Author Archives: alex

Re-Presenting Badges

Yes, it’s another badge post. Feel free to skip, or take a look at some of the other badge-related stuff I’ve posted earlier to get some background. One of my earliest questions, asked a couple of years ago, about badges and the Open Badge Infrastructure is whether you could put badges into the infrastructure that […]
Posted in Research, Teaching, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Unresolved this new year

I have learned a lot in 2012. It’s easy to forget things accomplished, and realize how much you didn’t do. I didn’t get in better shape–quite the opposite. I didn’t produce nearly the amount (or quality) of research I might have wanted. I didn’t make a huge sum of money. I wasn’t the best sort […]
Posted in General | 1 Comment

Do online classes suck?

Before arriving at my current posting, I would have thought the idea that online classes compared poorly to their offline counterparts was one that was slowly and inevitably fading away. But a recent suggestion by a colleague that we might tell incoming freshmen that real students take traditional meatspace courses and those just interested in […]
Posted in Teaching | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Reddit, Course Discussion, and Badges

This semester I am using a community on Reddit to run my course. I’m certainly not the first to do this. Here, for example, is a subreddit for a Japanese language course, part of the whole University of Reddit project. Using existing social software for course management is also nothing new. The code that runs […]
Posted in Teaching, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments