Multilitteratus Incognitus

With the gamification almost over (this coming week is the final week), the Human Computer Interaction course on Coursera is just starting! Back in the day (2003-ish) I was finishing off my undergraduate degree in computer science and one of my final courses was a graduate course on User Interface Design, which I really enjoyed! I liked the subject matter, and the course was taught by a professor that I really liked (he was quite talented!) .  In any case, I guess that about high time that I got back into it! Right off the bat I noticed three things: 1. There are fewer videos each week as compared to gamification; 2. Scott Klemmer is quite different from Kevin Werback in presentation style; 3. There are three levels of certification in the course. This course runs for 8 weeks as opposed to 5 in gamification, and each week the videos seem to run for about an hour in total (as opposed to 2 in gamification). I actually didn't mind the 2 hours of video each week in gamificati...

This morning, while commuting to work, I was catching up on some blog posts from fellow #blendkit2012 participants and I came across a blog post titled Is blended the same as half-distance ? but Andres Norberg. I was originally just going to comment on the blog post itself, but the response was getting quite lengthy, so I converted into a blog post. Anders asks: If traditional face-to-face education is combined with distance education, what happens? Savings of classroom space and lecturing time? Better enrollment on campus due to increased flexibility in scheduling for students? Extra learning efficiency by using modern tools? More stimulating classes? A sense of being modern and up-to-date by enriching a classroom culture with digital tools? All of the above? It's interesting, to consider f2f education combining with distance education, but, when it comes down to it, what does that combination really mean?  For example, our campus has a lot of  web-enhanced courses , ...

This is it! The final week of MobiMOOC is upon us!  I have to say that this MOOC really passed by so quick that it was really hard to keep up with it :-) Last year's mobimooc seemed like it was much longer than 6 weeks (in a good way), and this year's mobimooc seemed shorter than the 3 weeks that it runs. Comparatively, I think last year I joined the mobimooc with the intention to be a moderately active participant, and I ended up being "memorably" active, while this year I started with the intention of being memorably active...but I guess I'll have to settle for moderately active :-) .  There were a few issues, for me anyway, with this year's mobimooc - and most of them were around scheduling.  In April and May (original MobiMOOC) courses are near the end (or have already ended), so there is a little more head space to participate in the MOOC. In September, however, the story is a bit different. Courses are just starting, there is an initial crazyness as...

Last year, for me anyway, the major pondering point of the year was MOOC pedagogy. Between cMOOCs and xMOOCs I've seen, and I am now still experiencing a lot of different deliveries, technologies, interactions, and I've been pondering their underlying pedagogies, and what makes them work! While I am still thinking about MOOC pedagogies, I have out that pot on thwack burner to slowly simmer and I've decided that fall semester is going to be about the blended mode of delivery. To this extent, I am taking the series of 3 Sloan-C workshops on blended learning to see what their experts say on the topic, and I am following BlendKit2012 out of UCF. This week is the final week of the first Sloan-C workshop, and the beginning of BlendKit. I've already submitted my blended learning module to the workshop coordinators, so it's time to deal a little with BlendKit. The reading in week 1 is interesting. As someone with a masters degree in instructional design, and with som...

It's been a whirlwind tour in mobimooc this year.  Week 2 is almost done (I count my weeks by a 5-day weekday, rather than 7 days) and only one more week to go! I feel that I have not been as active in MobiMOOC this year as I was in the previous year.  Perhaps it's because MobiMOOC is only half of the duration of last year's MOOC.  It would be interesting to see how often I posted last year (per week) and this year :-) In any case, what has come up this year (that I think wasn't there last year) is a discussion on the nuances of mLearning and what constitutes mLearning, as compared to other types of learning (I call these  x Learning) such as uLearning (ubiquitous), eLearning (electronic), oLearning (online),  iLearning (internet) and so on. Here are some questions and points that were posed to spark discussion on the topic: Does M-learning start when E-learning comes to the end? E-learning doesn't feed our needs thus M-learning were born to fill the gap? ...

With the Introduction to Open Education course now done (and only 6 months late!), I decided to consolidate all of my posts here for the badge requirement achievement requirements . I hope I am not too late to claim these badges ;-) OpenEd Overview  Requirements (Novice level, complete for all 12 topics to earn the badge) Watch the topic video. Skim the topic readings. Write a short blog post summarizing what you’ve learned about the topic and why you think the topic is important. Write a final post linking to the 12 previous posts related to this badge and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. OpenEd Overview   Badge artefacts: Open Licensing - Open Licensing at a Glance Open Source - Open Source in Education Open Content - Open Content OpenCourseWave - It's OCW Time Open Educational Resources - OER (or old dog, new tricks ;-)  ) Open Access - Hello Open Access! Open Science - Open Science? Open Research! Open Data - Open Data ...

Well, with  my work on #ioe12 done, it's time for a little reflection! For whatever reason, as I may have stated before, I completely missed the announcement for #ioe12, which I guess ran from January to April (or May) 2012. I thought, that since the material is still available on the course site ( OpenEducation.us ) I would be able to go through and self-study. I did indeed go through and self-study, and I invited some fellow MOOCers to participate, but they had other things happening. This meant that the lone through the asynchronous MOOC might be lonely, and indeed it was. In the end #ioe12 was a really good course, but if I weren't so interested in the topic, I would probably have dropped out by week 7, or I would have just skipped some topics.  In the various MOOCs that I have participated in, other learners/participants have helped get me through topics that I either didn't care for, or just didn't appreciate the topic as much before I saw others talking abo...

This is it! The last topic in #ioe12 - Open Policy ! To be honest, there is almost nothing new to see here, if you've been following along with #ioe12 week-by-week.  All of the previous 11 topics do connect with one another, and policy issues  have  come up in the past, we just didn't cover them specifically. The crux of this topic is that anything that is publicly funded should be open.  For instance, for all federal grants, the research produced by these grants should  be under some sort of open license so the individuals who paid for it (the people of a give country, and heck  the people of the world) should be able to use it for free. In my own experience, having lived and gone to school in Greece K-8, I know that there is a national textbook publisher in Greece. These textbooks are free  to children who go to school.  These books aren't free as in "I am loaning this book to you for free", but rather " here is a free copy, do with it as you ...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist  (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. Here are the reactions I got from a fellow colleague (on the previous Formulation post): I must admit that my formulation wasn't completely new...

It's quite interesting, but the topic of MOOCs and accreditation keeps coming up :-) The post that prompted this blog post came from a post I saw on MobiMOOC today regarding information assessment and recognition of success .  In MobiMOOC 2012 one of the new things that is baked into the course is the awarding of badges , with an eye toward Mozilla's Open Badges. There are currently three types of badges: Wonderful Participant (for signing up in the course) Advanced learner (for participating in at least 2 topics in MobiMOOC) Memorable Collaborator (for being active in 3 topics) and writing a project overview for an mLearning project) I've already achieved #1 by being there, and I think I will most likely get #2.  #3 might be a little more problematic since I don't have much time to think of a new mLearning project, and I don't feel comfortable just picking from my bag of existing mLearning ideas (even though I haven't articulated them before, or implem...

One of the first things to deal with when tackling any topic is quantifying what we are talking about.  Since this is MobiMOOC, one of the key terms that ought to come up in the discussion is what exactly is mobile learning?  This discussion did indeed come up yesterday ( see forum here ). Let me just say that mLearning definitions are probably incomplete and they are subject to an ever evolving understanding of what constitutes  mobility and  learning .  Initial definitions were very hardware-centric and hardware-specific, and chances are the further back you go, the more hardware-centric and specific they are. This is fine because those definitions comes from a point in time when mLearning was the new kid on the block and we probably looked at demonstrable instances of mobile usage, and that happened to be mobile phones and PDAs. Clive asks some pretty interesting questions (and these are questions that I've heard in the past). If I use my laptop on a...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. So for this blog post I will formulate my argument.  My main argument around Open Education is that it benefits the learners and as such department...

It's coming down to the wire on #ioe12 with Open Business Models being the topic of the week. This week (unlike previous weeks) didn't have a video to watch in addition to the readings, but it was predominantly readings. The topics for the readings this week were a mix of author's perceptions around the topic of open publishing (and therefore open business models); the effect that open publishing has had on physical book purchased (or rather correlations between books being available for free, and their sales pre-and-post being available for free); and a case study of Flat World Knowledge. I read a few articles an skimmed some. The academic in me thinks that open publishing is a good idea, especially when it comes to publicly funded institutions (of one sort or another). It's our civic duty to openly publish if we receive state moneys (and most schools do  receive some sort of state money). On top of that, as anyone in academia knows, the currency of the land is repu...

I just noticed on the Google group for mobimooc that my MRT colleagues ( Micheal and Rebecca ) have posted their guides on how they will be participating in MobiMOOC this year, so I thought that it might be a good idea to do the same since mobiMOOC just started, and it's good to set expectations ;-) I have to say that I generally don't come back for "seconds" once a MOOC is done. Once the course is done, I don't feel the need to come back for the second iteration, but MobiMOOC is different for me.  Last year I got a certificate for  being a memorable participant in the MOOC, so I felt that I should be coming back this year and reprising the role ;-) Heck, not that we have badges, it's even more incentive :-)  The other reason for coming back is that my fellow MRT members are going to be here, and this is a group of people that I've been able to communicate, learn, and co-research with for more than one year ; this is pretty amazing considering that when...

This week on #ioe12 I tackled Open Assessment . Now, I am no newbie to badges. I can't say I've been there "since day 1," but it was pretty darned close!  Before going through these materials, which included a a video from the launch of the HASTAC and MacArthur Foundation DML competition , I thought of open assessment as something that dealt with badges for life long learning, and something that potentially disaggregated formal degrees.  When I saw the DS106 assignment submission page , which I had seen before - but never thought of in this light, I had my AHA moment! Sure, Open Assessment can be the badge system that potentially disaggregates degree granting institutions and un-bindles a formal degree.  However, I thought of two more potential use-cases for Open Assessment: 1) Open-ish Assessment (I still view this as open, others might not):  This is the type of assessment, along the lines of DS106 assignment submissions where members of the class of people who...