When I became Director of Studies at Peponi House Prep School, one of my jobs was to start a data tracking system of the pupils, using standardised testing. Peponi House was a little school in the suburbs of Nairobi, which had suddenly grown expedentially, becoming an accreditated member of the Independent Association of Prep Schools […]

An analysis of the open badge course: Take Your Teaching Online (OpenLearn – Free Learning from the Open University) with direct reference to Ahn et al. 2014 (Open badges for education: what are the implications at the intersection of open systems and badging?) Open Production Ahn et al. ask the question ‘Does the source of […]

  Underpinning the Open Badges project is the basic premise of offering learners recognition for skills and achievements that they glean from online courses, learning networks and the like. I like the digital badges concept and I believe the positives outweigh the negatives. Yet, there are assumptions that are made about digital badge courses and […]

MOOCs and the Long Tail Moocs and the Long Tail transcript Sources: https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/ Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), pp. 16–32.

MOOCs and OERs were born of an optimism that Brown & Adler explore in ‘Minds of Fire’, and were a pragmatic, ambitious initiative to change the essence of education. Eminent institutions the world over embraced the concept of MOOCs as a transformative exercise in providing free education for those who want it. MOOCs Target Audience […]

I think that the concept of Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is a wonderful one. I am a great believer in self-directed learning and, having lived and worked in a developing country for most of my life, I can especially see how life-changing access to education can be. MOOCs have […]

My MOOC experience I joined a  FutureLearn MOOC: Teaching Young Learners Online, run by the British Council. There are 37,868 people enrolled on the course and the course is projected to last 3 weeks, with 3 hours of work a week expected. The course is aimed at English Teachers and is run by two ‘Educators’. […]

I enjoyed reading the article ‘Minds on Fire’. It set an optimistic tone (albeit in 2008). The article must have been an exciting one for its time, focussing on the potential of the Internet to enable social learning and  advocating the ‘unleashing of productive inquiry’.  The article advocates the potential of the Web 2.0 to […]

Over the years, as I have developed as a teacher, I have been a strong advocate of the principle that ‘pedagogy must lead the technology’.     I found Cousin’s paper, ‘Learning from cyberspace’ remarkably interesting, as she sets out to critique this very mantra that I have chanted over the years. My new mantra […]

Two weeks ago, I really struggled to come up with a metaphor for a learning space. I chose a poem, Daffodils by WIlliam Wordsworth to represent the individual learning through inspiration that came from nature. I also liked a learning space as a metaphor of a journey, or conceptualised as a dining table or the […]