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 w...

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 uni...

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...

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 perh...

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...

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: ...

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 w...

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 ...

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...