Multilitteratus Incognitus

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

Το περασμένο σαββατοκύριακο είδα πως είχαμε μια νέα μονάδα στο Change11, με θέμα την ριζωματική γνώση. Ήθελα να γράψω κάτι περί αυτού (γιατί πάνω κάτω συμφωνώ με αυτή την επιστημολογία αλλά δεν μου ερχόταν να γράψω κάτι, λίγο δύσκολο να γράψεις για κάτι που ήδη συμφωνείς…και φυσικά δεν ήθελα να γράψω μια περίληψη αυτών που διάβασα. Αυτό με έκανε να αρχίσω να σκέφτομαι το πως τρέφονται και μεγαλώνουν αυτές οι ρίζες. Γιατί μεγαλώνουν προς μία κατεύθυνση και όχι άλλη, ή πως (με τι ακατέργαστα υλικά) αρχίζουν τα τρέφονται γενικός. Μετά σκέφτηκα την παρομοίωση της ανάπτυξης της γνώσης ως γυμναστήριο. Μπορεί να πηγαίνεις και να γυμνάζεσαι, αλλά αν δεν έχεις κάποιο μεγαλύτερο σκοπό (π.χ. να πάρεις χρυσό στην άρση βαρών) τότε γυμνάζεις το κορμί σου (πάνω κάτω) ίσια. Αν έχεις κάποιο σκοπό στο νου, τότε κάποια σημεία του σώματός σου είναι πιο γυμνασμένα από άλλα. Τώρα που πάω με αυτή την παρομοίωση δεν ξέρω - το σκέφτηκα και το καταγράφω. Απλός μου έκανε αυτή η σκέψη - πως τρέφεται και μεγ

I have to say that this is, hands down, the most cool thing that I've seen a participant do in any MOOC I've ever been!  Kudos to Guilia Forsythe ! Here is Guilia's Challege: So, I’m issuing a remix challenge. Record some audio for my doodle: using your PC, Mac, mobile, soundcloud, YouTube, etc. (your tool of choice, etc.), while watching the video and post it here for me. Or download the video using MPEG StreamClip and do whatever you like to it! (Update: I’ve made a version without audio for easier remixing) Maybe me and some fellow Greeks in education can come up with some hip-hop lyrics for this ;-)

This post is only peripherally related to Rhizomatic Knowledge (so you can skip it if you want ;-)   ) Yesterday evening I was looking over my twitter stream and I saw a post re-tweeted by George Siemens on what to say when someone asks you "should I do a PhD? " This post got me thinking (again) about the differences between a US (or perhaps a North American) PhD program and a UK PhD program.  In the US (and I assume Canada?) PhD programs (that I've looked at anyway) seem to be like a Masters++.  Most programs (again the ones that I have explored) are around 60 credits (which is about the equivalent of 2 Masters Degrees), which include required coursework, elective courses, research methodology courses and a dissertation.  If you enter the PhD program with a Masters degree in the field you can get some coursework waived (but how much is waived is really up to institutional policies). By contrast a UK PhD, at least my understanding of it from when I was looking at Ph

This week's topic in ChangeMOOC is brought to us by Dave Cormier and the topic is Rhizomatic knowledge , rhizome coming from the Greek word for "root." (OK, that's my last "big fat Greek wedding" moment for this blog post :-)  ) Dave tells us that the idea comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book "a thousand plateaus" and the idea, at least according to Deleuze and Guattari is that in a rhizome "ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-replicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process." It's quite an interesting epistemological view of knowledge and I can see how ideas are off-shoots of others thoughts and idea. We see this every day in sayings like "going off on a tangent or the infamous "six degrees to..." game. Everything is connected (which goes nicely with my previous blog post). Looking at Rhizomatic knowledge from a literal perspective, there may be no end (sinc

This week's Change topic was a nice break for me, allowed me to take a moment, catch up with other people's blogs, and the weekly session (which I made an attempt to visit while it was live, but I somehow missed it) was loose enough to allow for this break. In any case, the topic of this week was "Triangulating, weaving and connecting our learning." I've written before about disconnected knowledge (although I forget if it was a blog post here, somewhere else, or a comment on someone else's blog...) and disconnected knowledge is an issue when teaching and learning. One can't learn facts and figures in isolation, they are meaningless and we end up forgetting them anyway. If we can put them to use, that is one form of making these facts meaningful to us and thus providing for a mechanism to remember them. This week's topic reminded me of a mentor that I had in one of my master's programs. When I was a first-semester graduate student in the instru

'Tis the season to be thinking about which courses you will be registering for spring courses; unless you're graduating this December, in which case let me be the first to congratulate you! :-)  The spring course list is now out, check it out on our discussion board.  When I was a student I always liked to have a syllabus for the courses I was thinking about registering for so that I could get an idea of what the course entailed and therefore figure out what the best combination of courses was for me for that specific semester.  To that end, I wanted to write a little about INSDSG697: Research Methods for Instructional Designers which I will be teaching this coming spring. This is also an opportunity to get the reading materials ahead of time so you could prepare before the start of the semester (if you want to do that sort of thing - did when I was a student, but it's not everyone's cup-o-tea :-)  ) Why research methods? Our program has a balance of theory and pract

I viewed this week's live session yesterday afternoon (I really wish there were an export to MP3 function, I know WIMBA, one of the products going into Blackboard Collaborate allows this...but anyway - this isn't the MOOC facilitator's fault). In any case, I don't have much to say this week about the topic, so I will be catching up with things that other people write. I was brainstorming the other day and posted this on twitter Idea for longer MOOCs like #change11, factor in one "break" or "catch-up" week for every 4 weeks of content and it seems like a few people liked this idea.  If you look at the Change MOOC schedule  you will see that it is a year-long MOOC, formatted around traditional Western university semesters (fall and spring) with a traditional Western Christian 2-week "break" around Christmas and New Year.   It seems like the scheduling design of MOOCs can be examined through the lens of Change. Many people like the dip-

Since Week 8 of Change11 has yet to start (materials seem no where to be found) I thought it would be worth going back and commenting on my previous post on MOOC summative evaluations . The question posed by Alan Selig was how to get summative evaluations from MOOC participants when you have dip-in-jump-out  model for most MOOCs; I say most  because at least the language MOOC I will be designing won't be so much of a dip-in-jump-out -people could, but if you are a true n00b in the language   you might have problems if you skip a week since language is cumulative. In any case, my first step would be to ask do we need an assessment and why?   Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that we don't need assessments in MOOCs, but rather we need to rethink the assessment (as both Mark and Jane commented on in my previous post).  What do we aim to accomplish with an assessment? Is it for us (organizers) or for the them (the participants)? What form  of assessment is best suited for t