I’m launching this blog to use for the Connected Courses project, and more broadly as a place to post my thoughts on higher ed and educational technology. I’m Joe Murphy, the Director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy at Kenyon College. I’m quite pleased that I’ve got a small group of faculty at Kenyon who will also be participating in Connected Courses as a local cohort.
I signed up with Reclaim Hosting to start thinking about issues of owning my own digital space, but this blog is the first time I really gave it much thought. Should I blog here? Dust off my old Blogger address? Add a new tag to my ds106 blog? Shoot, owning your own digital space is complicated, even as CPanel makes it easy to just spin up a space and try something out.
I decided that, for me, the answer is to launch a new dedicated space. The main attraction is that this gives me multiple spaces where I could tweak WordPress settings in a real-content context, should I ever actually get around to it. I’m also intrigued with the idea that I might use something like Known to create one big “Joe on the Web” homepage, so I could share pieces of my life as appropriate and still reflect on the whole.
I did the same. I added a new and dedicated blog on Reclaim and I got some beta hosting to test Known. Let me know if youare interested. I have a link I am authorized to share. And I can quit anytime I want, just like a MOOC 😉
Hi Terry! I might take you up on that. One of my goals with Reclaim was to play more with new tools, since it would be my own skunkworks where I could spin something up and take it down easily enough. And sure enough… it’s leading to a proliferation of sites, and the belief that the answer is always to spin up a new one.
Terry and Joe just wanted to let you know I am interested to know how your experiences are with Known … I could recognize my thoughts in that article too.
Anyway, looking forward to connecting and learning with you both.
Hi Joe! I’m excited that someone from Kenyon is here — especially from a center for innovative pedagogy. During the extensive and harrowing process of choosing a college, Kenyon was one of my daughter’s top two choices. My daughter and wife visited the campus, and we went to a fun and stimulating Kenyon event in San Francisco. I’m a Reed graduate and a big fan of the smaller liberal arts college experience. In fact, a lot of what I’ve experienced in the best online discussions connected to courses (like the
ones I’ve been teaching at Stanford) remind me of what I did at Reed and what you do at Kenyon — spend a lot of time delving into texts together in small groups and weaving conversations that, at their best, are something greater than the sum of our posts.
See you around campus!
Hi Howard! I’ve got some professional friends in libraries and technology at Reed. It’s an outstanding institution, and yes, if you’ll pardon our local slang, rather Keny-ish. I hope your daughter found a great institution for her.
One of my goals with the cohort is to constantly ask how the curriculum is relevant to Kenyon’s environment. As you say, I think we’ll see that a lot of it is already in play. The campus dialogue suggests that there’s a lot of implicit connectivism already at play, though not everyone who subscribes to that pedagogy can articulate it that way. We recently engaged in a three-year examination of our general educational goals, and I think we might pick up some relevant tips for getting students to connect courses even within our own campus.
I once told a room full of librarians that our “information commons” was the entirety of Kenyon’s campus – because that’s where information, people, and technology come together. I like your idea that the network _is_ the campus for this exercise… see you on Middle Path!
Joe on the Web …. sounds like a television show.
🙂
Not a good one… but if I could raise some dough on Kickstarter…