Dear Friends We are pleased to announce issue 11(1) of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. This is a general issue featuring 7 research articles, 2 articles from the field, 3 CIDER session recordings, and 1 book review. In the issue editorial, I discuss changes to our Creative Commons license and to [...]

George Siemens sent me a link  to a post by Cameron Neylon that attempts to pound yet another nail in the coffin of peer review. As an editor of a peer reviewed Journal (IRRODL) I was naturally both curious and a bit defensive about the charges. Neylon argues that for peer review “ Whatever value it [...]

I have often had problems helping students learn to analyze qualitative data such as interviews, meeting transcripts, field notes etc. It seems common understanding is to read and extract the themes- but what does that actually mean and how do you know if you are doing it correctly? I thus was motivated [...]

I was shocked last week to read a story in Globe and Mail that they were allowing Inukshuk Wireless (a telephone company owned by Rogers and Bell) to discontinue its funding of educational multi-media projects. By way of background in 2000 the federal government offered bandwidth that was being reserved for educational [...]

I have been neglecting the ‘Canuck’ lately and wanted to take a few minutes on this last day of 2009, to share a few odds and ends that I’ve been meaning to write about. Earlier this month I had a great time in Second Life doing a guest appearance with Ross McKerlich in a  Danish Education [...]

Happy Holidays! For your holiday reading, The International review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) offers a final edition, featuring 6 research articles, one note from the field, a book review, and 5 web conference recordings from the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research. This issue marks our tenth year and largest number – 6 [...]

I’m always interested in learning from the prognosis of the New Media Consortium’s Annual New Horizon Report. The 2010 preview (7th annual report)  is out – with still a few weeks to go in 2009! As usual the report categorizes new educational technologies in three time frames.  And the winners are : Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or [...]

This has been quite an eventful last week. It started with the 16 hour flight to Melbourne and the publication  of a short article in the Journal of Distance Education.  A Rose by Any Other Name: Still Distance Education – A Response to D.R. Garrison Implications of Online and Blended Learning for the Conceptual Development [...]