Multilitteratus Incognitus

Moving along in NRC01PL, here are some reflections of what was presented in week 3 of the Personal Learning MOOC.  It's been rather busy at work, and at Athabasca as I am wrapping up my semester, so I haven't really gelled with anyone else in this cMOOC.  I think that the topic would be interesting to discuss in connectivist fashion, but I have not yet (satisfactorily) done any wayfinding . I see some friends from other MOOCs in the twitter stream (like Autumm and Jupidu), but don't see much in the place of discussion.  Maybe once I "catch up" I'll pay more attention to what others are doing?  I am getting a similar vibe now to the one I got in the Wiley MOOC on OpenEd (#ioe12)  - I am in a museum tour, and I am a few rooms behind the group.  Good opportunity for mischief and creative exploration, but it's always fun to have another friend around to share the experience with. In any case, in week 3 the topic was the (curious) case of the cMOOC, wher...

For the past semester I've mostly ignored synchronous learning on coursera.  Instead of consuming materials as they are released, I log in once a week, download the videos for the course, and I keep them in my video library.  If there are textual materials available as well, I donwload those, but I tend to focus more on video materials. When inspiration (or curiosity) strikes, I dive into the specific course of interest and have a video play.  At the moment I tend to play lectures in chronological order, the order that they were listed in - in the course I got them from. So, why not use coursera as "intended"?  Well, the predominant reason is the lack of time. These past two semesters have been quite busy for me and I don't have the time or inclination to do things as they are released by content providers (yes, I know - the noun used was quite deliberate).  There are also a lot of interesting courses being offered, not just on coursera, but also other MO...

I wrote (a few days ago) that I am re-designing  an introductory course in instructional design ( see syllabus here ).  In my assessment activities I've decided to go with a pass/not pass model.  There will still be something approximating traditional rubrics and categories for different things that learners need to address in each activity, but I am toying with the idea of doing away with prescriptive rubrics like this one †.  I think that grading rubrics, and the exercise of sitting down to create one, is invaluable for instructor and instructional designers.  It helps you go through the process of articulating what you want learners to be able to do in this activity. There is only one problem, not everything can have a meaningful rubric.  For instance, in the rubric I linked to, how does one convey to learners that they minimally summarized vs. summarized something?  Or summarized vs. extensively summarized?  Qualitative feedback is obvi...

So, the other day I was at the NERCOMP annual conference.  I heard a few people speak (cool stuff), and I also got an opportunity to chat with people, and be a nosy eavesdropper on other people's conversations.   One of the things that came up, as has come up elsewhere in the past three or so years, has been the concept of MOOCs as OER and MOOCs as OCW.  We've actually seen this with xMOOCs like Udacity as having their content labeled as open courseware. EdX uses the term "courseware" for their course materials on their MOOCs, whether they are open is an entirely different discussion.  Even my third MOOC ever (mobimooc 2011) had stated that the materials would remain as OER after the end of the MOOC. Then, I started to think about Dave Cormier's question, or potentially a challenge, on how to introduce newbie to the Rhizo14 MOOC that ended five weeks ago, but we are still active, on facebook at least.  All of this got me thinking about two things: ...

Well, this week has been particularly crazy, with a couple of days of snow making things pile up at  work, and with a presentation this past Friday on international education at NERCOMP, it means that I've been behind a bit (compared to where  I thought I would be) on blogging for #rhizo14.  I have been keeping track of the facebook discussions, so I think this week I'm consolidating both original post and blending them with things that others have written. The question of the week (or rather, the prompt of the week) was: Explore a model of enforced independence. How do we create a learning environment where people must be responsible? How do we assure ourselves that learners will self-assess and self-remediate? The first thing that came to mind actually comes, second hand, from former classmates taking a course on Group Dynamics (a course that I never took during my graduate studies with this particular faculty member).  The story goes like this:  First da...

Now that my fun (and educational) little excursion to the world of the Ancient Greek Hero is over, I am more energized to go back into the world of the reportage and punditry around MOOCs.  I am not all caught up yet, but I did go through enough articles to have some thoughts on the news that has transpired over the last couple of months in the world of the MOOC. First of all,  more Acronyms.  What's up DOCC? This was an article on Inside Higher Ed this past week. On the one hand it's great to have big universities do something other than the xMOOC format, on the other hand the lack of background research on the format you are trying to "disrupt" is disheartening when it comes from academics.  I guess this fine group of folks wanted to disrupt the disruptors by coming up with their own concept, along with a nice little acronym (DOCC: distributed open collaborative course) that they can lay claim to.  The definition of DOCC is as follows: A DOCC is differen...

It's been a while, but I have completed the course.  I don't know if EdX considers me a "completer" but I got what I needed from the course ;-)  That said, the course I started back in the spring was The Ancient Greek Hero, offered through EdX (HarvardX in specific).  I had been looking for an EdX course to take so I could evaluate the platform and the pedagogy, but most of the topics really didn't jive with my interests, until this one. When I started the course in Spring things were busy at work, then I went on vacation, and when I came back the course was over, with me not having done more than half of the readings.  I did take the course textbook (downloadable as a free ePub from the course page), so I took the opportunity at the beach, and on the boat, while on vacation to do some reading.  In addition to the textbook ("slow reading") there was also a free reader with the Iliad, and additional original texts.  This was meant to be "fast readi...

It's week 6 of 9 in OLDSMOOC† and the topic is Curation of content , and one of the major areas is Open Educational Resources (or OER).  I had to go back to last summer, when I was working on the #ioe12 MOOC, and the week that was specifically tackling the topic of OER to see what I wrote then on the topic. I think my main "complain" about OER is that it, in addition to spending time to find OER resources, you also have to, usually spend, a lot of time on editing and adapting the OER for usage in your own classroom. After all, materials are designed with certain uses, users, and criteria in mind, and those uses, users, and criteria may not match your own LD/ID analysis.  Thus, the process isn't one of  Seeking & Deploying , but rather  Seeking, Evaluating, Modifying, Testing, Deploying . The process then can become a rabbit hole, where if you jump in too deep, you feel vested in the outcome and you probably don't want to scrap your current work on OER, if y...

One of my friends and colleague works for Canvas now, and we happened to be at the same NERCOMP workshop when news of the Canvas Network hit the wires.  Honestly, I've been so MOOCed out recently with all the MOOC coverate and punditry that it's not easy to keep up with all MOOCs all the time. And, to be honest, if you want to really assess a MOOC strategy, my feeling is that you need to be a student in that MOOC in order to really gauge what's going on. I have just started saving all MOOC related articles, opinion columns and blogs (that are more than 1 or 2 paragraphs) to PDF so I can go through them more leasurly once I am done with my current research projects (and maybe something can come out of those that is more scholarly than just a "I read them" note on my blog) That said, one of my twitter connections reminded me of the Canvas Network and i gave it a quick look. There aren't that many courses on it just yet (or it didn't seem so anyway) but I ...

It's the final week of CHFE12 (edfuture.net) and the topic is something that we've beat to death in the past in MOOCs like #ioe12 (which I completed a bit late this September) and #change11 ; in which we discussed the topic of Open Research about a year ago. I may have also seen this topic crop up in eduMOOC in 2011 and a MOOC on Open Education (not #ioe12) also running this fall. In any case, I feel like I am really past the point of talking about Open Research, and I am more in the "doing" phase of things.  I know that academia has a problem with collaboration and co-research and co-publishing.  We are masters of saying one thing (we want collaboration!) but then we are also great at reprimanding people who do collaborate. In hiring committees and tenure decision making, we aren't as comfortable with candidates that don't have as many publications under their name, and their name alone.  A few months ago, I heard some colleagues from another on the elevat...

The topic of open assessment came up during #blendkit2012 this week, which is quite a fascinating topic. Britt asked if peer review can work in small groups, having seen it in xMOOCs like coursera. I've written about open assessment before, but not specifically about this, I don't think. I have written some quick thoughts on the coursera peer review system which can be summarized even quicker by saying "hit or miss." In the one course (thus far) where I've opted to do the assessments and review my peers, the reviews were a mix. Some reviews of my work were good, others were lacking, and for some I wondered if they even read (or understood) the rubric! So, while I can see how massive open peer review can be good, the fact that its anonymous means that I can't seek clarification, and there is no apprenticeship into the rubric to make sure everyone gets it (and really understands the asynchronous lectures). Bringing this back into the blended classroom, I ...

Yesterday morning I was catching up on some #cfhe12 blog posts by Bryan Alexander (who I have not seen in a MOOC in ages), a blog post about d efining MOOCs  by Rolin Moe ,  and my colleague Rebecca who writes about the ease and usefulness in MOOCs†. First, let me respond to Rolin's points (since I happened to read his blog post first). There are lots of people looking at the future of academic publishing, pushing for an open movement. Some academic journals have gone open, but the majority of journals carry a high price tag which only exists as price opportunistic for educational institutions (and some rare corporations and organizations). Yet academic journals are part of the lifeblood of scientific research, especially for soft sciences (such as education). By only working with open resources, a cMOOC cuts many of these empirical, peer-reviewed research works out of its circulation, having instead to pull from free resources that often lack academic rigor. For a...

With the Introduction to Open Education course now done (and only 6 months late!), I decided to consolidate all of my posts here for the badge requirement achievement requirements . I hope I am not too late to claim these badges ;-) OpenEd Overview  Requirements (Novice level, complete for all 12 topics to earn the badge) Watch the topic video. Skim the topic readings. Write a short blog post summarizing what you’ve learned about the topic and why you think the topic is important. Write a final post linking to the 12 previous posts related to this badge and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. OpenEd Overview   Badge artefacts: Open Licensing - Open Licensing at a Glance Open Source - Open Source in Education Open Content - Open Content OpenCourseWave - It's OCW Time Open Educational Resources - OER (or old dog, new tricks ;-)  ) Open Access - Hello Open Access! Open Science - Open Science? Open Research! Open Data - Open Data ...

Well, with  my work on #ioe12 done, it's time for a little reflection! For whatever reason, as I may have stated before, I completely missed the announcement for #ioe12, which I guess ran from January to April (or May) 2012. I thought, that since the material is still available on the course site ( OpenEducation.us ) I would be able to go through and self-study. I did indeed go through and self-study, and I invited some fellow MOOCers to participate, but they had other things happening. This meant that the lone through the asynchronous MOOC might be lonely, and indeed it was. In the end #ioe12 was a really good course, but if I weren't so interested in the topic, I would probably have dropped out by week 7, or I would have just skipped some topics.  In the various MOOCs that I have participated in, other learners/participants have helped get me through topics that I either didn't care for, or just didn't appreciate the topic as much before I saw others talking abo...

This is it! The last topic in #ioe12 - Open Policy ! To be honest, there is almost nothing new to see here, if you've been following along with #ioe12 week-by-week.  All of the previous 11 topics do connect with one another, and policy issues  have  come up in the past, we just didn't cover them specifically. The crux of this topic is that anything that is publicly funded should be open.  For instance, for all federal grants, the research produced by these grants should  be under some sort of open license so the individuals who paid for it (the people of a give country, and heck  the people of the world) should be able to use it for free. In my own experience, having lived and gone to school in Greece K-8, I know that there is a national textbook publisher in Greece. These textbooks are free  to children who go to school.  These books aren't free as in "I am loaning this book to you for free", but rather " here is a free copy, do with it as you ...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist  (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. Here are the reactions I got from a fellow colleague (on the previous Formulation post): I must admit that my formulation wasn't completely new...

With the course almost over, I decided to undertake the OpenEd Evangelism badge. The requirements for the OpenEd Evangelist badge are: OpenEd Evangelist (Journeyman level, complete for 1 topic to earn the badge) Construct an argument by which you could persuade someone to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice. Your argument should include at least five elements (kinds of evidence), with references.Write a blog post describing your argument in detail.  Have a conversation with a faculty member in which you use your argument to try to persuade them to adopt the topic as an ongoing practice.  Without revealing his or her identity, write a blog post describing your conversation and the reactions, responses, counterarguments, and concerns of the faculty member and announcing your intent to have completed the badge. So for this blog post I will formulate my argument.  My main argument around Open Education is that it benefits the learners and as such department...