Multilitteratus Incognitus

So this week Gamification , with Kevin Werbach of UPenn started! After close to two years of working on, what is now termed, cMOOCs (connectivist MOOCs), I decided to check out an "xMOOC" (institutional MOOC) to see what the learning experience is. I hope to be able to write a weekly recap about my coursera experiences :-) So, the gamification course is a six-week course on gamification from a management background, which ties into my MBA background. The course isn't designed to teach game development, but rather give a broad overview of gamification, and gamification techniques as they apply to a management background.  Nice! The course itself revolves around some mandatory videos of the instructor (in total Week 1 was about 2 hours worth of video, broken down in 10 minute segments). The videos themselves are quite doable, even when you are in the office. You can easily download them and put them on a mobile device to view during your commute (this is a nice example

With more than half of #ioe12 done, I decided to tackle the OpenEd Assessment designer badge. You can see my crude attempt at a badge on the right.  The background is taken from David Wiley's stock badges, with an overlay of the Open Access logo (I like the unlocked padlock) on a Syllabus that is on a scroll.  I was going for a Wax Tablet (going with my Greek roots), but I could not find any CC licensed Wax Tablet graphics (heck, I couldn't find many non CC wax tablet graphics that were usable). In any case, for this challenge I had to: Design a badge for the class, including a name, expertise level, and statement of work. Complete the badge yourself. Blog about your proposed badge. Include all the information necessary for someone to complete the badge. Also include your worked example and a description of how it meets the badge requirements. Monitor the class hashtag for someone else who claims to have completed your badge. Judge their work and decide whether they m

This is my second expansion post around the subject of open teaching;  and it goes toward the fulfillment of my 3rd requirement for the Researcher badge of #ioe12!  I've been involved with MOOCs since early 2011.  OK, in the grand scheme of things I've been only at it for 18 months thus far, but I've have attended a wide variety of (what are now termed) "c-MOOC"s (or connectivist MOOCs).  One of the main things talked about around the topic of MOOCs are the "massive" number of participants, but what's not often talked about are the amounts of people that drop the course, or just lurk. Drop outs you can't do much about, they are the same as window shoppers are to retail establishments. People come in for something specific and they don't find it; or they come in just to look and leave.  These people may not be in the right place, so retention of these individuals in the MOOC isn't a major issue.  Lurker on the other hand (coming from a c

Welcome to the Expansion Pack for the Open Teaching week of #ioe12 :-)  Here are some additional resources for open teaching. Peer Reviewed Articles Koutropoulos, A., Gallagher, M.S., Abajian, S.C., deWaard, I., Hogue, R., Keskin, N., Rodriguez, O. Emotive Vocabulary in MOOCs: Context & Participant Retention . EuroDL: The European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. 2012/I. A little self-promotion here ;-)  This is a recent article that the MobiMOOC Research Team (or MRT for short) researched at the tail end of last year.  We wanted to see if language use of participants while interacting in a MOOC gave some indication as to whether participants would be more likely to participate in subsequent weeks of the MOOC or not.  We did not find any correlation, however we did have some interesting participation results (reported in the paper) and we propose some further research.  This paper would be in a Learning Analytics type of publication as well because we were looking (mo

It's Open Teaching time on #ioe12! Having been involved with MOOCs for close to a couple of years now (in the fringes early on, and on the main stage since January 2011), I thought I knew quite a lot about open teaching, but Wiley video presentation surprised me and I learned something new!  I had run across Wiley's syllabi on Open Content  a while back, (before this course) but I wasn't aware that the goal was to also have students suggest topics as well!  When I heard that (in the presentation) I thought to myself "hmmm...it would be cool if learners actually did do this, but somehow I don't they will..." and lo and behold they did not!  I do agree that it's probably a perceived power dynamic between teacher and student. Students are not empowered to suggest topics in our culture, so it didn't surprise me that students did not contribute to the syllabus.  Maybe something to change, culturally, in the future. Language in such open courses is somet

OK, It's Friday, one more day of  MOOCMOOC, and today's topic is about creating our own MOOCs.  I've written about my own MOOC creation plans (centering around teaching of language).  I had hoped that I would be able to do this as part of a dissertation, but since a potential dissertation is way way way out there in terms of timing, I think I may have to move on this sooner, rather than later.  I wonder if I start collecting data be my dissertation is approved, if I can use it ;-) In any case, here are my responses to the questions at hand  for today. What are MOOCs about? What are appropriate subject matters, theories, ideas that they can explore, explain, or explode?  Initially, for me anyway, MOOCs were a curiosity.  I was out of school, and wanted to learn more. A MOOC was something I could explore beyond the content.  That being said, like my colleague RJH, I've gotten used to the form factor of the MOOC and it's brought me back full circle to the days t

OK, I am a little behind on yesterday's questions at hand,  but I am catching up today.  This one topic a day is a little too much ;-) How might reimagining assessment prompt us to rethink not only our pedagogical processes, but also the law and policy that governs traditional academic environments?  I must admit that I am having a hard time with this question. Assessment ought to be driving our pedagogy , since we are starting with our end-goals in mind.  Maybe this is my inner instructional designer speaking, but we don't just teach and then figure out what we are going to do.  We figure out what we want our learners to know or be able to do, and in what contexts, and then we teach with materials and methods that are appropriate to the goals at hand. That being said, I am having a hard time with the "laws and policies" that govern traditional academic environments.  It is my understanding, that under academic freedom, the university cannot tell me how to teac

So, gamemooc is over!  Well, almost! It's on Hiatus!  We've completed 5 weeks (of the 6 in total) with Week 6 coming back on September 10th to wrap up.  I've noted it in my calendar, and hope to be able to come back and wrap up. Coming into this MOOC I wasn't sure what to expect.  It was using a site meant for guild communications, which seemed apropos for the topic, but at the same time it was something new to me (schematically though, quite similar to google groups and ning so it wasn't too much of a shocker). The weekly themes that we tackled were quite interesting, ranging from why gaming to specifics of gamification, alternative credentialing, types of games, sharing of games in educational contexts, and when the rubber meets the road: hurdles toward implementing games in the classroom. There were a lot of interesting participants in this MOOC, and quite a few interesting guests in the hangouts (that were recorded and posted later on to youtube).  In week

We are not half way through our first μMOOC! The topic of today is participation, deliberate participation, in education and learning . This is something near and dear to my own heart, and something I've commented on in at least one (if not more) MOOCs. Without participating, in my opinion, you can't really learn. Of course, there are degrees of participation, and even in online environments there is only a finite amount of participation possible.  In physical environments the limit is time-based, how much time you've got with your interlocutors.  In online environments, the limit is participation-saturation. You can only participate so much before you start seeing stars and there is a point of diminishing returns. You can post something, but if no one reads it and comments back (or heck, even if they don't comment back, to see in your analytics that x-many people saw what you wrote), then the exercise doesn't have as much educational oomph as it would have had

It's open data week on #ioe12 ! That being said, I am not sure that there is much to write about ;-)  I've heard of Open Data before, on the context of OpenStreetMap  and Data.gov .  In principle I do agree that data should  be open because this does enable people who want to use it in new and creative ways. It also allows for participation in creating better  data.  For example, if you have census data you can (and should ) open up the data to everyone via the web, so that people don't have to go to a stuffy room, in a specific village in the old country to work on their family tree.  This open data also allows crowd-sourcing of transcription and metadata generation.  This can be a time consuming, and expensive, task.  However, if you harness the power of volunteers all over the world who might be looking to piece together their family history, you can transcribe those sensur records that were done in hurried cursive writing,  we all know how hard it can be to read cursive

It's day 2 of MOOC MOOC (sounds like something Zoidberg would say) and I was reading the intro for the day when I saw that a blog post of one of my colleagues (Pat Masson) was referenced. Pretty Cool!  I read it pretty quickly, to be responded to late. I must admit I don't subscribe to Pat's blog, but maybe it's time to do so :-) Today's task is a video, but I don't have a ton of time to invest in it, so I will make due with text.  The questions at hand for today are: Where does learning happen?  Learning happens everywhere! Sure, it does happen in the classroom, but it happens when you're out in the market; when you're stuck in your car in traffic while commuting and you're listening to the radio (or some audiobook); when you go to the gym; when speaking to your friends; and of course in the classroom.  Human are learning machines, there is always something new, no matter how minute it may be, that we learn every day. We may not retain it

OK, so I did say that I would probably lurk in this MOOC, but I think I will upgrade my status to be that guy who yells from the stands at the people playing LOL :-)  If I have time, I will do my best to  come down to the green and kick the ball a bit myself ;-) The readings for today (and the general intro and topic outline available here ) are things that I've encountered before in my almost-two-year exploration of MOOCs.  The questions to spark conversation today are: What are MOOCs? What do we think they are? What do we fear they may be? What potential lies under their surface?  Personally I view the MOOC (or at least the "c" variety of MOOC) as another type of learning environment, along the same lines as a lecture, or a seminar, or an apprenticeship*. Just as there are many ways to teach in an on-campus classroom, there are many ways to teach online.  A cMOOC is just one of them.  Admittedly, they are more geared toward more knowledgeable learners, so a novic

Well, MOOCMOOC starts today, and while #change11 was an experiment in the massiveness of a MOOC both in terms of registered users and in terms of length (36 weeks), MOOCMOOC seems to be an experiment in how small a MOOC can be. I heard about the MOOC from the usual suspects, and while I do have my doubts about MOOCMOOC, I signed up (a glutton for punishment? Or curious soul? You decide). The point of MOOCMOOC is to explore what a MOOC is, in thir own words: In this week-long experimental online course, we'll be investigating exactly what it means to participate in, create, and even envision a MOOC (massive open online course). We'll be questioning what a MOOC is, how useful this educational format can be, and the new and innovative opportunities toward which it points. The daily topics include: discussing/brainstorming about what a MOOC is ("a mooc by any other name" type of thing) xMOOC, cMOOC an communities of learning pedagogy, and pedagogy in MOOCs

I must admit that my "science" days, at least as far as biology, chemistry and physics go, are far behind me.  Interesting topics, but I prefer thinking (and dabbling) in other topics; thus this week's topic on #ioe12 wasn't that interesting, at least as far as the video and the readings go. The presenter (Michael Nielsen, on the TED video)  did say something that I've often suspected about academia: people don't share their data, they treat it as "their data" because the name of the game is publish or perish . It didn't surprise me that the core problem of the polymath project (was this a pun btw?) was solved by means of massive mathematical problem solving. We can indeed (as Michael says) use the internet to build tools that amplify our collective intelligence to solve problems. I think that this is an important undertaking, especially given how many smart people there are out there that solve problems every day, that could work together to

Well, I have signed up for the dark side (or is it???) After more than 18 months taking part in various "c" MOOCs such as LAK11, CCK11, MobiMOOC, #ioe12, and Change11 (and a few more that I can't remember off the top of my head), I decided to take the plunge and join the "dark side," or the "x" MOOC.  Last year, when the Stanford AI course was offered in a MOOC format, I opted to not participate since the topic of AI (Artificial Intelligence) didn't really appeal to me. My colleague, Osvaldo, participated, and from that came a paper on the comparison of cMOOCs and xMOOC . Now that Coursera has a number of courses offered, from a variety of institutions, I decided to try out the platform, to both learn something new (content) and to also see what the xMOOC (at least the coursera variety) looks like.  So what did I sign up for? See the list bellow (I will probably be writing about the experience on here) Gamification - with Kevin Werback from

We have now entered week 5 (of 6) of GameMOOC, and I completely forgot to add a quick synopsis of take-aways for the past couple of weeks (time flies!)  So here is a quick synopsis of notable things in these two weeks. Week 3: Gamification Week 3 was all about gamification. There were a number of interesting discussion thread this week, and one of them (which also produced a n interesting blog post ) on the risks of rewards!  This reminded me a lot of the literature review that I did while researching intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for an Academic Checkins article that I have now submitted to the international journal of instructional technology & distance learning (fingers crossed that it will get accepted!).  While doing my lit review, I looked at motivation in educational journals, psychology journals, and...even economics journals! What I found out is that external rewards aren't always bad.  It's not the external reward that is detrimental to internal motivatio