Multilitteratus Incognitus

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design degree) and my comprehensive exams (for Applied Linguistics) to pay too much attention to PLENK and CCK09. With formal schooling done (at least for now) and with no courses to take at the university I decided to experiment with MOOCs.   In January a friend and colleague, @cdetorres, recommended LAK11 - Learning Analytics. This was to be my first MOOC. It was quite interesting, I did learn quite a lot, and it just highlighted that I was interested in a topic, learning analytics, that I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering. The course was quite fast paced; a lot of things to do, in what seemed

Merry Christmas to all! A little holiday fun from PhD comics 😊 - Posted using BlogPress from my Newton 3000 (iPad)

I am taking a break from #change11 to continue some work on a paper that's been in my mind for a while but I haven't had much time to work on just yet.  The overall topic is a proposal for a foursquare  type of service for academic environments. Location Based Services fall a bit short because GPS doesn't figure out what rooms you are in, so the article is going to propose a hybrid of Location Based Services (LBS) with Event Based Services (EBS) with a variety of outcomes including incidental learning opportunities, increase in school spirit and student engagement. The idea is still nascent, but I am getting there. As part of my literature review I came across Vicki Trowler's Student Engagement Literature Review  (hey, what better place to get an overview of the field than a recent literature review?).  It was an interesting read and it pointed me to some sources that I want to explore in greater depth. The thing that stood out to me was that there is no universal a

This morning in the local news there was a story about MITx , an set of courses that are designed to be done through the Web, with no face to face component that people can take for free.  While the course will have an assessment component, if people want the credential of having  taken and passed that course there will be a nominal fee for logging into a secure environment to take additional exams to certify their mastery of the subject. While this isn's really a MOOC, it is an interesting experiment in education.  The resources for these courses will need to be out in the public domain or under a creative commons license in order to make things work in free environment.  Additionally, unlike OCW which I view more as a repository of "things" that a course contains (which you could roll into a full fledged course by yourself), MITx courses will be designed  courses for this environment. Not many details are available yet, but I know that I don't do as well in a so

I was reading an article on tablet computing that @ rjhogue  had emailed me and it brought to mind (again) the need to be able to rethink your processes and your affordances when working with a new medium. For example, looking at eBooks, most eBooks are just text - which is fine, but it doesn't utilize the medium (iPad) very well.  Now take a look at Operation Ajax , a graphic novel on the iPad, based on real life events, that really takes advantage of the medium.  The graphics aren't static (so no plain page turns), it incorporates actual film reel footage from the time period, and it includes images and recently declassified files, which allow you to jump out of the narrative to get additional info on the characters, the back story and other facts important to the story. This is a good example not just for comics and books, but also for eLearning! CIA : Operation Ajax for the iPad from Cognito Comics on Vimeo .

Woohoo! A paper I wrote earlier this year (that has been bumping around in my head for a while) has made it to (virtual) paper :-) My Digital Natives paper has been published in the Journal of Online Teaching and Learning (a journal I've been reading for the past few years, at least since I got into instructional design) Abstract: A lot has been written about the digital native since the coining of the term about ten years ago. A lot of what has been originally written by the digital native has been taken as common sense and has been repeated many times in many educational contexts, but until recently the true nature of the digital native has not been explored. Because the myth of the digital native is still alive and well, this article aims to examine the findings that have come out of recent research with regard to digital natives and their true nature, as well as turn a critical gaze onto the assumptions, taken as common sense knowledge, of what the characteristics of digit

The other day I was thinking of the research methods class that I may be teaching in the spring (as of yet there are only two students signed up) and I was reading a research article for the literature review for the MobiMOOC paper that the MRT is working on.  In this article quite a few things correlated, but I they didn't necessarily cause each other. To be fair, the researchers did not claim that there was causation, but I thought that this article would be a good one to analyze, especially for people new to critical review of research literature.

Yesterday I got a note, presumably for an editor, to ask me to submit any manuscripts I have to the Journal of Strategies & Governance. The first thing that raised the "WTF" flag was that it wasn't just an email, but an email that contained a lot of quoted "Re:" text.  Well, I thought, it may have been an undergraduate student who was asked to send this out and didn't know that they had to delete the other text. Then I went to the, googled it just in case it was a phishing scam, to see this: I felt like a character at the end of a Lab Rats episode (I loved that series...I wish it would come back!) where someone goes "What the f..." (queue music). This is a journal on its fourth volume?  What? It's got flashing logos from the series " the event " (another great series that was cancelled).  Was the journal's website something that was contracted to a high school student using microsoft word?  I don't know if I should

I was reading this most recent PhD comic last night and I found it quite funny, partly because I think it's true.  There are quite a few times when I get the same, or similar, reaction when I tell people that I work in academia, or that I am still pursuing my education.  Most Greeks (and any other ethnicity I've come across for that matter) seems to view education as something that should be done  by a certain age. My own experiences are that people think that maybe around 28 you are really pushing it.  Time to reform our views of education and the "you-are-too-old-for-school" mentality ;-)

It's been an interesting run for Change11, and we are now at Week 15 with the topic of Authentic learning.   Next week, and the week after next, are break weeks, so no new content, at least from a subject matter expert perspective.  I wonder if the daily mailer will still be coming to our inboxes, or whether that will take a break as well. I think I've reached my natural saturation point with course materials for this course. Readings, both this week's seed post, and other participants' blog posts, have accumulated in my ReadItLater account which I have little (mental) energy to read.  Perhaps I will that this opportunity to go out an play in the cold, yet sunny, weather and re-energize my creative batteries :-) By the way...I thought that this week's topic was authentic learning.  I just checked the seed post (just to see how long it was) and it seems like another mLearning topic.   I've added the free eBook on mLearning to my to-read list but perhaps I

In a previous post I wrote about a call for paper from Language Learning & Technology for their special issue on Mobile Language Learning.  I've been thinking about mLearning, MOOCs and Language Learning for a while as a potential dissertation topic (when I get started with PhD program anyways).  I was thinking that this would be a good place to start building a frameworks for mMOOCs (mobile massive online open courses) that have a specific focus on teaching language. Here is an initial title and abstract: Title:  The intersection of mLearning, MOOCs and Language Learning: A Framework for SLA using mMOOCs Abstract: In recent years Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), based on connectivist, and some times connectivist and constructivist, principles, have been the center of attention for educational researchers. At the same time the idea of mobile learning (mLearning), activities that allow individuals to learn through a compact digital portable device that the indiv

A month (or more?) ago @cdetorres tweets me (or was it IM? I don't remember) about submitting proposal for the 2012 NERCOMP conference . I had gotten a notice about this, but I had completely forgotten about it, and I was working on a MobiMOOC related paper. In any case, the deadline was that evening and my brain was sufficiently tired to not want to do work. Despite this I ended up putting a proposal together, with @cdetorres as co-presenter and he did the same. Well, great news!  Both of our proposals got accepted.  Of course we both goofed. I wanted mine to be a presentation session, not a poster session, and he wanted his to be something else, not a lightining round. We must have clicked on the wrong things (see? when you're tired you make mistakes, lol). In any case  things however worked out since neither of us has done a poster session nor a lightning round, so it will be a dual learning experience. @cdetorres's Lightning Round Title & Abstract: Taking Soc

This week's Change11 topic on Slow Learning reminds me of discussions I've had with friends and colleagues about Instructional Design in general.  When I started my instructional design career officially and went to school to learn about ID, my university taught the Dick and Carey model . As part of the course my instructor, Mary Hopper , has us examining other models as well for our group projects and ADDIE , ASSURE , ARCS * and HPT models came up and we discussed them by themselves (and maybe in relation to Dick & Carey, I don't remember). What I do remember, is that subsequently there had been discussions about which model is "better" (among students and graduates) and since Dick & Carey is what the program taught and what we had most exposure to, it is the model that was deemed "better" by those discussing it.  Me...not so much.  It's not that I think that there is one model that is better than the other, and I don't think that

This week on Change11 our host facilitator is Clark Quinn author of Designing mLearning  and of  Mobile Academy . It's interesting. My initial exposure to Clark has been through twitter  and through these two books.  I read Designing of mLearning as a potential text for a college level mLearning course (I like it for what it's worth) and I currently have the Mobile Academy on to to-read list on GoodReads *.  In any case the topic for this week is Slow Learning , read his seed post for the week here . Even though Clark writes about corporate training (or so it seems from the blog post) I think that the ideas are good for both K-12 an Higher Education. There seems to be a race to cram as much information as possible in as little time as possible. In higher education there have been calls for a 3 year Bachelors degree, which is achievable, but it could be done poorly (i.e. through a banking model of education ) or it might be done in an good way where knowledge and skills stick

Αυτή την εβδομάδα στο Change MOOC, ο προσκεκλημένος εμπειρογνώμων είναι ο Clark Quinn, o συγγραφέας του Designing mLearning και του Mobile Academy και το θέμα της εβδομάδος είναι η Αργή Μάθηση. Ο Clark έρχεται από τον εταιρικό κόσμο και βλέπει την μάθηση από το κάτοπτρο της επέκτασης και της βελτίωσης του ανθρώπινου δυναμικού, αλλά πιστεύω πως οι απόψεις τους έχουν κύρος στην παιδεία (τουλάχιστον στην ανώτατη παιδεία οπού βρίσκομαι). Κατά την άποψή του (τουλάχιστο απ' ότι καταλαβαίνω από το δημοσίευμά του) ο τρόπος με τον οποίον σκεφτόμαστε την μάθηση είναι λάθος. Την σκεφτόμαστε ως ένα γεγονός, μια ειδική εκδήλωση, που ίσως να είναι ξεκάρφωτη από την καθημερινότητα μας. Τα μοντέλα ανάπτυξης μάθησης (instructional design models) είναι επίσης ελλιπείς για διαφόρους λόγος ( δείτε το δημοσίευμά του ). Για παράδειγμα το μοντέλο ADDIE (και το μοντέλο Dick & Carey το οποίο διδάχτηκε στο δικό μου πρόγραμμα) αντιμετωπίζει την διδασκαλία ως μάθημα και δεν λαμβάνει υπ’ όψιν τον μα

Life and Death Screenshot This week is gaming and simulation week (if you haven't guessed from the posts that I've been posting and responding to) on Change11 with guest Clark Aldrich . As usual, I've skipped the live session since there is more than enough content on the blogs and what's been provided by the guest facilitators. The reading matter for this week is a short book by Clark titled Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich way . The book was quite succinct and on the small side, perhaps an abbreviated version of  The Complete guide to Simulations and Serious Games , in other words a good quick read to get you situated in what one needs to do in order to get simulations off the ground for instructional purposes.  This book, for me, was quite interesting because it bridged my computer science and UI design backgrounds, with my management background, and my instructional design background - it was pretty cool to see all of these converge in an area (simulations) t

Rhizomatic Week Achievement in Change11 An interesting brainstorm item on gaming, motivation and achievement came up while reading and commenting on Jaap's blog. This particular blog is about badges (or achievements) in MOOCs . Interestingly enough I also saw Dave Cormier's tweet about having a badge on his blog (seemed like a tongue in cheek post). Serious, or not, I've included the image in this post. In any case, if you scroll down Jaap commented: In my opinion badges are not fit for MOOCs. Mobimooc did give a certificate for students that finished the MOOC and published, etc. (Ignatia, if you read this, thanks) Maybe, a badge would destroy the fun of paricipating. which was followed by Jenny's comment: Sometimes formal recognition stifles growth. Sounds counter intuitive but how often does fame smother new talent? Can a badge become an end in itself and diminish the creativity within the person? For that matter, does an artist seek a badge when moved to

While looking up the most recent issue of  Language Learning and Technology I came across their most recent call for papers. This time around the topic is mobile language learning, both topics I am interested in!  I was wondering if there are any change MOOC participants out there who are interested in mLearning, and Language Learning to work as part of a collaborative research team on the theme :-) Here's the actual call for papers: There has been increased interest in portable technologies which allow learners to access tools for learning languages in virtually any time or place that suits them. The quickly developing functionalities of mobile phones, MP3 players, laptop and tablet computers, and other hand-held devices with touch screen technology mean that the range of possibilities for language learning has greatly diversified. GodwinJones (2011), for example, points out that iPhone and Android phones have ushered in a phenomenal expansion in the development of Apps for j

The other day, while I was on the train and on my way home I was reading the most recent Change11 blog posts. I was going to comment on each one of these blog posts individually, but I realized that there as a thread developing in each one that made them fit together pretty nicely. First, I read brainysmurf's " if you don't like messy learning don't play in the snow " post.  Brainysmurf comments on Jon Dron's comment that MOOCs are "not easy, this [therefore] will be demotivating and inefficient." Brainy says the following: Wow, that scares me because I think he’s right! If learning (in a mooc or elsewhere) is not easy, it seems that a number of learners will lose motivation. What does that say about the willingness of an individual or group to risk, to fail, to learn from failure, to get up and try again? Does *everything* in our world have to be faster, more efficient and require less effort now? To what degree do we actually learn from an

Χτες το απόγευμα, κατά το απογευματινό ταξιδάκι προς το σπίτι, διάβαζα τα δημοσιεύματα του Jon , της Jenny , του Matthias  και του John (αν θέλετε να τα διαβάσετε, διαβάστε τα σε αυτή την σειρά). Το γενικό θέμα σε όλα αυτά τα δημοσιεύματα είναι το πως (και πόσοι) συμμετέχουν σε ένα MOOC. Αν παρατηρήσει κανείς τον ημερήσιο εγκύκλιο του MOOC θα δεις πως σε γενικές γραμμές τα ίδια δέκα άτομα συμμετέχουν συχνά, και που και που θα δεις κανένα καινούργιο πρόσωπο. Αυτό δεν σημαίνει πως δεν υπάρχουν άλλοι στο MOOC που διαβάζουν και επεξεργάζονται καθημερινά τα δημοσιεύματα άλλων· απλός δεν γνωρίζουμε πόσα άτομα υπάρχουν που παρακολουθούν και πόσα ήρθαν την πρώτη εβδομάδα φερ' ειπείν, είδαν κάτι και έφυγαν. Η αλήθεια είναι το κάθε MOOC είναι διαφορετικό (όπως και το κάθε μάθημα που δεν είναι MOOC) και το πως μετριέται αυτός που είναι παρόν θα αλλάζει αναλόγως με το μάθημα και την θεματολογία. Για παράδειγμα, ένα άλλο MOOC, το ds106 (ψηφιακή διήγηση), ο κάθε συμμετέχων έπρεπε να παρα

Over the holiday, at some point I came across this blog post asking how much longer will (college) degrees mean something . It was a short, but interesting post, and something that I've thought about in the past; not in reference to how much longer will college degrees have a monopoly on accreditation of individuals, but rather I've been pondering  what  does a college degree mean. The impetus for this post seem's to be Stanford's AI MOOC , which apparently will give out certificates of completion to those who participate and do the work.  Jeff, the author of the other blog posses the following questions which I wanted to tackle a bit: When do we start hiring for the knowledge you have rather than the degree you hold? We used to do that, and we ought  to be doing that now. One of my concentrations while an MBA student was Human Resources Management, and as a student one of the key things is that the piece of paper doesn't matter, but rather it's the skills

This paper seems to have made the rounds while I was away from blogging last week, but I thought it would be worthwhile  posting it on my blog just the same :-) The second paper of the MRT (mobiMOOC research team) is now available through the  International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning (IRRODL) and is titled " Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education ."  Here's the abstract: In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational

The MobiMOOC research team has been working on our third paper, further analyzing aspects of MOOCs, and MobiMOOC in specific.  Our forthcoming paper tackles the topic of emotive language usage in MOOC discussions as a predictor of continued, or future, participation in the course. We are currently in the process of going over and refining the paper, but I don't want to give away the punchline before it's done in its totality :-) In any case, I've taken the lead on this project to see which journal we can publish our findings in.and I have found a journal whose theme is online learning and asynchronous networks, which fits in with MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy (although, to be honest I don't know how much MOOC pedagogy there is out there...perhaps something to put our heads together about). Anyway, I was looking over the author submission guidelines to see what sort of format they wish to have us submit our paper in terms of citations, footnotes* and text formatting; and

I tried making that rhyme, to come up with a catchy title, but it didn't really work out... Oh well, maybe next time ;-) In any case, in the Research_MOOC Mailing list Alan Selig had an interesting question which I thought I would poke at for a while until I came to an answer (or at least something to add to the discussion) Alan Selig One final "wonderment" from my limited understanding of Connectivist Learning theory:  If the reflecting and remixing never leaves the head of the lurker, except perhaps in their own behavior, is it still learning? If the wider community never receives a benefit does that disqualify the experience as being learning? Well...I think that there are different levels of looking at this. First of all, is it learning if it never leaves the brain/mind of the lurker? Strictly speaking, if the "learning" never manifests itself outside of the mind, I don't think it's learning. This manifestation doesn't have to involve o

This week in Change11 our host is Jon Dron (rhymes with Tron ;-) )and to topic is Soft technologies, hard technologies and everything in between . While reading the seed post I got a distinct mental image of Steve Job's voice reading Jon's initial post - it had a jobsian feel to it. The article is an interesting epistemological view of technology; technology being very broad by definition since pedagogy is also taken to be a technology. I honestly don't know what to make of this week, just yet anyway. It was an interesting read, it did engage me mentally, but where to go from here?  I suppose the activity itself might be a good starting point... So Jon asks us to ... Provide at least one possible educational use for an unenhanced standard email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express that requires nothing more than that email client and its usual supporting infrastructure (network connection, operating system etc are fine, but no other distinct applications lik

The other day I posted some thoughts based on Leahgrrl's original post on adjuncts and technology . Tony Bates also posted thoughts on the issue around the topic of accreditation . Between these blog posts, and comments to all three of them, the mental gears started to slowly turn and think of additional thoughts around the issue.  The first one being accreditation. Tony writes that through his experiences being part of an accreditation agency, adjunct labor is something that they pay attention to when new  programs apply to become accredited, but then there is no follow up.  I know our campus had a recent AQUAD review* for all programs on our campus, and  both internal and external reviewers viewed departmental submissions of the resumes of these departments (history of department, course offerings, student information, course reviews, faculty reviews, student evaluations of courses and instructors,  etc.), in short everything an accreditor would need to see in order to approv

I was reading the blog posts that were posted yesterday on Change MOOC on the topic of Learning in times of Abundance and it suddenly hit me*, this learning in times of abundance reminds me a lot of the research I did on digital natives (article forthcoming). Yes technology (seems to be) ubiquitous, and so is information, but as   Eric Duval admitted in his intro post: Really big caveat: of course, all of this abundance talk is only relevant to us who are the privileged few, who do not need to worry about where we will sleep this evening, or how we will feed our children… I thought of a few more caveats, one of which I mentioned before, that of literacy. Abundance is almost useless without the literacy to use it...sort of like the old saying: so much sea and yet I am thirsty (OK, I paraphrased a bit right there). The other thing that I was reminded of is actual usage of this abundance.  In a lot of the good digital native research† that I came across looked at factors such as how

This week's topic, as I mentioned in my initial post, is learning in times of abundance. Eric Duval, in his definition of abundance, goes for the digital element, but I wanted to focus on something  a little more mundane - the "disconnected" world of the library.  The fact of the matter is that our abundance of information is no new thing. Some may go back as far back as the invention of the printing press, but I won't since buying books still costs money to the individual and thus, while there is an abundance in materials, it's not abundant to you because you've got limited money.  Instead I want to focus on something quaint - the library. The library has provided us with a lot of abundant information, for both learning and pleasure.  Through various consortia, if your own town library (or libraries) don't carry the item you want, they can get it for you, usually for no extra charge, so you can have access to whatever material you need. In high school

I was reading a post by Leahgrrl the other day titled Adjunct Technology, or why I can't figure out Blackboard . It was quite an interesting post, and not something completely foreign to me - I've read my fair share of adjunct posts on the Chronicle of Higher Ed , and Inside Higher Ed , as well as having known many adjuncts personally. This past week, while attending the Sloan-C annual conference (virtually) I saw a session on developing faculty, and one of the institutions (the name escapes me now) had faculty take an 8 week long training seminar which focused on pedagogy, but the final "product" of the course was a full course on Blackboard (or whatever LMS the institution used). The faculty were not paid for the workshop, but they were paid a stipend for creating the course on Blackboard (so I guess they were sort of reimbursed for the time they spend on this project in some fashion). What should be pointed out was that not all institutions do this - I think only

Last week I was a virtual attendee at the annual Sloan-C conference. It was fun and educational enough to spend 3 days watching live streamed sessions, and a saturday catching up on some recorded ones. The recorded ones are not as fun since you don't have the twitter stream going :-)  In any case, I was watching the session on State Perspectives on Online Education and it seemed to me that there still is tension between the online side of the house and the face-to-face education side; namely that the f2f side doesn't want online to be "poaching"  "their" students, and in some cases refusing to share resources.  This was a major #facepalm moment for me because it's essentially two sides of the same organization fighting each other - which is really counter productive...so I tweeted: Competition between online&f2f jeez!Can we get over it already &recognize that OL or f2f doesnt matter.Its just one campus! #aln2011 Which lead to a brief exchange

Je sais que cette semaine n'est pas fini, mais je ne sais pas si j'ai autres choses à dire pour ce sujet. Alors, maintenant je pense à le sujet de change MOOC de la semaine prochaine. Le thème de la semaine prochaine est l'apprentissage dans le temps d'abondance. Vraiment je ne sais pas que veut dire Éric Duval (notre facilitateur pour cette semaine) mais je me demande: ce qui est en abondance? L'information? Non, ça ne pourrait être correct parce que nos bibliothèques ont eu beaucoup des livres et information pour beaucoup de temps! Vrai, une bibliothèque n'as pas toutes les livres du monde, mais quelqu'un que veut quelque chose que son bibliothèque n'as pas, cette personne peux demander une livre d'une autre bibliothèque utilisant le "ILL" (interlibrary loan). Je pense que nous avons eu l'abondance en information depuis Gutenberg et l'invention de l'imprimerie; et bien sûr l'existence de la système des bibliothèques.

The other day I was writing about changing the PhD  and Jenny wrote an informative reply to my post informing me that in the UK there are actually three types of PhD programs, the ones that I had experience with (though my researching of PhD programs): the "enter with a dissertation topic;" those that have required course components and a dissertation (what I would term "North American style"); and finally a type of PhD program called PhD by Publication. Being curious, I spent some time looking into what is meant by this type of PhD program and it added to my readitlater reading list (along with the Change11 posts that I wanted to read that day).  I have to say that  I was sufficiently intrigued by this method of getting a PhD. As Jenny alluded it, it is hard to get into this type of program since it seems like it's either reserved for staff members of the university (so perhaps as a way of getting required credentials for career advancement having already pro