Multilitteratus Incognitus

One of my friends and colleague works for Canvas now, and we happened to be at the same NERCOMP workshop when news of the Canvas Network hit the wires.  Honestly, I've been so MOOCed out recently with all the MOOC coverate and punditry that it's not easy to keep up with all MOOCs all the time. And, to be honest, if you want to really assess a MOOC strategy, my feeling is that you need to be a student in that MOOC in order to really gauge what's going on. I have just started saving all MOOC related articles, opinion columns and blogs (that are more than 1 or 2 paragraphs) to PDF so I can go through them more leasurly once I am done with my current research projects (and maybe something can come out of those that is more scholarly than just a "I read them" note on my blog) That said, one of my twitter connections reminded me of the Canvas Network and i gave it a quick look. There aren't that many courses on it just yet (or it didn't seem so anyway) but I

This week I am starting my 4th coursera course, offered by Duke University called Think Again: How to Reason and Argue . I signed up mostly because I was intersted in the topic, but as a nice side-effect it allows me to continue to be exposed to a variety of MOOC "accreditation" schemes.  This particular MOOC offers statements of accomplishment on two tiers: Statement of Accomplishment Statement of Accomplishment with Distinction. To get the "with distinction mark" you need to score 85% or better in the course. It seems like the only gradeable items in this course are the quizzes, which I assume at this point are multiple choice.  The caveat here is that you can only take a quiz twice (and not the same quiz) to have it count for credit. There are exercises in the course, but they are ungraded, so I am wondering how that works for non-self-motivated autodidacts.   While pondering this, I also came across and readthis article on the Chronicle on the Uneven

Along with CFHE12 ending, this is the last week of the Human Computer Interaction course on Coursera.  This course was mostly a review for me considering that I had already taken an HCI course (grad level) back when I was doing my BA in computer science and I wanted a refresher. This particular course had 3 levels of participation, and I opted to participate at the lowest level which was to watch videos and take the quizzes, and of course, pass with a satisfactory grade. I have to say that the course was a nice review.  Initially I wrote that (comparatively) the professor didn't have as much screen presence as the previous coursera MOOC I had taken, but he grew on me. By the end the Lectures weren't bad at all.  Of course, I am seeing this through the lens of someone wanting a review.  If this were my first time around in HCI, that first level of participation would probably not have been enough and I would have to kick it up to the peer reviewed coursework level. Havin

Well, another MOOC is now complete!  I still have a few more readings in Pocket to go through, blogs from fellow bloggers.  I have to say that the materials in this MOOC weren't a revelation for me.  I have encountered these topics before in my professional career, especially more recently when topics like MOOCs and alternative credentialing and badges are hot topics. If I already knew some of these things, why join?  Well, as we've said before, content isn't king.  Content is an important part, but not king.  For me, it's about interacting with other people, and getting to find out other important SMEs and thinkers in the field. To agree, disagree, debate, and write.  In addition to some of the usual suspects, like Serena (which gives me good reasons to practice my Italian :-)  ) and  brainysmurf , this time around I met another interesting MOOCer, Rolin Moe ( blog here ). I don't always agree with what he writes, but his blog was always a good thoughtful read on

It's the final week of CHFE12 (edfuture.net) and the topic is something that we've beat to death in the past in MOOCs like #ioe12 (which I completed a bit late this September) and #change11 ; in which we discussed the topic of Open Research about a year ago. I may have also seen this topic crop up in eduMOOC in 2011 and a MOOC on Open Education (not #ioe12) also running this fall. In any case, I feel like I am really past the point of talking about Open Research, and I am more in the "doing" phase of things.  I know that academia has a problem with collaboration and co-research and co-publishing.  We are masters of saying one thing (we want collaboration!) but then we are also great at reprimanding people who do collaborate. In hiring committees and tenure decision making, we aren't as comfortable with candidates that don't have as many publications under their name, and their name alone.  A few months ago, I heard some colleagues from another on the elevat

Yesterday, while commuting, I had written a longer post about my MOOC-coverage fatigue.  It seems as though MOOC coverage has gotten out of proportion and it's spilled over to other non educational news outlets that I frequent, where I go for non-educational news. In any case, it seems as though the Google Blogger client of my iPhone ate my post.  Maybe for the best, because I feel like I was getting to have a cranky "get off my lawn" slant to it ;-)† In any case, in thinking about re-writing that post, I was skimming some recent MOOC related news on Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle and the non academia blogs that suddenly have picked up and started reporting on MOOCs since they are the subject of venture capital news. Despite being an MBA, I don't get all excited about VC news, I am more interested about the product than figuring out right away how to make money with it. While going through a day's worth of RSS feeds, I just had this crystallize: Many &qu

I must admit, I had planned on writing a post about how finding college leaders is like dating at times, you can go with the blind date and be pleasantly surprise, or date one of your friends and (hopefully) know most of the information before hand. As I was reading the Washington Post article, however, I was overcome with a severe sense of facepalm, and as I was responding to the article, it got long enough to need a blog post of its own.  I decided to interweaver some of the dating metaphors where applicable ;-) So here we go: On Hiring: The article starts by talking about how most educational leaders get their positions in academia, and the usual path tends to be through becoming a tenured faculty member, and then, at some point, becoming an administator. The article goes on...: The usual way to accomplish [getting tenure] is to develop expertise in a relatively narrow area and publish like mad in it. Bold efforts to open up entirely new fields or draw grand syntheses are ext

Last week was pretty interesting, but between storms, workshops, and work (it's advising and registration time), I only got away with one initial blog post last week.  I did keep up with the discussion, thanks to a large part to the daily newsletter for #cfhe12. As I was reading the various blog posts, this popped up to me: MOOCs and the Teaching Profession . I was really surpsised (I think my jaw dropped) when Rolin's acquaintance told him that he didn't think teaching was a profession.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised. In my area (as I am sure in others), K-12 is highly regulated, so much paperwork and documentation to be completed, I guess anyone pushing paper effectively was be seen as competent whethey they are or not.  K-12, however, is not my area of expertise, I know something here and there.  Higher Education I am more familiar with. I guess, in a higher education context, I am still shocked to hear that teaching is not, by some, considered a profession, b