Spring/Summer 2009

Once again I have some considerable catching up to do since my last posting. At the end of March this year I attended the National Centre for Academic Transformation Conference in Orlando. The conference was very useful but it was also a welcomed trip to the sun after a particularly long cold winter. It was made even more enjoyable as my daughter Sabrine joined me and we got out to do some golfing. Sabrine just turned 13 yrs old but is a very good golfer (7 hdcp).

This summer I was honored to give the keynote presentation at the The Fourth International Blended Learning Conference at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. My presentation can be view at: http://www2.herts.ac.uk/fms/documents/teaching-and-learning/blu/conference2009/Elluminate%20Recordings%20from%20Blended%20Learning%20Conference%202009.pdf

I was also pleased to be invited to the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning in Madison, Wisconsin in August. I think the highlight of the conference for me was the keynote presentation from Dr. Michael Moore with regards to the history of distance education and the watershed events in the mid 1980s with regard to the acceleration of scholarship in the field. In this regard, I would like to note that Marti Cleveland-Innes and myself have a book on distance education due out this fall. It addresses the current state of distance education in the context of developments associated with online and blended learning. We argue that we are entering a new era of distance education very much shaped by collaborative communities of learners which, in turn, challenge the core independence assumption inherent to traditional distance education. The question is whether distance education will be transformed or will it eventually reach an evolutionary dead-end?

Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (in press). An introduction to distance education: Understanding teaching and learning in a new era. London: Routledge.

In closing let me note that Norm Vaughan and I will be doing an online workshop on blended learning for Jossey-Bass in October. Norm and I were also invited to speak at the the E-Learn--World Conference on E-Learning in Vancouver in October on the topic of blended learning. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to hear that I had been been selected to be the recipient of the 2009 Sloan-C Award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Online Learning by an Individual. This was a great honor but given the timing of the presentation I had to cancel out of the E-Learn Conference. This was not a major issue as I know Norm will do just fine without my input.

Finally, I would like to say that I am working with my colleagues Phil Ice and Zehra Akyol on an exploratory study of meta-cognition using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. The guiding question is what role does metacognition play in the developmental dynamics (constructing meaning and confirming understanding) of a community of inquiry. More specifically, we will be exploring the relationships between meta-cognition and each of the presences (social, cognitive and teaching) in the CoI framework. So much for now.
RG