Big T

Teagarden's trombone style was largely self-taught, and he developed many unusual alternative positions and novel special effects on the instrument. He is usually considered the most innovative jazz trombone stylist of the pre-bebop era – Pee Wee Russell once called him "the best trombone player in the world" – and did much to expand the role of the instrument beyond the old tailgate style role of the early New Orleans brass bands. Chief among his contributions to the language of jazz trombonists was his ability to interject the blues or merely a "blue feeling" into virtually any piece of music. [Wikipedia]

Important point to note here: was largely self-taught. 

Three carriage train

This model is about leading change. I first saw it here in a video by Ray Nasher and I've adapted it to suit my own purpose and context.

Do a simple survey of the target group:

We should switch to fixed width for our default font.

  Agree
  Not bothered
  Disagree


DISAGREE - NOT BOTHERED - AGREE - LOCOMOTIVE

• Make the Agrees visible to the rest
• Work on the Not bothereds, they'll easily join the Agrees
• With the Not bothered wagon empty the Disagrees will get nervous and
• Shift up the train to join the Agrees.

ARRF stands the test of time

It was May 2012 when I first posted about the adult learning model ARRF. Attributed to Cormier, Aggregate, Remix, Repurpose, and Feed Forward is still in my toolbox, six years on. Along with Read-Talk-Do it's one of those simple models you can grab, and just start building your course.

Testing h5p embed-ability

This stuff sticks...

This is an interesting post from Steve Kraus via Kiwi Belma. I cringe whenever the Coursera model is described as a MOOC... it's because I read the Open in MOOC to have several non-optional meanings: open entry, open curriculum, and open source... see what I mean? Anyway --- anything that asks questions around what Coursera are doing, how and why has got to be interesting (talk about disruptive technology, this is about as disruptive as it gets). Oh, and it's about their business model.

Kasanoff and Hinshaw disruption 3 of 7

Cut prices 90 percent (or more) (Kasanoff and Hinshaw).

I can't imagine what would happen if the sector's income was reduced by 90%, but how is this for a model? Make all courses Moodle courses. Make all courses open to a highly streamlined and free sub-enrollment process. If a student engages fully and submits satisfactory assignments, then they can be enrolled retrospectively and when they pay the fee their study points are recorded and accrue towards their qualification. All lectures, online or offline, are simply open. A popular model for start-ups is first to drive traffic and second to look for ways to generate income from that traffic. Of course a lot of start-ups fail, and maybe that failure rate is something that isn't in anybody's model for educational courses. But actually, why not? Look, I'm not actually proposing these ideas be adopted. They're too wacko, I'm aware of that. I'm just exploring ideas, using the ideas as objects to think with.

Kasanoff and Hinshaw disruption 2 of 7

Dramatically reduce complexity (Kasanoff and Hinshaw).

Already underway is the reduction of the huge number of tertiary qualifications we have in this country (NZ). It must have been really painful for some people to give up their babies, and undoubtedly some niche students will miss out, but did it not have to be? Next we need to get to a point where tutors aren't constantly re-writing the materials. Perhaps they could use software to provide personal annotations to existing bodies of material in one-tenth of the time. MOOCS reduce complexity in one way (students access the course in their own time and place and on their own device) but increase complexity another way (by studying with a number of different institutions and individual professors on a number of different platforms). My masters thesis may have been titled "Student-user modeling in connectivist environments", but I don't know that I'm very much nearer to solving the thousand and one problems connectionism and mobility create in the context of accreditation.