Multilitteratus Incognitus

"Fractured Spock" - by me and Net Art Generator, for #clmooc Over the past couple of years, since the silly acronym "SPOC" was invented to denote a course that was the antithesis to the MOOC, a Small Private Online Course , I've had issues with the acronym, and took exception to this new discovery  on the part of schools that newly invented  this form of education, considering that there are schools that have been doing it since the early aughts. In any case, I was finally going through my Pocket account today, trying to read as many things as I've saved for later reading since Rhizo15 when I came across a couple of articles that really made me roll my eyes a bit and made me want to facepalm... The first article is a featured article in Harvard Magazine, July/August issue, titled Is Small Beautiful? This was a fairly quick read, but I couldn't help but think that this was mostly a PR piece on the part of Harvard and Harvardx. There is a lot ...

Alright, being now back from my mini vacation, and back into the regular rhythm of work, reading, and very soon classes, I've caught up with a lot of my saved Pocket articles.  The one thing I saw is, still, the very schizo nature of MOOC reporting and commentary. This reminds me a bit of the headlines, back in the day on Engadget and other tech sites, about studies on cell phones causing/not causing cancer. In the MOOC context this is about whether or not MOOCs (in their many forms?) are/aren't good, revolutionary, the best-thing-since-sliced-bread, etc. Sometimes I feel like the Charlie Brooker of the field of education when I write these, but hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Right before the holiday break, one of my colleagues sent me an article from Technology Review which he thought I should publicly respond to (being the crazy MOOCie that I am).  The article is What are MOOCs good for ? and I may have read this a while back, but probably didn't real...

It's the final stretch of 2014! This makes it my fourth year in exploring MOOCs - boy does time fly!  When I started off with LAK11 I was really just looking for ways to continue learning for free.  While I do get a tuition benefit at work, this also involves standard semesters of 13 weeks, getting work-release time (since online learning isn't covered by the benefit) and retaining the motivation to keep going through a predefined course and syllabus.  Even when MobiMOOC happened and we formed the MobiMOOC research team I really didn't foresee that the, oddly named, MOOC would catch on fire the way it did.  At the time I was eager to get some initial thoughts together on how to put together a MOOC (now they are called cMOOCs) and put together a Great Big MOOC Book , with others, that was a right mix of research and practice.  Since the MOOC has really expanded a lot over the years, with many different things being called a "MOOC" the original idea might be be...

Wow, hard to believe, but we've reached the final module of Connected Courses (and boy is my brain tired!).  I found out last week that there may be a slim chance of me being able to teach Introduction to Instructional Design (INSDSG 601, a graduate course) at some point in the new future. This is something that was offered to me a couple of summers ago, but being away on vacation at the time (with questionable internet access) it didn't seem like a good idea to be teaching an online course. I've been poking around the course shell, here and there, over the past couple of years (even since teaching this course was a remote possibility) to get ideas about how to teach the course.  The previous instructor, who had been teaching this course for the past 10 years but recently refocused on other things, did a good job with the visual design of the course. It's easy to know what you are are supposed to do each week.  Then again, from the design of the course I can see th...

It's been a while since Rhizo14 ended, but the community is going strong! Facebook may not be as active (or maybe facebook is  hiding most Rhizo posts from my timeline...that could be it...anyway), but we are still chugging along with the collaborative *graphy. I can't call it an ethnography, or autoethnography because variables have changed.  Some of us decided to get together and write an article for Hybrid Pedagogy on why the Collaborative *graphy article is taking so long (a meta-article if you will) but we got stuck there too (or it seems as though we are stuck).  I think others have written about their own personal views on this on their own blogs, so I've been working out what my own stumbling blocks are with this project. I think I have a way to explain things now! So, when working collaboratively in previous collaborative work situations your final product feel unified.  The main analogy that I can give give is the main root of one plant which looks like ...

What do you get when you mix connected courses, thinking about academia, and cold medicine?  The answer is a blog post (which I hope makes sense) :-) As I was jotting down my initial thoughts on co-learning in the previous post I completely forgot to address some of the initial thinking questions for this module.  Here are some initial thoughts on co-learning and how I would address these questions: What is co-learning and why employ it? For me co-learning is when two or more people are working together to solve a problem and learn something new.  As I wrote in my previous post, the individuals in this community do not all need to start from the same point. There can, and will, be learners that are more advanced in certain areas as compared to others.  This is perfectly fine, and it's realistic to expect this.  This can be a community of practice, it can be a broad network of learning, or a loosely connected network of learning that centers around a hashta...

I took a small hiatus from Connected Courses in the last module because everything sort of piled on at the same time and  I had little space to breathe.  Yes, I've been dalmoocing, so I guess everything is a choice ;-).  I guess that was my jump-out week of connected courses, and now I am dipping in again. I love the language of cMOOCs ;-)  The truth is that I've felt a little fatigued with #ccourses.  I am not sure if it's the length, or the time I've been engaged with it (7 weeks if you consider the pre-course and that's before we got to Diversity, Equity, and Access ), so I guess I needed a little mental break.  I don't think this is an issue unique to MOOCs because I've been feeling a mild case of senioritis in my first EdD course. Luckily I've done all of my deliverables, submitted them, and have gotten feedback, so now I am participating with my peers and engaging in the participation aspect of the course. Anyway, these next two weeks are ab...

This semester I am helping out a colleague, and current M.Ed. student on the topic of MOOCs. He is taking a few MOOCs as part of his trying to grasp what it means to take a MOOC in order to create a MOOC.  Unsurprisingly, as is the case with most people, he's having some issues with Connected Courses because cMOOCs require the knowledge, and utilization of, certain literacies that we don't necessarily teach, or practice in school, even as graduate students. So, in brainstorming with him over the past couple of weeks I've been  thinking a lot about the phrase: The Medium is the Message †.  One of the main pitfalls of instructional designers and instructional technologists, especially those who are currently going through their studies and are novices in the field, is that they tend to think of technology first, and everything else later.  This is true with MOOCs as well, especially people who've been enculturated to think that MOOCs are of the xMOOC variety, that ...

Τις περασμένες δύο εβδομάδες είχαμε ως θέμα μας, στην ενότητα του connected courses, το τον ιστό, και συγκεκριμένα τον ιστό ως πλατφόρμα, και ως κουλτούρα . Τα κείμενα που μας έδωσαν ως αρχική ύλη ήταν πολύ βασικά για εμένα.  Πριν από αυτή την ενότητα δεν το είχα σκεφτεί πως είμαι στο ίντερνετ σχεδόν είκοσι χρόνια.  Όταν επέστρεψα στην Αμερική κάποιος φίλος τις οικογενείας, βλέποντας πως είχα αφίσει όλα τα φιλαράκια στην Ελλάδα, μου πρότεινε να τους βρω στο ίντερνετ. Κάπου τότε άρχισα να μαθαίνω τι σημάνει διαδίκτυο, και τα έμαθα χωρίς βιβλίο. Έτσι την κουλτούρα του ιστού, και την τεχνογνωσία που χρειάζεται κάποιος, την έμαθα μέσα σε 20 χρόνια, γνωρίζοντας πολλούς και διάφορους ανθρώπους από όλο τον κόσμο. Τώρα το θέμα μας είναι πως μπορούμε να διδάξουμε εμείς αυτά τα πράγματα σε λιγότερο χρονικό διάστημα στους φοιτητές μας, έτσι ώστε να μπορούν να χρησιμοποιήσουν αυτές τις γνώσεις, αυτή την τεχνογνωσία, και να μπορούν άνετα να κινηθούν στον χώρο αυτής της νέας κουλτ...

Here we are, week 2 of module 3 (so week 6) and half-way through the formal run of connected courses.  I spent most of last week catching up with stuff that was piling up in my Pocket account from previous weeks. In all honesty I wasn't quite sure what to make of this module.  Pretty much all of the things that were readings failed to spark my imagination, given that I had either read similar things in the past, or I had actually lived through them.  The thing that really started to spark my a few things was Mozilla's Web Literacy white paper. Then I was having a conversation with fellow MOOCer Luis , in real life, about literacies and then it hit me.  How do people engage on the web, in a cMOOC? Luis was telling me about issues with engaging with a cMOOC and fellow participants out on the web, and how the other two xMOOCs he is following along with seem much more engaging.  I think that this is because they have a form and format that graduate students know t...

My own doctoral journey may have just started, but it's been a meandering path to even get to the start.  It's not the destination after all that matters but the journey. Eventually all doctoral journeys culminate in a dissertation.  For the longest period of time this type of writing was a bit intimidating.  After all, who's got the energy to sit down and write a document that's 100 pages long and that few people will read. I challenge you to go ahead and look at academic articles that cross your path.  How often do you see people citing someone's dissertation in their citations?  Not that often, eh? So, this gets me to this blog post.  I was reading M aha's blog post this morning on the way to work about her experience with her dissertation and her defense, and I was prompted by the #digiped questions she reposted.  This really got me thinking about my own path and what it's leading me to. about a more responsive, and perhaps more accurate, fina...

Είμαστε λοιπόν κοντά στο τέρμα της δεύτερης μονάδας του Connected Courses, ένα ανοιχτό διαδικτυακό μάθημα (OOC) και η θεματολογία αυτής της μονάδας είναι η εμπιστοσύνη στον χώρο του διαδικτύου και η διαδικτυακή ευχέρεια των μαθητών, αλλά και τον καθηγητών. Το θέμα της εμπιστοσύνης μου θυμίζει κάτι παλιά podcast από Έλληνες, όπως ο vrypan, κατά το 2005-2007 όταν είχαμε αρχίσει να γράφουμε όλοι στο διαδίκτυο με τα μπλογκ μας και να τουιτάρουμε εντός τον γνωστόν μας δικτύων. Θυμάμαι τότε πως ο Παναγιώτης (vrypan) είχε δημιουργήσει έναν aggregator ο οποίος είχε μια γενική λίστα των ελληνικών μπλογκ και αν θυμάμαι καλά έκανε aggregate και ένα μέρος από την ανάρτηση για όσους ενδιαφέρονταν να δουν κάτι περιληπτικό πριν αποφασίσουν να πάνε να διαβάσουν το μπλογκ. Εμένα αυτή η υπηρεσία μου άρεσε αρκετά επειδή ήθελα να βρω άλλους Έλληνες στο διαδίκτυο και να έχω κάποια επαφή με ελληνικό περιεχόμενο που με ενδιέφερεε και που δεν ήταν από εφημερίδες. Μερικοί όμως είχαν πρόβλημα με το aggrega...

Siemens, 2014 It seems like Connected Courses is the cMOOC that keeps on adding while we are in the process of conducting the course.  I think, based on my own personal experience, that this (the addition of "features" as the course is in progress) is a hallmark of cMOOCs ;-). Anyway, Discussion forums have been added to  Connected Courses , and a discussion cropped up on whether students can opt out of the open course if you are teaching in an open environment.  If they are not comfortable with open, is there an option for them to participate in a closed version, which I guess is similar to an a traditional online course through an LMS.  I am not sure how much I will participate in the forum, so I thought it would be an interesting though exercise to post some initial thoughts on here and have a discussion about the topic on here (or via a network of blog posts) since it connects with what I might be doing as an experiment for my dissertation. So, really qui...