WA 2016 Week 01: #critlib chat on information resources & incarcerated people

Weekly Whaaa…?

#critlib chat on Information Resources & Incarcerated People

On Monday, 2016-01-04, I was lucky to co-moderate a #critlib chat with Seattle’s Books to Prisoners on information resources & incarcerated people. With my previous knowledge of prison libraries only being a bit of volunteering for Bloomington, Indiana’s Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, I’m grateful that Books to Prisoners took the time to select background information and that so many people joined in the conversation during, before, and after the chat’s designated time.

Here’s a Storify archive of the chat, put together by Annie Pho.

Upcoming #moocmooc on Instructional Design

From 2016-01-25—2016-02-12, the fine folks at Digital Pedagogy Lab and Hybrid Pedagogy will be propagating¹ the #moocmooc on Instructional Design.

Here’s how they describe the intent:

This year, we’ve chosen to jump down the throat of instructional design for a few different reasons. First and foremost, as more learning goes digital, instructional design is no longer a peripheral preoccupation in education: it is a force to be reckoned with, discussed, and understood. Additionally, more and more learning is being turned over to instructional designers, who sometimes must push the round peg of teachers’ content into the square hole of the learning management system. Teaching is rapidly becoming an effort between experts in the field and experts in design, with only the rare conversation about pedagogy. Efficiency has become the modus operandi of the educational institution, which leaves inquiry, agency, and emergence to find other arenas for expression.

I hope you’ll join in the fun—the past one I participated was full of a generous spirit of learning together, so I always benefited no matter how much or how little I could read that week.

Useful App: Nuzzel

I actually first heard of that upcoming #moocmooc not through Twitter directly, but instead through a new (to me) app, Nuzzel. It’s a bit like an RSS reader, except it aggregates the news or links most commonly shared by the people you follow on Twitter. Plus, the logo’s a hedgehog!

1. What’s a good verb for one of these somewhat anarchic, delightfully sprawling meta-MOOCs that involve weekly Twitter chats, readings, prompts for writing on personal blogs, and instructional challenges? ↩