Half-way there! Mid-semester tired thoughts.

Well, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I get a lot of energy from seeing students in 620 participating the forums!

That said, I am feeling pretty tired! I don't know it it's just "hump-week"  - you know, that week in the middle of the semester when you feel that you are climbing a steep hill and you just want to sit down, but you gotta keep moving - or just that I really need a vacation (or this damned cold that doesn't want to go... ) :-).  Either way, I hope that once the current project is done that I will feel like I am on a skateboard rolling down hill to the finish line - i.e. lots of fun, and a rush, and not at all like now - feeling like I am dragging my feet.

On the docket for the next 2 weeks is Assignment 2.  While it's only meant to be 4,000-5,000 words, and probably just an introduction, to a topic in teaching and learning, since Jen P. presented on gamification in 801, I didn't want to rehash  her work, and information from the Gamification MOOC from 2012 (one of my 2 primary sources for my own gamification knowledge).  So, I finished reading 3 books on gamification and games in education, and I am now working on both McGonigal's Reality is Broken (in audiobook format) and Sheldon's The Multiplayer Classroom (in print). I think between six books and some background info from my previous gamification knowledge bases (both MOOCs) I should be more than fine.

I was originally planning on gamifying my presentation, build in some audience engagement, maybe have my classmates do some pre-work, but I am not sure how to work the mechanics right at this moment.  Once the paper is written I should have a better handle of how to gamify the presentation - if indeed I go down this path.  It's hard to gauge audience reaction and reception sometimes.  I get the sense that we are all tired coming into our seminar presentations, so I don't know if gamification of a presentation will delight or annoy my cohort-mates ;-)

A couple of weeks after my gamification paper and presentation, I have a presentation on connectivism as well, so I guess I will need to start reading (and re-reading) some articles I have saved on that, and some new ones that have come out since, in order to present something semi- or quasi-comprehensive.  Once these two assignments are done, I think I will be in down-hill-skateboard territory.

On a side note, I signed up for EDDE 804 (registration is open for next spring) and books for that should be here by next week.  I guess they'll have to be shelved for another 30 or so days until the semester ends ;-)

Oh yeah... where's my hover board?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more