Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, Week 4 has begun in the graduate course I am teaching, and it was time to tally up some numbers to see if any secret badges needed to be released and awarded to students in the course.  Of the 8 secret badges I designed for this course, four of them have been discovered by students one-quarter of the way through the course! This is actually pretty nifty!  So what are the secret badges that were revealed this weekend? Helping Hand Description: A helping hand can be like a compass showing you the way to the solution. Criteria: To earn this badge a learner needs to respond to at least two fellow learner's troubleshooting question with an answer that gets the initial learner "unstuck" from where they currently are stuck in their project, or in the course. More info: The idea behind this badge was to reward students who help out others students with some of the technical issues in class. For example a student may not know how to "collect" discussion

Well, last week of #rhizo14 and we're all pondering where to go from here, planning the next steps I guess.  Although I am getting the distinct feeling that participants are going through the stages of grief ;-)  In any case, the topic of this last week ties into enabling student independence, which was the topic of week 3, except that this week it feels more like kicking the birds out of the nest :) The other day, independent of rhizo14, I was having a conversation with one of my graduate assistants, who also happens to be in the graduate course I am teaching this semester (titled: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses ).  This, and #rhizo14, mixed and produced the following thought process, pondering, and question at the end of the post. (Historical background - if you want to skip, go down 3 paragraphs) The first time I taught this course (Spring 2013), I was a last minute substitution. The course designer, and regular faculty member teaching the course, was not av

The end is nigh! The end is nigh! This is the last week of #Rhizo14. Of course, the end is probably just a beginning, but we'll cross that bridge later on.  In any case, the topic for this week is Planned Obsolescence , or as I would frame it: the culminating step of the metamorphosis of our learners from guided to self-guided life-long learners. Dave asks How do we teach ourselves into uselessness?  While this is probably meant to be provocative, I don't think that we can ever teach ourselves into uselessness, both from a teacher perspective and a learner perspective.  From a teacher perspective, it is quite possible (and I would say desirable), to teach our students to be on their own, and to continue to learn on their own, and pass on that knowledge and gusto for learning to others.  Just because we've enabled others, doesn't mean that we are useless or obsolete.  It just means that we've added to the world.  This isn't a zero-sum game.  Yes, it probably

The medium is the message ... The medium is the curriculum ... The community is the medium ... The community is the curriculum! Well, we've made it to Week 5 of Rhizomatic Learning, and this week's topic shares it's title with the course itself!  The Community is The Curriculum .  Odd, to me this would have made a perfect final week (you know every end is a new beginning, circle of life learning type of thing).  Perhaps the end is nigh and this is Dave's subtle way of telling us ;-) Anyone, the community as curriculum poses some interesting questions for me and I'll explore the first two that came to mind (otherwise we'd be here all day). Background of Learners  It seems to me that courses like this one (and other highly engaging OOCs, engaging to me anyway) is that we are relying on two things from the participants of the MOOC.  The background of the learner (i.e. they aren't complete novices in the discipline), and they are self-starters.  We

This was an eventful week! Snowstorm, followed by several days of coughing, sneezing and all those other lovely wonderful symptoms of winter colds (or whatever it is I have).  This has made me fall a little behind on reading the contributions of fellow rhizotravelers, but hopefully I can slowly catch up on my Pocket readings. One of the things I came across this past week was a post by Tellio where he writes about how he collects all of the sources relating to #rhizo14.  I had started thinking about this back in Week 2 when I started thinking about how many channels I can reasonably follow and participate in. My own threshold is 2.5 channels.  I decided to focus on P2PU and on Facebook, and the 0.5 channel is twitter for when I am commuting and on my mobile phone.  Any more than that becomes untenable, for me anyway.  What Tellio described in his post reminded me of the days before RSS, when I had three or four forums open in tabs simultaneously (MacOSX.com, HowardForums.com, and a

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205135659/What-MOOCs-can-do-for-the-Traditional-Online-Classroom-Part-II Introduction 2014 is upon us! We are now a couple of years from the big MOOC “explosion” in the news, and since we’ve gone to both extremes, too much optimism and too much pessimism, about what MOOCs can and can’t do, it’s now time to have a more refined look at MOOCs and their potential to cross-pollinate with, and positively influence the direction, and practices, of traditional online courses. As with the previous article in this series, I’ll just refer to MOOCs in general.   The reason for this is that MOOCs are experimental, and we’ve seen a lot of experimenting over the lifespan of MOOCs these past six years. These include cMOOCs, xMOOC, pMOOCs, sMOOCs, and other MOOCs that have yet to be named.   It’s now time to start thinking about what can best be borrowed from MOOC practices into traditional online learning.  

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205134044 Introduction It’s been a few years of extreme sentiments around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). 2012 was proclaimed the year of the MOOC (Pappano, 2012). 2013 was the year that MOOC criticism was the new trendy or “in” thing (Rees, 2013). Perhaps in 2014 we’ll move away from such dichotomies and evaluate what’s working in MOOCs, what’s not; and what we can import into traditional online learning.    A while back I read a post on WCET about redirecting the conversation about MOOCs. One line that really caught my eye, and that has really struck me up to now, was “let’s Learn from MOOCs and recapture the microphone” (Cillay, 2013).   Now, MOOCs are still in an experimental mode, and we will be in this mode for quite some time in my estimation. After all, classes need to run, so that we can collect data, analyze it, come up with hypotheses and test them. Then rinse and repeat until satis

Well, we've made it to Week 4 of #rhizo14, a full two-thirds done with this rhizomatic thing. But wait, if rhizomes are all middle with no beginning and end, what does two-thirds actually mean? I guess the topic of the week is the printed medium, and the overall question of "is Books making us stupid?"  The question brought up immediately the mental image of Homer Simpson, from the show The Simpsons , pondering one such question. Dave, in his opening salvo this week tells us that there is something in Books that he distrusts, in that books encourages objectivity, distance, a feeling of being removed from the audience. Something less participatory.  This is quite an interesting thought, considering that many (of a certain generation) would claim that Google (and the Internet) is making us stupid and we are losing out literacy skills because we aren't reading as much.  Just like those concerns over Google are unfounded, so is this concern about Books (in general).

So, week 3 is done, week 4 is upon us in #Rhizo14, and the topic for week 4 is undeclared. So, this is a good opportunity to maybe do a summation of last week.  However, as I was thinking about this topic I was a bit uncertain on how to proceed.  There were many things discussed, and many topics approached in facebook, P2PU and the various blogs.  I guess Jenny and I had the same issue with which thread to pick up and unfold. Then Jenny brought together the aspect of uncertainty and jobs: Nowadays, many people, if not most, will have a number of jobs during their career. There is no certainty that they will be able to stay in the same job or even in their own country throughout their working lives. And we know that in many aspects of society, change is coming at us much faster than it ever has in the past. This got me thinking of something Maha wrote: Now if only I could convince my students that this is actually a good thing in formal (and informal) learning! They would have t

NOTE: this is a report of the post I wrote for Sloan-C back in November of 2013.  I am reposting here as a backup.  The original can be found here http://blog.sloanconsortium.org/2013/11/18/mooc-evaluation-beyond-the-certificate-of-completion/ This coming January will be my third year of involvement in MOOCs. Questions have come up in the last year around the issue of why students “drop out” and how to better retain students. Tied to these questions is the issue of evaluation of learners and learning in MOOCs. At this point, I’ve witnessed at least three different kinds of MOOCs, and they all approach evaluation somewhat differently. During my first year all MOOCs were of the cMOOC kind. This included, among others, LAK11 (Learning Analytics) , CCK11 (Connectivism) and MobiMOOC (mLearning) . There was not an evaluation of learner knowledge acquisition component in these MOOCs because the MOOCs were focused on community and emergent learning. This meant individuals made th