Multilitteratus Incognitus

It is a bit of an odd thing to admit, but ever since I started formal school again in order to pursue a doctorate the amount of pleasure reading has gone down.  Now, this is to be expected, time resources need to be allocated differently in order to meet the rigorous demands of a doctoral program.  That said, my pleasure reading was research articles anyway, so it's kind of hard to out down your candy (research articles about MOOCs and online learning) in order to have your balanced meal consisting of research in other fields that you aren't necessarily aware of.  This is a good thing, but the amount of research on MOOCs keeps piling up in my dissertation drawer at work.  Summer project! Anyway, I digress! I saw that France Bell and Jenny Mackness had a recent article in Open Praxis about Rhizo14 .  I actually did with it what I do with all MOOC articles these days - download the PDF, archive it, print it out, add to my "to read" pile. Normally that would h...

Happy Labor Day everyone! The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments ( Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they were from a while back, so I thought I would address them here. Comment 1 I'm not sure how you can say that "MOOCs first appeared in 2008." Remove the word "online" from MOOC and you have International Correspondence Schools. Response I think the underlying current of this comment is "everything old is new again." Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone is claiming that MOOCs are this whole new genesis that came from nothing and is here to change the world like nobody's business. However, one can't dismiss that this c...

Last week, despite the craziness, I completed two courses.  First, I completed the #fslt12 MOOC, which I really enjoyed a lot!  The interactions between my peers and the facilitators were great, there was a lot of sharing of best practices and lived experiences, and I took a lot of things away; both things that I can immediately put into practice, and things that I need to read up on :-).  It was a bit of a bummer that I was not able to attend the final session and present my microteaching activity (see a blog post or two back), but my peers did discuss it and gave me some feedback which was pretty cool! I hope that Oxford Brookes runs this MOOC again next year because I think it's beneficial to people that are new to the teaching profession :-) The other course that I completed was a course/workshop from the Sloan Consortium on implementing the quality scorecard in online programs.  This was a pretty interesting course. Going into it, I was under the i...

Here it is! The final week of FSLT12, and the topic is evaluation! A topic near and dear to me, especially considering that it's the final step in th ID process before iterating :-) Here are two parts of this weeks lecture presentation.      

Here is an interesting synchronous session recorded last week on FSLT12 with Etienne Wegner   

This week I've been at the NMC conference (and Monday I was sidelined with a summer cold, no fun), so I've skipped out on most of this week's fslt12 activities. I've been thinking about this microteaching activity, and what I can teaching in 10 minutes. The activity reminds me of a reality TV show, the next Food Network Star, where contestants have to show that they can do something, in a short period of time (a promo video for their show) that they would be expanding on (supposedly) during the full episode. So, what could I teach in 10 minutes? The big issue is that I am thinking too big! Then, it hit me! I could go back to my tech-training background and show people how to use the cameras in their iPhones. Sure, it's not super academic, but what if I were an assistant for DS106? DS106 has the Daily Create activity, where learners in DS106 (and interested participants) can use their phones to participate in this activity. So, here is a quick 10 minute lesson pl...

Here's a quick recap of yesterday's NMC12 breakout sessions. I decided to skip the morning plenary- 2 hours of 15 minute presentations is a little too much for me, and I can get those on iTunesU anyway ;-). Yesterday's breakout sessions were mostly interesting (and I had quite a few interesting side conversations!)   Exploring a Tablet Application for the seminar Classroom With Eric Gordon from: Emerson College And Drew Harry from: MIT   This was the first session the day (and if I am not mistaken I had seen something like his last January at the NERCOMP mobile session). We've seen tablet (or laptop) applications that tap into the backchannel in large lectures to capture the pulse of the classroom, but the idea behind this particular application was to tap into the "backchannel" in small lecture group (15 or fewer, based on the design of the application) and the idea is to be able to propose topics for discussion and to track discussion topic time. There wa...

Here is this week's video (lecture!) on lecturing, from the FSLT12. I have currently paused the video to post it here (see, blogger is not competing for my attention :-)  ).  Thoughts on lecturing to follow!

It's week 2 in FSLT, and the topic of this week is group participation. One of the things mentioned this week by the facilitators are the roles that people take in group work , which was quite interesting, as I could see  people in my past group work experience taking on those roles consciously or subconsciously. In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last week), which got me thinking. One of the things that I've been pondering is the mode of participation.  In MOOCs like Change11 and CCK11 the main mode of participation seems to have been Blogging, and aggregation of those blog posts through a daily newsletter.  Other modes included tweeting, posting on delicious, and using the basic commenting systems on gRSShopper.  It is true, at least for me, that in these two MOOCs I did not miss the discussion board element and I fully embraced blogging (and commenting on other people's blogs) as a way to participate and follow the lear...

Change11 is over...but the discussion is still going ;-) I was reading this post here by Jaap today and I started thinking (some more) about the subject.  Here are some questions (incomplete as they may be) to Jaap's questions: Do schools have a property right on educational materials that is made by teachers? (law) I am of mixed opinion on this.  In the beginning I thought YES ! Of course they do! Schools are hiring instructors/professors to teach certain topics, and when certain topics don't have materials, the instructor needs to create them (otherwise they are not an effective instructor).  Now, a a couple of years after I think that NO , the institution does not have property rights on the materials created by the teachers. The teachers, in most cases, are hired to teach, and not to develop materials.  If teachers are required to develop materials due to the inadequacy of the materials that they are provided with, they have no legal or moral obligation t...

For my inaugural "assignment" post for #fslt12 I thought I would use one of the reflection templates, specifically the "areas of expertise" one. It's interesting to think about my teaching experience thus far. Initially I was tempted to say that my teaching experience extends back to February of this year; this is when I started teaching a college level course (graduate level) in research methods for instructional design. Thinking about it a bit harder though, my teaching experience goes back further. A couple of years ago I volunteered to guest-host a learning module on communities of practice for one of the courses that a friend a colleague teaches. Sure, it was uncompensated, but it was a teaching experience nevertheless. This learning module was for graduate students in instructional design as well. I've also taught non-credit workshops when I worked for the library (Microsoft office, RefWorks, and on rare occasion how to use the to do library research...

This morning, before I left for work, an article caught my eye in my RSS reader from Inside Higher Education (amazingly, they gave me enough of a blurb to want to read the article - usually they don't!).   The article is about an Italian University that is going English-Only for their instruction . This article is an interesting read (I can't wait until the comments start coming in). My initial reaction was one of being taken aback.  Why the heck would a national university use a language for instruction that IS NOT the language of the country?  My secondary reaction was one of opportunity (Imagine old style cartoons with dollar signs in the character's eyes ;-)  ).  Since English is a language that I understand very well, and obviously use on a daily basis, I thought that this is an opportunity for people like me to work in other countries and at the same time not have to worry about attaining an Academic Language Proficiency in the national la...

Well, actually, it's the start of two new MOOCs! I know that Change11 and DS106 are still going, but change11 seems to be on life support. It seems to me anyway that the same 4-5 people are posting, and even though there are interesting people in these final weeks, most people have moved on, which is too bad. I still read the daily digest, and those 4-5 people post some thought provoking stuff, but I just have nothing to add to the conversation, so I lurk :-) With DS106 I don't feel that creative (which is a bummer), so I've resolved that once the summer comes and I have more mental bandwidth (too many work projects taking up space now) I plan on doing two challenges every week and work through the assignments in the summer months. I've wanted to get a podcast off the ground for a while, so doing something for DS106 should kill two birds with one stone ;-) Anyone interested in doing a "MOOC Talk Weekly" with me? LOL :-) Anyway, so what are these two ne...