Online behaviors of faculty [the documentary]

This past week in Change11 we had George Veletsianos as the facilitator.  It was a pretty nice week, I really enjoyed the three articles he posted as readings. It seems like most of the posts in the daily (the few posts) were about MIT and Harvard and EdX....yaaawwwwnnnnn....

Seriously, isn't EdX just a continuation of the OpenCourseWare movement that MIT started?  Let's just call it OpenCourseWare 2.0 and move on.  I'll have to read some more reactions about EdX in order to write a more cogent and informed response, so I will quit my ranting about it right...about....now!

So, back to Change and Veletsianos.  The readings were quite interesting.  What really stood out for me was that faculty aren't luddites; some are, but in general they are not - they are curious.  They are cautious about the use of SNS, and how the Home/Work/Professional environments collide.  I know many people that don't care about the Home/Work/Professional collisions and meshing, but this does not depend on age, but rather what type of work you have.  I can see parallels (from faculty SNS use) with other sectors, especially people working in highly secretive organizations like defense, pharmaceuticals and so on. The personal and the professional stay completely separate and compartmentalized. So much so that this compartmentalization often times inhibits the usage of SNS on a personal level as well.

The twitter study was interesting.  The MobiMOOC research team (MRT) has some twitter data from last year's mobimooc that I've been wanting to analyze, research and publish along with the MRT. I've been a bit burnt out from reading and writing (that plus I have two papers that need to be done in two weeks and two months respectively)...so this project is on the backburner for now. That being said, since Veletsianos has seen this type of textual analysis valuable, it just gives me energy to put this research paper back in sight for later on in the summer :-)

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