Role of Educator w/ Stephen Downes – November 8, 2011

Stephen Downes was our guest tonight in #eci831 and he shared with us a “live-slides” style presentation on the topic, “The Role of Educator in a Networked World“. You can find the Blackboard Collaborate recording here, or if you want an alternate method of catching the session, Stephen has shared the slides and the recorded audio on his site. Slides for the session are also available below.

I want to give a special thanks to Dave Cormier who stood in for me tonight to moderate the session (as I’m currently in Australia). I am lucky to be connected to such good people like Stephen and Dave who are passionate about open learning that they are willing to donate their valuable time to support the learning of my students.

Rhizomatic Learning – Oct. 25, 2011

Tonight, we were very fortunate to have Dave Cormier as our guest in EC&I 831. The topic was Rhizomatic Learning, a concept that Cormier has been expanding upon for some time (at least since this post in 2008). Dave gave a wonderful overview of the topic, and was able to fully engage the participants in using his ‘live slides’ method (creating a slide deck on the fly through user feedback).

If you missed the conversation, there are two ways to view it. First, the entire Blackboard Collaborate session is available here. Also, Cormier saved his own copy of the presentation using a great tool called Screenflow. The resulting recording has been uploaded to Youtube and is available here and embedded below.

If you want to learn more about the topic, check out Cormier’s more recent post, “Workers, soldiers or nomads – what does the Gates Foundation want from our education system?“.