Multilitteratus Incognitus

This week (at least for me) the topic of #ioe12 was Open Access. Open Access isn't all that new to me (having worked for an academic library for quite some time) but the materials still had a few new bits of information for me.  I keep forgetting the difference between OA Gold and OA Green.  For some reason "Green" is associated with money (dollars are green), so I had it in my head that OA Green was "author pays" while OA Gold was "author doesn't pay." I was surprised to find (in the video) what the actual cost of some journals is! Considering that it is a "free" enterprise (in that authors and peer reviewers don't get paid), to have a journal subscription cost thousands of dollars is just ludicrous.  I also find it equally ludicrous that there are Open Access Journals where the author has to pay to get published.  I suppose, in the end, the money source needs to come from somewhere. However, considering that authors already put in...

Last week was a pretty interesting week in Games MOOC . The main idea behind the week was to try out some new games and explore the game dynamics.  There were a few recommendations, among them RuneScape , a free (or freemium?) online MMORPG.  I thought I would give it the "ol' college try" and try out something new, but RuneScape just was not cooperating with me!  That, plus I was at the Campus Technology conference (see recent blog posts) so I wasn't really able to really try out RuneScape.  Perhaps another time.  One of my main issues with RuneScape was that Java was not cooperating with me (so browser version was a no-go) and the downloaded version had some sort of issue where my mouse needed to be x-many pixels south of where I needed to click in order for the click to register (20-30 pixels it seemed).  This meant that it was a bit frustrating to even start to explore.  Maybe when I get back to it I can use Jing or something to record w...

I've been dabbling with the OER "week" in introduction to open education  this week. I have to say that I've been a big proponent of OER (from a theoretical standpoint) for quite some time now.  I do believe that it is important for educators (especially those in public institution) to share their contributions for free and feed them forward.  The actual implementation is what I am stumbling a bit on in that it generally takes more time to go through OER resources in order to find something that works best in your  course sequence, and at times you don't even find that. A complaint that came across in OERu's #OCL4ED workshop was that it was more time consuming going through OER to find what might work well in your course, compared to going with some publisher's pre-packaged (and not-free) materials. That being said, there were a few quite interesting resources in the readings. For example, A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources  is a nice (and fre...

Well, one more campus technology conference and expo is done! The Campus Technology annual summer conference is the nation’s premier higher education technology conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning using the latest in applications, social software and immersive platforms. Initially I was thinking about writing a blog post per day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), but I had way too many interesting conversations with presenters, participants, and vendors to be able to do this (brain stops working after a certain point, you see).  So I thought I would pick 3 of my top sessions, and my top vendor of the show and talk a bit about these. KEYNOTES First of all, the keynotes by Mark Milliron (Chancellor of Western Governor's University) on "Deeper Learning Conversations ...

Finally catching up with gamesmooc this week ;-) I haven't quite gotten to playing games just yet (runescape is not cooperating with me), but I did read over the text-based materials (thanks to Pocket!) and views the TED talks.  This particular one was pretty interesting.  The example she gives of Herodotus of the Lydians playing games one day and eating another, thus surviving an 18 year famine by eating on alternative days is quite a nice example of flow . It also ties in nicely with a story I read today of " Death by Diablo " where a teen died, presumably after playing Diablo for 40 hours without break for food or sleep.  Maybe he had an underlying condition that precipitated his death - but it seems like even in a state of flow you can't ignore basic needs (water, food, sleep, bathroom breaks) for very long. Another interesting thing, a tie-in to learning theory, is a comment she makes about World of Warcraft  and quests, where even the lower level players ar...

As part of the researcher badge requirements I need to also contribute some new resources to the course for fellow participants. Here are some sources that I have found interesting: Academic Articles Friesen, N. (2009). Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 10(5). Retrieved from: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/664/1388 This article tackles OER, and OCW is considered as a subset of OER. It examines a number of different OER initiatives and examines the sustainability issues and challenges. Carson, S. (2009). The unwalled garden: growth of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, 2001-2008. Open Learning, 24(1), 23-29. doi:10.1080/02680510802627787. (download from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02680510802627787 ) This was an interesting article that tackled the creation and growth of the OCW consortium. It wasn't very in-depth (I think it could have been mo...

I thought that the OCW week would be a good week to work on the Researcher Badge for #ioe12 for two reasons: I am a big proponent of Open, especially with openly sharing and iterating through better course materials; and up until recently (#NMC12 to be specific) I wasn't completely clear as to the goals of OCW. Yes, I could have reader the fine "about OCW," but I didn't - my bad :-) In any case, my anecdotal experience about faculty perceptions of open, and openly sharing their own materials in an OCW fashion has been of the "closed" variety, or at best the "copyright boogey man" or the "someone will steal your stuff!" varieties. I've only met a small handful of people at my institution who would just jump on the bandwagon. To this end, I am interested in finding out more about the perceptions of faculty members about OCW, and sharing their own materials in an institutions OCW repository. I would like to know what they think about ...

With Week 2 of Game MOOC starting up today, I thought it would be worth while to write a couple of observations from the inaugural week of this MOOC. Last week's content was quite interesting. I still see a lot of people still introducing themselves in the "welcome and introduce yourself" forum, so I guess many more people are coming on-board, even at the end of the first week. The video of Jim Gee (reposted here) was quite interesting and engaging, and the games that the Guild Council (MOOC facilitators) had us sample weren't that bad. To be honest, I would not have tried any of these games out if I didn't have to. My time is a bit limited, and these learning games don't generally fit in with me as a learner, and don't fall into the demographic if people who might be in a course of mine. That said, I did enjoy the games (despite some of them being frustrating, but I guess that was the point) and had some interesting discussions with a few participa...

This past week I also looked at the OCW module of #ioe12. The assigned video was the announcement of the OpenCourseWare project back in 2001 (more than 10 years ago! Who would have thunk it!).  Now, reading about the OCW back then, I got the impression that these were going to be courses  and not just materials. That OCW would be something like what MOOCs are today rather than a publisher or materials. When I first looked at OCW I was really disappointed.  These were not courses!  They were materials, exams, readings and course notes.  Some OCW materials were more "complete"than others, so an interested student (with loads of motivation and resourcefulness)  would be able to  self-study, but some materials were really incomplete and not conducive to self-study.  I saw this as a major #fail. This really colored my perception of OCW. At this year's NMC conference (11 years later!) I did attend a session on OCW and my misconceptions abo...

My colleagues and fellow MRT member, Osvaldo, posted an interesting blog post the other day .  It is interesting in and of itself, but if taken along with the Chronicle's What's the Problem with MOOCs , if gives you a whole other dimension. Osvaldo makes reference to Bonnie Stewart's post (this was new to me, so thank you for the link :-)  ) which is slightly reminiscent of the whole "digital natives" thing in how participants are consuming AND producing. Osvaldo's post makes reference to the 90-10 rule (or 90-9-1 rule, depending on how you heard it first)  where 90% of the participants in some social activity online are lurkers, while 10% are producers (the 90-9-1 rule states 90% lurkers, 9% contributors, 1% creators). and how this is evident in the MOOCs that we have seen thus far. This makes sense, at least from an anecdotal standpoint, from my own experiences in MOOCs.  Granted Change11 was a bit of an aberration because it was SO LONG that I really ...

It's Open Content week on Introduction to Open Education with David Wiley (well, it was Open Content week a while back, but I just got to it!) This week, at least compared to the previous two weeks, there was little reading and materials (perhaps this is a good week to work on the Research Badge, eh? ;-)  ) and, at least for me, I think I have come across these materials before in Change11 and perhaps CCK11. David talked a bit about Open Content during Change 11 Week 5 . It is a pretty interesting concept, his open content idea pre-dates creative commons, and I think he was glad someone took charge of the legalese and made the concept happen. It was also nice to have someone openly discuss the fact that they didn't so so well in their initial try.  Failure seems to have a negative connotation in our society, even if iteratively we end up working things out in the end. One of the things that holds great promise, for me anyway, is the open textbook concept.  Small OERs...

This is keynote address from Games for Change. Pretty interesting! Big "G" Games.

OK, I may have bitten off more than I can chew (challenge accepted!).  I saw that some former MOOC participants have a new MOOC on games in education. This was too interesting to pass up.  Even though next week will be busy with a Sloan-C workshop, and the Campus Technology conference, it's only one week. I can still participate in 5 out of the 6 weeks on this MOOC :-) I am seriously looking forward to this.  Week 1 has a video keynote by Jim Gee, which should be interesting :-)

Here is a preview of the facilitator lineup for MobiMOOC12 (straight from the MobiMOOC group!) With the start of the course still two months away, our grand group of   facilitators was completed last week and here are the guides-on-the-side   for all the upcoming mobile learning topics (in completely random order).   All of us cover 4 continents and 9 different mobile learning topics: Mobile learning theory/pedagogy : Geoff< http://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffstead >(Stead) is a mobile massive brain from Cambridge, UK, with an enormous   amount of zest and creativity. Who better to provide an overview of mobile   learning theories and pedagogies then his creative mind? Corporate learning : Amit < http://www.linkedin.com/in/gargamit100 > (Garg)   from India has inspired companies to go mobile based on strong business   plans, goal oriented design and intuitive learning. He shares what he knows   with all that want to hear. Amit is a true e...

This second week of #ioe12 was all about open source. The materials included The Revolution OS, a video of Cory Doctorow at the 28th C3 conference, and a few readings about what open source is (including the Cathedral and the Bazaar). You can have a look over at the course website for get the actual materials. The Revolution OS is now about ten years old (this was my second viewing, the first one being when it was released). It's not a bad movie, and as a documentary it's an interesting accounting on the early life of Linux. I just happened to find the movie a bit slanted (sometimes verging on the obsurd). For example, there is an apparent rant by Bill Gates in the Homebrew Computer Club newsletter about how paid software is necessary for quality's sake (and for other reasons, including that good software takes time and money to do it well). The reading-outloud of this letter was as if Bill was crazy or something. I don't think that Free Software is crazy, but I a...

As part of #ioe12, and in order to get the OpenEd Researcher badge , I need to: Write a blog post proposing a research study by which key assumptions of the topic could be (in)validated. Don’t worry about identifying specific participants, etc. Describe what you believe would be the ideal research setting, participants, data collection, and analysis methodologies. This is sort of like an abbreviated version of something that I assigned to my own students in a research methods course :-). So, my proposed research study deals with Perceptions and Real World Practices of Faculty and their Relationship to Copyright . Over the years it's been my observation that people who teach at higher education institutions are simultaneously both fiercely protective of copyright (namely their own) but at the same time they seem to ignore other people's copyright when it suits them; thus having potentially some cognitive dissonance when it comes to copyright. So, the ideal setting for this mix...

One of the things that we need to do for #ioe12 ( to earn the "researcher" badge ) is to provide some additional resources for three topics. This week I will be contributing some resources for the Open Licensing portion o f the course. Scholarly Resources Sawyer, M.S. (2009). Filters, Fair Use and Feedback: User Generated Content Principles and the DMCA. Berkeley Technology Law Journal. 24. pp 363-404. If legal articles don't scare you away, this might be a good one to print out (or just download and read on your eReader) if you are interested in copyright and fair use. The article is sectioned off into four sections, giving the reader some background on the DCMA, fair use and two versions of the Fair Use Principles of User Generated Content, as well as presenting the view that technological solutions that prevent copyright violation don't work because they err on the side of copyright holders and violating the fair use rights of everyone else. Reading this remind...

I am in the process of finishing up the Mobile Learning Manager certification course (also known as mLeMan) and I am on the final unit.  Here are a couple of interesting videos.  (More on my experience with mLeMan later on...if I don't forget ;-)  ) The first is Mobile Madness: Making Sense of the Converged , Multidevice World from: IDCeXchange   held on 4/292011 This second video is  Mobility, Clouds and Intelligent Industries: Positioning for the 3rd Wave of IT Industry Growth

Last January David Wiley launched a course on the topic to Introduction to Open Education (how did I miss it?) I can't really say that this course is a MOOC, because it seems like it wasn't "massive", so I just it's just an OOC ;-) In any case, it seemed like a good point to start this course (better late than never!) and slowly take my time at completing the various tasks required to complete the course (for which you get various levels of badges) This first week (actually, from a glance, I see that all weeks are structured more or less like this), there is a video and some readings. I had a crack at the video, which was a TEDxNYED video with the famous Lawrence Lessig. I have several of Lessig's books on my "to read" list on Goodreads, but I haven't had much time to get to them just yet, so a quick bite sized (20 minute) TED video was just what the doctor ordered. It was an interesting video, definitely worth watching, but it didn...