Multilitteratus Incognitus

We are nearing the end of CCK11, (and we're starting mobiMOOC at the same time!) and I came across this post by Jaap , asking a few question on how connectivism fits in with with established teaching methods. I've got a few thoughts on the issue... What does a teacher see of connectivism? What will change in education as a result of connectivism? What does a connectivist lesson look like? Connectivist principles, I think, do exist in schools, it just depends on what type of schools you look at. I think Jean Anyon 's commentary, albeit 30 years old at this point, show that there isn't just one type of pedagogy in our schools.  What does a connectivist lesson look like?  I'd say probably something like what is done in Montessori schools . Would this work in public schools? Of course! If we want to throw resources at our schools to pursue this type of teaching and learning. What are the implications of connectivism for the school? If New Brunswick wants to chan...

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted to learn.  I am not sure how face-to-face immersion works, but I assume that online immersion probably works around the same lines.  I'd have to do some more research and looking information up to be sure. In any case, thinking ahead to a PhD, I am wondering if anyone has researched open education, or MOOCs, or both in the field of Applied Linguistics and language learning. This might be something that I would be interested in doing and I am wondering if there are people out there in CCK11 that have learned a language just by interacting with others online (and supplement...

Being on vacation this week, and with little access to a computer and a monitor, my CCK11 involvement is pretty mobile- reading posts and materials on my iPhone and blogging from it as well. I've been using my phone for the same things in the past (email, RSS and PDF reading) so it's not such a change from the norm - with the exception that I am using this tiny screen in a more sustained matter than simply consuming small bites of info at a time. The last couple of CCK11 topics, Power and Openness have been pretty interesting; Power was covered quite a few times in my Applied Linguistics curriculum (in one of the readings Freire mentioned one of my professors: Dr. Donaldo Macedo - pretty cool) so the readings were a nice adjunct to things I had already read. More on Power in a future post, this one is devoted to open educational resources and on one of my efforts. Last semester, my last as a master's level student, I formed a small study group of applied linguistics studen...

I've been mostly lurking these past couple of weeks on CCK11. I've enjoyed reading both assigned readings and reading through blog entries of participants. Most blog entries are in English, which isn't surprising considering that this MOOC is run in English, but at least once, if not, more times per week I've seen postings in Italian , French and Portuguese - I'm sure I've seen Spanish as well, but I really don't remember. I definitely saw some Spanish in LAK11. While I do enjoy reading ( good ) content in English, it's always a breath of fresh air to read it in other languages! I minored in Italian and German as an undergraduate, I self-studied Spanish (in isolation, so my communicative competence isn't that great...but reading is OK) and I took 4 years of French in high school and I spent a year or so in French chat rooms in college (the early days of Yahoo! Chat). For me reading in a second language isn't that difficult - it's ch...

I've posted a new blog post over at the UMassOnline blog with some thoughts about the net gen and teachers knowing their learners. Check it out: click here