#bonkOpen week 2 - did things get quieter...or is it me?

It seems like things have shaken out a bit on #bonkOpen for week 2. There seems to be way fewer threads in Week 2 as compared to Week 1. This isn't a big deal for me, my initial plan of looking for 10 interesting threads and following and replying to them is still intact. Now, if in Week 3 (this week) we have fewer than 10 threads...then I will have to re-think my initial strategy for participation.

Week 3, instead of readings, has a number of videos by Curtis Bonk. Each video is about 10 minutes, and there are five or six of them - so you could just seem them all in about an hour. I've gone through half of them thus far. This is making me wonder two things: Were the videos planned as part of Week 3 from the get-go? Or were they a change of strategy once some people complained about the amount of reading that they had to do (by taking part in this voluntary learning opportunity!) The other thing that it makes me wonder is this: In Week 1, the synchronous session seemed like the lecture session for the readings. Since we got the lecture in these videos...what's going to be the focus of this week's synchronous session?

I've said this before, and I will say it again: I am not a big fan of synchronous. If there are other vehicles to accomplish the same thing, I will go asynchronous. Now that I have access to Elluminate Publish I do download the recorded sessions just to catch up, during my commutes, but I don't see as much value in them.

One last thing I wonder is this (and it has to do with my own MOOC plans). If a MOOC is hosted in an LMS, any LMS, it doesn't have to be blackboard, how do you best incorporate the discussion forums and other affordances of an LMS, with the affordances of the Downes/Siemens MOOC - gRSShopper, capturing all delicious and diigo bookmarks, all tweets with a certain hashtag, and all of the blogs, with a certain hashtag. I haven't seen a good way to do this yet, and I am interested in how to best accomplish this. I like the Downes/Siemens approach with gRSShopper, but I think that it may not be as accessible as using an LMS. Then again, and LMS can be restricting...

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more