Introducing Chapters from the TEC-VARIETY Book One Day at a Time:
As detailed in my most recent blog post back on July 24, 2014 (2 months ago), my new book, written with Dr. Elaine Khoo from the University of Waikato, was published in May 2014 (though a prepublication version was posted online 3 months earlier). It is titled: "Adding Some TEC-VARIETY: 100+ Activities for Motivating and Retaining Learners Online." This book project took more than 10 years to plan and 3 years to write. Hence, I am glad it is done. I am even more delighted to bring it to you for free!
During the next few weeks, I will be offering sample paragraphs from the start of each chapter. I will try to do one per day. Again, I want to remind you that the entire book is free as a PDF document at the book homepage and so are each of the 15 chapters. To date, more than 21,500 people have downloaded the book and over 13,000 have downloaded specific chapters. You can also find a link to the book from my personal homepage.
As an experiment, I self-published the book with Amazon CreateSpace. I also used my book publishing website OpenWorldBooks.com which I forgot that I owned. My amazing son Alex did the book cover. If interested, you can purchase paperback or softcover versions of this book for under $15 USD in Amazon and for the Kindle for under $10 USD via Amazon.
See below for a opening part of the Preface. Elaine and I hope that you enjoy the book. Below is the section of the book that I am sharing today. I will share more of it in the coming days and weeks.
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Preface to TEC-VARIETY (Note: this is just the first three paragraphs as a teaser or tickler).
Ki te kahore he whakakitenga ka ngaro te iwi.
Translation: Without foresight or
vision the people will be lost.
—Kingi Tawhiao Potatau te
Wherwhero, demonstrating the urgency
of unification and strong Maori leadership
The Web of Learning
Many ideas and events led to the
development of the TEC-VARIETY framework and the 100+ activities for motivating
and retaining online learners described in this book. Much of it has its roots
in the mid-1980s, long before most educators had ever heard of online learning.
At the time, Bonk was, in fact, a deeply
bored accountant working in a high-technology company. In his spare time, he
enrolled in paper-based correspondence and television courses as well as
outreach and extension courses to qualify for graduate school in educational
psychology at the University of Wisconsin. During these courses, he learned
much content knowledge in education as well as psychology. Perhaps more
important, Bonk gained an appreciation for the multiple modes of educational
delivery as well as the varied ways in which learners could access courses, and
then change or improve their lives. When online learning began taking off a
little over a decade later, he coordinated several national research projects
on the state of e-learning and blended learning in both higher education and
corporate training in the United States. His research soon entered into K–12
and military training settings and then expanded globally.
In each project, many benefits and
challenges regarding online learning were documented. For instance, as with
centuries of correspondence and face-to-face (F2F) courses, most online courses
initially relied on text alone. There was often a cookie-cutter or
one-size-fits-all mentality of the right way to do things and often a favored
instructional design model that would win the day. Such is the history of the
instructional design field. As was soon apparent, however, prescriptive forms
of instruction belonged to the previous world of scant learning resources and
limited selections; they were not applicable to an open learning world housing
vast resources, choices, and opportunities to learn.
Fast-forward to the age of the Web 2.0 in the second
decade of the twenty-first century. We live in a world rich with golden nuggets
of free and open learning content as well as technologies for interacting and
collaborating about this content. Not too surprisingly, relying on
prescriptions and preset paths can lead to boredom and protests. There might
also be contempt for instructors who are unwilling to allow individuals to
learn as they do in more informal settings where they might rely on Twitter feeds,
text messages, online news and reports, mobile applications, Facebook postings,
and shared online video. Today’s learners also want instruction to be ...(see free book for more...)
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Note: for the rest of the Preface and the entire Adding Some TEC-VARIETY book, you can find it FREELY available (and the entire book as well at the book homepage or you can purchase it via Amazon. Comments and questions are always welcome as are stories and examples of how you use the ideas in the book (just write to: curt at worldisopen.com).
Labels: Amazon CreateSpace, free book, motivation, online pedagogy, preface, retention, TEC-VARIETY, The Web of Learning |
