Steer clear of the bridge: Bridge International Academies in Kenya, neoliberalism, and lazy shortcuts to meaningful education

Reblogging here from Panoply Digital. Returning to a favorite subject of mine, discussed here and here in past posts, is the ongoing Bridge Academy debacle throughout the continent, but particularly in Kenya, which has now turned legal. “Lawyers for the for-profit chain secured a temporary court order preventing Wilson Sossion, General Secretary of the Kenyan […]

Teaching Coding to Kids: Caveats and Initiatives from Africa and Asia

Reposting here from Panoply Digital. Teaching coding to children is, if press reports are to be believed, an educational imperative, some sort of literacy that children can’t live without in the 21st century. We see initiatives throughout the world in the UK (with the express goal of creating a ‘code-literate’ society), the EU, and elsewhere, […]

Vygotsky’s theoretical construct as city: Life is a constant feeling of effervescence

I am knee-deep in the normal rounds of doctoral reading that someone with any remote connection to the liberal arts, education, or even just doctoral school is bound to read. They are like the tattoos of the doctoral student (or artefacts, perhaps), these reading lists. They include the normal Vygostky, Lave and Wenger, Engestrom and […]

The University of Everywhere is a community of students, thousands of little somewheres

See the full gallery on Posterous In the spirit of dissecting articles written about entirely different slants and using them for springboards into other topics, I am going to do a quick spinoff of the New York Times Op-Ed piece from Bill Keller “The University of Everywhere. To its credit, it had me thinking quite […]

Posterous (et al) for mobile learning

In response to one of the learning activities for the #MobiMOOC course being conducted now (wiki or follow #MobiMooc or the Google Group), I am attempting in this post to show how I would use an mlearning tool (QR code, audio/video) for learning. I had done some work awhile back on creating a skeleton of […]

Micro-reflection: Mobile=feedback loop

Some comments on my recent blog post from Ivan @iwannt about how the term I used “micro-reflection” relates to connectivism had me thinking a bit. I like a term “micro-reflection”. When I read this post first time, the term reminded me the concept of granularization of interaction, described by George Siemens here: I would have to […]

#mobiMOOC: Impact of mlearning

I am participating in the mobiMOOC open course for mobile learning development available at and it seemed a natural enough time to reflect on my relationship to mobility as a learning construct, as a facet of learning itself. I began to take stock of all the ways in which mobile itself is infused in my […]