Multilitteratus Incognitus

In a few days I will be leaving on vacation, so I won't be MOOCing...or at least I won't be MOOing.  I have downloaded textual materials on my iPad, and I plan on getting a local SIM where I go to keep up with my RSS feeds (until Google Reader decides to kick the bucket).  I thought it would be a good idea to write a few thoughts while I have a hardware keyboard in hand. First up, edX and the Ancient Greek Hero course that I have been following. In a previous post I had mentioned that I had fallen behind with reading of the Iliad Scrolls (the side materials for the course) and I was only keeping up with the main textbook, the Ancient Greek Hero in 24 hours. Week 6 and 7 were actually quite long, compared to previous weeks, in terms of reading, so I have fallen behind on that one too. It is on my iPad, so I will be completing it during my vacation.  That said I did have a lightbulb moment when I was thinking of academic rigor for MOOCs and how xMOOCs are replicating exi...

Last weekend one of my friends emailed me one of his Pocket readings in which the link between Second Life and MOOCs was made (i.e. is the MOOC the new Second Life?).   I must admit that I laughed at this because I never found Second Life particularly useful, whereas I do find MOOCs pedagogically intriguing.  The whole disruption aspect is up in the air still for me. I was excited to see, yesterday, on First Monday an article on MOOC Pedagogy .  "YAY!" I thought, let's read something good!  Sadly, the article was a piece of garbage.  This isn't really a knock on the authors, well, maybe a light jab on the arm as opposed to a left hook on the face, but I do see some serious parallels between the whole Digital Natives (and other such classifications) from early 2001 to 2011 and MOOC "research" like this one.  The digital natives sideshow produced many opinion pieces that posed as research; and then these opinion pieces existed in a vast echo-chamber fueled ...