Multilitteratus Incognitus

Apple's Clarus the cowdog; and his "moof" 'bark Well, it's the end of 2013 and it's been a MOOC-kinda year, so before I head off for a small break (which is probably going to involve a lot of MOOCing), I thought I should write a summative post for my year's exploits in MOOCs. 2013, other than it being the year of the Anti-MOOC (according to some) was really the year of the xMOOC for me.  I participated in a lot of xMOOCs and got to see how different organizations had different takes on how to approach courses that are online and have, potentially, a large amount of participants.  Most of my MOOC experiences were coursera based (it seems like they are at the top of the hill at the moment), but I did expand my horizons by taking a course on EdX on the Ancient Greek Hero, a Harvard course, and a couple of courses through the Virtual Linguistics Campus which are courses offered through the Philipps-Universität Marburg . The VLC, interestingly enough got

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forum A couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems , you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come up based on your usage pattern of the system. Now, those systems aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they can serve as ways of finding some diamond in the rough that you didn't know exist.  Think about it, both in a shopping or entertainment venue, and a MOOC you have one potentially huge issue: limited time to devote, a large sea of information to go through in order to find what might entertain you, or pique your intellectual interest and  get you engaged with some subject.  Last summer, at the end of Campus Technology 2013, I was having food and drinks w

Since I have a captive, in a sense, audience, I thought I would use the power of the crowd to help me identify a suitable PhD program for myself :) Now, over the years I've been thinking about pursuing a PhD, but a sage mentor once told me that I should take at least a year break from school before making any decisions.  Essentially clear the head out, think about what I like to do, and then think about what PhD program might be most appropriate for me.  Well, it's been four years, and I've already made a few excel spreadsheets with potential programs, but they all fall short in some way shape or form, usually the main issue is financial ;-)  So, I thought I would tap into the wisdom of the crowds on the web, on #edcmooc, and people following the Sloan Consortium to see what you all think about my (potentially unreasonable) conditions for the "perfect" PhD program; it can be an EdD too - PhD is just short-hand for the purposes of this post. Program of Study

I was thinking about what to create for my digital artefact for EDCMOOC.  My initial thought was to create a sample dialogue between a fictionalized EDCMOOC student and Prof. Eliza.  Prof. Eliza would be, of course, based on the the venerable ELIZA computer therapist program. I could then go in and modify the specific psychotherapy lines with something specific to education. In the faceless environment no one knows if you are a dog , so in online education how do we know if a professor isn't just a machine pretending to be human?  In any case, this was meant to be a parody. There were two directions I could go once I got the dialogue all set: I was going to ask a friend to run some lines with me, and they would play the role of Professor Eliza. The computerized responses as said by a human would/should make people think about appropriateness of responses of professors to learners and how helpful they are. Or, I could text chat with Professor Eliza and record that, and the ED

Vice Admiral Tolya Kotrolya Well, here we are! The final(ish) week of #edcmooc.  As I wrote in my tweet earlier this week, I think #edcmooc, like #ds106, is probably more of a way of life for some than an actual course.  Sure, there won't be additional prescribed readings or viewings after this week, so the course is technically over, however the hallmark of any good course, as far as I am concerned, is one where the learners keep thinking about the material long after the course is done.  They keep engaging with the provided materials and with any new material that they encounter in critical ways.  In other words, once the course is done we don't shelve and compartmentalize the knowledge gained and leave it to gather dust like an old book on the shelf. In any case, like previous weeks, here are some thoughts on the hangout, readings, and viewings from this week. To be honest, I don't particularly care about a certificate of completion, but I am interested in designin

Man, it's been a crazy week.  I've been jotting down notes for this post from the various viewings, readings, fellow blogger posts, and discussion forums.  This was meant to be several posts over the week, but it all wrapped up into one big thing. Oh well.  Such is life ;-) This week I'm creating some category headers to make things easier to read. From the week 2 synchronous session The synchronous Google+ session was pretty interesting.  From it came a few interesting points to ponder.  One of the participants of EDCMOOC brought up a question on whether or not it is necessary for everything to be a game?  The question was probably geared toward questioning gamification and the implication that learning shouldn't need to entice learners to partake in and engage with learning.  I personally disagree.  Everyone finds a reason to participate, or not participate in a learning venture.  For some people learning is a thrill ride, so even when they are down in the dumps an

Angry Spock (Star Trek reboot) OK, OK... the title was easy pickings but this article is quite serious.  I've chosen to ignore, for the most part, the whole idiocy of the term SPOC (small private online course) .  SPOCs are really just "regular" online courses, as I've written in my one other post about SPOCs. It bothers me that there is so much revisionist history around the topic of "traditional" online education with articles such as these where organizations like Colorado State University claim to be "pioneers" in SPOCs since they've been doing online education for the past five years.  A whole five years? Our fully online Applied Linguistics MA has been around for eight years, and our overall organization, UMassOnline , has been around for about ten years doing "SPOCs." Maybe we are pioneers too, who knows, but it's really difficult to critically discuss MOOCs, traditional online education and flipped classrooms when peo

So, we are at the end of Week 2 of #edcmooc and we are wrapping up the unit on Utopias and Dystopias, and everything in between (because thing is really that black and white). As with the week before there were some videos to watch and think about. I think that the no-lecture-videos format works well.  I like to see what people do with certain conversation starters and where they go with them. As I said last week, even though this course is run through coursera it's very much a cMOOC format to me. One of the videos presented was the video bellow on bridging the future.  Honestly this video seemed really cool, and a nice proof of concept of what could potentially be done with technology. Students, in this case, seem to be using junior  versions of tools, like CAD, that professionals use to do their work. This seems both useful to learn concepts, but useful to also begin learning the tools that are used in real life for these types of tasks.  The one concerning thing that I saw w

Over the past few weeks I've been dabbling with a course on coursera designed by two professors from UW Wisconsin.  I didn't realize who they were (Squire and Steinkueler) initially, but at the "course" progressed I realized that I had read some of their work before when I was reading about video games and learning.  An added benefit was that there were some guest appearances by Jim Gee, someone who is mentioned quite often in the department I work in (Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston) and whose books on video game learning I've enjoyed in the past. Since there really wasn't a lot for me to react to while the MOOC was in session I decided to hold off and do one summative post at the end of the MOOC, which just so happens to be this week. So, the first thing that struck was this insistence that the "M" in MOOC stands for "Massively."  This is just wrong. It's a massive online open course, not a Massive ly  open online course. I

Take one blog, mix with others, add own thought and see what happens Over the past couple of days I've been reading what fellow participants have contributed to the blogosphere on #edcmooc.  I've watched the week 2 videos (more on that in post during the weekend), and I am slowly reading (or re-reading) some of the food-for-thought articles posted for week two. To keep things manageable, I decided to devote only 3 days to fellow participant's blog posts, so I can move forward with other materials well.  In this blog post I wanted to react to a couple of things I read from fellow participants in the last few days.  First off, we have the Sage on the Stage (SoS). I was reading this short post on why the Sage is likely here to stay .  Interesting post, and it's got a couple of comments. I highly encourage you to read and think about it as well.  The gist of the post, from what I read into it, is that the Sage on the Stage instructor is here to stay because (1) people