Multilitteratus Incognitus

Despite the fact that I am technically a digital native (BS and meaningless as this term might be) I still cling to paper - perhaps because it's cheap and (up until recently) freely available.  With a plethora of academic articles piling up, and eBooks to read (granted, most are public domain like the Divine Comedy and The Prince), I thought I would shed my reliance on paper this semester and go paper free as much as possible. I am working on a couple of papers, one solo and one with the MobiMOOC Research Team, and there are academic articles that I need to read (or re-read) in order to complete the research. Since I can't print out as much as I did before, I thought this is a perfect time (since we are at the beginning of each research project) to see if paperless is the way to go (for me at least). We are producing digital scholarship (my previous articles can be found on my Scribd account ), but up to now, for me at least, a component of that research was done on paper...l...

This of this blog post as a pre-test: my thoughts on Digital Scholarship prior to reading any of the materials (to be fair, I viewed the intro video by Martin Weller last night).  So this week is Digital Scholarship week on Change MOOC  (is the "c" in this MOOC for "class" or "conference"? lol :-)  ), and the topic on hand is Digital Scholarship; a topic that's been talked about on one of my favorite educational podcasts: Digital Campus . Maybe I am just too literal, but isn't scholarship considered scholarship no matter what the medium? Of course the medium can impose constraints, or it can allow the scholar to include or with with things that are unique to that medium and thus scholarship doesn't just become unidimentional (i.e. papers with words, tables and charts in them) but rather multidimentional, including not just words, charts and tables, but also audio, video, 3D worlds (let's not get in Second Life just now - I don't like ...

I thought it would be great to start a blog post about misconceptions that you've come across about mLearning that you would like to share.  To kick this off here's what I've heard a lot: "you can't even begin to look at mLearning until everyone has an iPad (or other tablet)" FALSE! You can indeed start to look (and implement!) a load of mLearning options.  Good mLearning is not device  dependent - good mLearning (like all learning) is based on a solid needs analysis, a solid learner analysis, and working with what you have that works in the environmental context that you need it to work in.  Sometimes it will be an iPad, other times it might be a Walkman and a Palm Pilot (yeah I know, I purposely picked "antiquated" technologies just to make a point) mLearning is not just  eLearning on a mobile device.

I finally had an opportunity to view the presentation by Dr. Zoraini Wati Abas (video below) for Week 2 of Change11. I must admit that having read the blog posts prior to viewing the presentation did influence how I viewed the presentation.  First I read Jaap's blog post , which lead me to Louise's blog . Both Jaap and Louise had some questions, and I viewed the presentation based on these questions.  Here are some thoughts (by the way, great to "see" you again Jaap!) Do you use SMS for activating student academic behavior because it is cheap or because it is the best way to get results? - by Jaap My feeling is that SMS it just ubiquitous. Given sufficient mobile phone penetration, and free incoming SMS (something that is NOT the case in the US), SMS was the cheapest and most universal way to get something done. Do you trust the answers of the students where they tell you they are very pleased with the SMS? Are the students just being polite? - by Jaap If answer...

I am happy to see that the topic of MOOCs as a language learning tool have come up in Change11! Again, even though I am not a PhD student yet, I am considering topics for a potential dissertation. The idea is that if I have an idea going in, and it's partially developed, I won't be stuck in dissertation purgatory :-) In any case, I've been participating in, and observing, various MOOCs over the past nine months and what's emerged is that different MOOCs take different approaches to the running of the class.  Some are more loose (see eduMOOC) and some are more controlled (I think LAK11 was more controlled), and of course there are other MOOCs that are somewhere in-between those two spectrums.  In thinking of a language learning MOOC (at least my potential dissertation topic), I am thinking of a MOOC that is more on the controlled side. The MOOC is going to be an introduction to Modern Greek, so there are some standards, some criteria, that students would have to m...

Ha! Got you to look! OK! OK!, all juvenile attempts to get attention aside, I don't really mean what I wrote in the title! It was a not-so-clever ploy to get you to this post.  As a matter of fact mLearning is not a fad! Well, I guess if you consider Computers in general to be a fad, then mLearning and mobile devices are a fad too, I guess it depends on your world view.  For me, and for the mainstream mLearning is a nice extension to learning that should be explored and taken advantage of. The main problem with mLearning, at least the main problem I've encountered in my professional life, is that people expect mLearning devices to be just like computers, where you sit down for XX-minutes, you view so many minutes of instructional video or animation, you perform an activity, and you take a test.  This, the mobile device, is not an appropriate modality for this type of learning!  You cannot shoehorn a certain type of pedagogy into the mobile realm....well, I suppos...

OK, so it's week two of ChangeMOOC and I am looking at  the Course Outline which points me to a Google Spreadsheet.  I see that the topic this week is Mobile Learning (über-cool!) and I am asked to go to another page where supposedly I will have access to some content, activities, and other things that one would expect in a learning module.  Now there are two problems here: (1) Too many clicks: Perhaps I am spoiled from CCK11, but CCK11 was much more organized in terms of content.  The Course Outline page for CCK11 gives you links to each weekly module, and each module in turn has recommended readings, viewings, and activities. So, to get from MOOC homepage, to content it's two clicks.  In contrast, Change is three clicks to get to the guest host's blog/webpage/CMS, and then it depends how deeply the content is buried. (2) Clear content postings per week. Now, future weeks may fix this problem, but this week the problem is t...

Ce semestre j’ai décidé a retourner a la classe pour améliorer mon français.  Le dernière fois que j’ai parle français était en 2005 quant j’ai fait des vacances en France. Let dernière fois que j ‘ai écrit quelque chose en français était en 2001 quand j’ai eu une correspondante. Alors, je crois que ma maitrise de français n’est pas bon et j’ai voulais de faire quelque chose pour le remédier. Le professeur était super mais désolément je n’ai pas beaucoup de temps pour aller a la classe ; Alors, j’ai décidé de faire le blogging pour améliorer mon français et de voir des films en français ce semestre ; peut-être je peux écrire des critiques de ces films. Je peux aussi lire les livres que j’aurais lu pour cette classe que je suis pas. Alors, qu’est-que cet expérimente de qui je parle? Je veux voir des film – bon. Je veux écrire des blogs – bon. Ou est l’expérimenté ? Je voudrais que vous, les francophones que lisez ces blogs,  corriger ces blogs. Est-ce-qu’ il y a des erreurs v...

I love MOOCs, because it gives me an opportunity to meet interesting people and read what they have to say.  It's both educational and a discovery tool!  In any case, I read a blog post by Alex Reid today on the aversion to badges (you know, those things that you get for "achieving" stuff in various places and services." (I'd link to the article but my laptop has crashed three times today while trying to link to it :-) - just Google it it's called "welcome to badge world"  ) In any case, I read his article and I actually do not disagree! I think that people have taken credentialing (and badges are a type of credential) to a level that is a bit too far.  They place too much emphasis on the credential rather than what the credential implies. An example of this are academic badges like the degrees one earns. When you look at a human resources job posting you see that emphasis on the degree, rather than the skills implied by attaining such a degree ...

This semester I was planning on returning to the classroom, the language classroom, to get back into French.  The last time I took a formal french class was my senior year in high school and it was fourth year french (mostly literature from what I remember). In any case, my freshman year in college I frequented Yahoo! Chatrooms to practice my french and I did have a pen-pal for a while. Around 1999 our paths diverged and that was the last time I wrote in french (also the last time I regularly "spoke" it as well). In any case, I was planning on taking a 300 level french course on composition and stylistics. I attended a few class sessions and the course was challenging, but just at the right level for someone as rusty as I am. Due to work, and the fact that I just can't sit for 90 minutes two times per week I decided to stop auditing the course and attempt a different method.  I figured that there are enough french speakers on the internet to help me out.  I thought I wo...

ChangeMOOC has started! Even though it's still an introductory week where people get to know each other (should I bother posting a "hello, my name is..." type of blog post?) it is the start of the MOOC for all intents and purposes. The one things that is really striking about this MOOC is the name... change what ? is what I want to know. Granted if you look at the course schedule it's all about education. I guess the subheading for this MOOC is education, learning and technology , so I guess we are changing them, but eduMOOC just finished a few weeks ago, and that was all about Online Learning Today...and Tomorrow . So I guess ChangeMOOC is a superset of what eduMOOC was about?  Either way, the week by week topics look interesting and interest piquing. I was planning on taking some Sloan-C workshops this fall, but between research projects and the ChangeMOOC, I think I won't have time.  Perhaps I will revisit the idea of SloanC workshops later on :-) #chan...

Thanks to Rebecca and her " Does a MOOC need a Needs Analysis? " post I was reminded that I needed to subscribe to George Siemens' blog :-)  George has a recent post titled " Who are MOOCs for? Confused Personal Thoughts " in which he admits that previous MOOCs haven't been user needs driven, but rather driven by the facilitators themselves. His description reminded me a little of BarCamps or CoffeeCamps. It also sheds some lights as to why some MOOCs were better than others.  MobiMOOC and CCK were quite good in my mind, but eduMOOC not so much (I am looking forward to the next iteration of eduMOOC though!) Rebecca has some pretty good questions and insights into this, but I wanted to add my own two cents. I am considering creating a MOOC as part of my PhD dissertation research. Now, it should be said that I am not a PhD student yet, and the PhD program I want to attend hasn't lifted off yet (PhD in Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston - starting proba...