about 8 months when I first saw Gilly Salmon demonstrate it (via a series of PowerPoint slides in her keynote speech) to a bemused audience at the Learning Futures Conference 2007 which was held at the University of Leicester. Gilly was offering it up as a possible virtual learning […]