Multilitteratus Incognitus

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 ...

Last week I was somewhere between work, teaching, the NERCOMP symposium I co-facilitated and the annual Sloan Consortium Emerging Tech for Online conference. It was nice to see some familiar MOOC faces on both twitter and on the live stream presentations. I think it was in Jen Ross's presentation (of EDCMOOC fame) that a Rhizo14 participant was quoted anonymously.  I really didn't think much about it at the time. It was more of an "wow, I didn't think rhizo was really that well known outside of some crazy circles."  In any case, it turns out that the quote was from the autoethnography that we are working on (slowly but surely I guess), and that no permission was sought to use the quote.  Before I knew the specifics the prompt on the rhizo14 facebook group was: I have to admit that my gut reaction was "someone's watching? Who's reading our stuff?" But, I should point out, that this isn't indicative of a  negative reaction, but rather a ...

Check, check. Is this thing on? Linguistics isn't generally considered a topic, like one of those sexy STEM courses, that everyone talks about when they talk about degrees and fields to study for job related purposes. For this reason we haven't seen a lot of linguistics related MOOCs.  Last year we had the Virtual Linguistics Campus offer three MOOCs using their own approach to teaching MOOCs which seemed more like self-paced eLearning. I didn't complain (much) because it was, after all, courses in linguistics. This time around, the University of Lancaster is offering a course on Corpus Linguistics, which I have naturally signed up for.  There is at least one colleague from the #rhizo14 MOOC taking this course, so I am curious to see what they think of the course after all is said and done.  In the meantime, I have some initial thoughts on the course itself, as well as the mechanics of the future learn platform, as they are realized through this MOOC. The first ...

Just before the spring semester starts and I start getting really busy with the day-job, teaching my class, working on a couple of conference presentations and working on the FutureLearn course on Corpus Linguistcs, and P2PU course with Dave Cormier, I thought I should really jump into a couple of Udacity course offerings to give the platform a real try out. In years past I stayed away, as a learner, because none of the content was interesting. While I do come from a computer science background, the things that pique my interest tend to be in the style EDCMOOC or  CCK. Now, however, that Udacity has "Introduction to the Design of Everyday Things," it was an opportunity to test that out, as well as a more technical Statistics course. If I were taking a n exit survey, I would probably say that I took "Introduction to the Design of Everyday Things" because I liked the topic and I knew the author, and I signed up for "Statistics" to see how a math course wo...

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 dr...

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, ...

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 d...

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 t...

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...