Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, eduMOOC starts today! This will be my fourth MOOC, and it seems to be the most chaotic to date, even more chaotic than CCK11! It seems like LAK11, perhaps due to its theme, didn't have many active participants, which made it easier to follow. CCK11 was a but more chaotic, but gRSShopper made it easier to find and prune blog posts of interest to read and comment back on. mobiMOOC was less chaotic than CCK11 (at least for me) because all discussion was in a central place - like in LAK11, but it was a manageable volume of information. eduMOOC seems to have two strikes against it - A TON of volume and it's a bit chaotic. The course is hosted on google groups and it seems like some of the participants don't know where to say their hellos, as a consequence there are many "hello, I am..." threads (in addition to the official thread), and people respond to those which makes thread mushroom out of control and fragment the discussion. I do wonder if this is an...

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is the topic of research, writing, and publishing. If you want to be in academia research and publishing is a must while if you want to be in the private sector it may not be as important (I am guessing it's not - but if you are of differing opinion leave a comment!) In thinking of research and publishing one of the questions that comes to mind is to go at it alone for the most part (i.e. researching and publishing mostly stuff you work on your own, and keep collaboration limited), or to collaborate with people for the most part keeping some special topics for yourself (something that you don't want to share with others or something that is so specialized that you can't collaborate). Having worked in groups, and alone, through four masters programs I haven't come to a conclusion which method I prefer. As a lone wolf I can set the tone and the schedule. If I want to slack off one day but really go at it another ...

Note: I had originally written this for the UMassOnline blog, but since it's not posted yet, I am cross posting here :-) This past December I graduated from the Masters in Applied Linguistics program and I am no longer a formal student [i.e. someone in a degree or certificate granting program]. This doesn't mean that I haven't been busy.  A relatively new phenomenon in learning has cropped up in recent years - that of the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC for short). These past few months I've been taking part in several different MOOCs, dealing with topics such as Learning Analytics [LAK11], Connected Knowledge [CCK11], and more recently mLearning [ mobiMOOC ]. There are other MOOCs that I decided to skip this time around (Digital Story Telling and PLENK).  Some MOOCs use traditional Learning Management Systems like Moodle, while others use a more distributed architecture, using freely available Web 2.0 tools to create content, comment on this content, and...