Multilitteratus Incognitus

A weird thing happened the other day. I was on my Google+ profile, looking to get the URL for my Google Reader Shared Items . By mistake I tapped on the URL for my google scholar profile and I noticed that one of my articles had a citation. A citation? A citation! For one of my co-authored articles? It seemed so!  But who would cite us? Don't get me wrong, I believe that the quality of the work I put out, and the quality of work that my collaborators put out, is exceptional. On the other hand, I am a young academic and I really don't expect anyone to be citing us this soon. The paper that was cited was our recent IRRODL paper on Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education  and it was cited in Levy & Schrire's The Case of a Massive Open Online Course at a College of Education . I have to say, in addition to excitement (about getting cited), I also had a small degree of paranoia.  I know my information is out there, heck...

Well, actually, it's the start of two new MOOCs! I know that Change11 and DS106 are still going, but change11 seems to be on life support. It seems to me anyway that the same 4-5 people are posting, and even though there are interesting people in these final weeks, most people have moved on, which is too bad. I still read the daily digest, and those 4-5 people post some thought provoking stuff, but I just have nothing to add to the conversation, so I lurk :-) With DS106 I don't feel that creative (which is a bummer), so I've resolved that once the summer comes and I have more mental bandwidth (too many work projects taking up space now) I plan on doing two challenges every week and work through the assignments in the summer months. I've wanted to get a podcast off the ground for a while, so doing something for DS106 should kill two birds with one stone ;-) Anyone interested in doing a "MOOC Talk Weekly" with me? LOL :-) Anyway, so what are these two ne...

I am not sure if this counts as a MOOC, we'll see :-) In any case, I got this notice through coursesites.com the other day (I use coursesites to teach my research methods course this semester), and it seems interesting - at least I am curious about it. Here's the link to register for the course  in case you are interested. Free, Open Course With Dr. Curt Bonk:  Enroll Now Please join us in  CourseSites   for a unique opportunity to learn with Dr. Bonk -- and from each other -- in our first open course focused on increasing student engagement and motivation online. We know your time is valuable and limited, so in this course you choose your level of participation. Whether you simply drop in or fully engage, we hope to see you online! Course Title :  Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success Description : Motivating students and creating community within blended and online learning environments are crucial to academic achieveme...

Last week I had a conversation with Lou McGill, a researcher collecting data for the Change11 MOOC. Our conversation was quite interesting and it seemed to be revolving around learner self-awareness and goal setting. I did take th change MOOC survey, but I have no idea what my responses were when I took it - it seems like such a long time ago (I know I have a copy of the responses, I am just too lazy to look them up). In talking with Lou, I am wondering what sort of goals (or non goals) oth participants of MOOCs have. For example, none of the MOOCs I've participated in (except for DS106) we're MOOCs where I explicitly set goals for myself. I participated (and continue to participate) out of curiosity about the topic and the medium. If I get something out of it (in tms of declarative knowledge) OK, if not, that's OK too, because I will probably get a lead on an interesting research article to read, or I will interact with interersting people. I look forward to reading what ...

Recently I read an article on the Chronicle of higer education on Program vs Technology . It was interesting, I'll give it that. It's just that recently (last couple of years) geeks both the blogosphere and the twittersphere seem to be longing for a time when computer science was taught in all of our schools (high school and specifically in this article University), and we've moved away from a "computer science for all" approach, or we've severely dumbed it down, by introducing those silly office applications. In a previous blog post I also had commented on a similar story lamenting the fact that schools weren't teaching kids programming language in school and the author had taken so much away from learning a programming language (BASIC I think) that it's inconceivable that kids aren't taught programming (now if only I could easily find that blog post). In any case, some of these commentators and bloggers are clamoring for a time that didn't ...

Yesterday and the day before, the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) was hosting a spring focus session on learning analytics .  I have to admit that drew me to this talk (in addition to being interested in analytics of course!) was the talk that George Siemens presented at this ELI to kick things off.  The first day was quite productive, but the second day I had too many other commitments to attend to and could not attend for most of it. One of the back-and-forths that I had on twitter my colleagues was about learning analytics and assessment.  A fellow colleague seemed to be very certain that learning analytics could be used for assessment, and I disagreed.  It's hard to carry on a meaningful debate in 140 characters, so I thought I would write a quick blog post about it. And who knows, perhaps I mis-interpreted what my colleague was saying! First I think it's good to start off with a few definitions so that we are all on the same page: Learning An...

This week I am taking part in a Quality Matters workshop on Applying the Quality Matters Rubric.  One of the videos that we're given was this pretty funny video on alignment and assessment. I think anyone who is interested in teaching, or anyone who wants to be an instructional designer, should view this first and use it as a mini case to point out what's wrong :-)

Every time I want to write something about the topic of "what is a MOOC," another interesting post comes up! To date I've read posts by Jenny (including the 3-4 posts that she references in here post), Stephen, John and Osvaldo. Most of these retweeted since they were quite interesting. I don't think, personally, that there is much poi t to debating what is a MOOC. Taking a page out of Stephen's talk, I think that the MOOC is fundamentally about education, self-directed education. Sometimes there will be content, and lots of it (AI) and other times there won't be top down content (PLENK), but somewhere, somehow there will be some interaction. Even in Connectivist MOOCs we don't always see interaction from a lot of people, given how many lurkers there are. So, in the end, it's not a black and white scale for content and interaction, but rather it's one large swath of gray! Osvaldo had mentioned that maybe we need another name for MOOCs, or at least...

Finally catching up on some Change11 stuff! This past week I've been thinking about a post by bioram on cognitive dissonance on liberal arts education. It seems like the topic has been quite popular in the past couple of weeks because another blog post came out from a student who decided not to go to college (because he wasn't sufficiently challenged), a blog post on the Chronicle on whether someone should pursue a B.A., and finally an episode on a television lawyer show (Harry's Law) regarding a student who moved out from his parents home because they were forcing him to go to high school when he was making more than $70,000 making "some twitter app." I think that if people don't want to go to college, it's perfectly fine. If you are one of those few well positioned and talented individuals that can make over $70,000 on the web be my guest. In this case, however, I see college of a sort of insurance. If your startup goes belly up, or decides to sell ...

This is my final AAAL wrap up post, this time focusing on Computer Assisted Langauge Learning (CALL). There were a few interesting presentations (I guess for more CALL stuff I need to go to the CALICO conference) at AAAL on computer assisted language learning. One presentation (from a colleague at UMass Amherst if I am not mistaken) focused on using WIMBA to teach Japanese completely online. David Malinowski from UC Berkely spoke about a collaboration between UC Berkely and Universite de Lyon II where undergraduate students from UC Berkeley were paired up with Masters students in France learning to become teachers of French (French as a Second Language), using Skype (and later on a homebrew system) to tutor students. Another presenter was presenting on the use of Blogs as ethnographic and reflective journals for students who were learning Spanish (in Spain) during a semester abroad program. The last presentation I went to that dealt with technology was one where (in a Japanese class) ...

Despite the couple of mis-steps (i.e. hand wringing sessions) there were a lot of great presentations at AAAL this year. There were a couple of presentations that I attended that dealt with the learning of native languages of Australia by the natives themselves. The people presenting were from the University of Melbourne - it seemed like a delegation, or at least a group of colleagues that work together frequently.   These researchers were looking at three sites in Australia, but for the purposes of the presentations they only focused on one site, the Yakanarra Community (which I tried finding on a map, but I was having trouble even locating it). So this community isn't that old, it was founded somewhere in the 1980s and it brought together a number of Walmajarri speakers. The fascinating thing was that within a generation or so the Walmajarri language was replaced by an English Creole (Kriol) which is what the speakers speak today, but there isn't a standard variety of th...

I guess I will start with the "m'eh" of the conference considering that we can only go up if we start at the bottom (and it just so happens that one of the first session I went to was one of these two).  So, I think this was partly my fault for not really reading the abstracts prior to going to the sessions (mostly going by the title), and even when I read the abstracts, not really looking up things I was unfamiliar with (thinking that I would pick stuff up in the session. The first session that was a bit  "m'eh" for me was: Title: Native or Non-native: “That is the question!” or “Is that the question?” Abstract: NNESTs find themselves in a profession wherein (a) NESTs are perceived as idealized language teachers, and (b) there exists an untenable causality between nativeness and pedagogical competence. Utilizing labeling theory, the current study aims to foment a move from a polarizing “either/or” to a “both/and” wherein professionalism will be redefi...