Multilitteratus Incognitus

And so, this week, another school season kicks off!  This week  we had both the kick-off for EDDE 805 (dissertation seminar I) and EDDE 806 (dissertation seminar II). I decided that last to start attending EDDE 806 regularly (or as regularly as I can) so that my final class-based semester (next spring) can be focused more on getting my dissertation proposal done. In this first session of EDDE 806 we mostly had a bit of a check-in (which is sort of what we did in 805 as well). There seemed to be some interesting strands that came came out of 806 last night.  First, Peggy Lynn (Cohort 6) is working on a project to translate the term OER (Open Eaducational Resources) into a variety of languages for a variety of reasons, but one of them is to make it easier to label, and search for, OERs that are in languages other than English.  If you want to help out please check out this page .  I did actually try to coin a term in Greek a number of years ago.  A few co...

In a MOOC a long time ago, in an internet far, far, away, a rag-tag team of starry eyed researchers got together to research about MOOCs (hey, I've got to setup an interesting getting together story, otherwise how are we going to get a movie deal? ;-)  ). All joking aside, back in 2011 the 3rd MOOC I participated in was a MOOC organized by Inge de Waard called mobiMOOC. I participated as a member, probably a 'memorably active participant', based on the categorization of participants we had in mobiMOOC, and near the end something crazy happened - there was a call for collaborative research! This was unsual since my mental model of academics is that they (we?) tend to just keep our toys/research for ourselves so that we can claim all the glory.  This wasn't like that. It was an open call to put together a paper based on the MOOC we had just participated in, which was really cool!  In the end we had a few of us working on this paper, which earned us a prize at the Mobil...

Now that school is over, and grading is almost over for the course I am teaching this semester, I finally have an opportunity to go through and continue my quest to read existing MOOC literature.  I had started this past September reading a collection of articles in an IGI publication titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses which I got electronically for a limited time in order to do a book review.  Needless to say that between work, school, and personal priorities this book review (and reading of articles) went in the back, back, back burner.  I also noticed that colleagues Markus Deimann and Sebastien Vogt published a special issue on MOOCs in Europe on IRRODL recently .  It would not be an understatement to say that I could probably take a year off from my EdD program just to read all the MOOC related research that has been published (and retrieved) in the past two years.  I'd say it's been gathering dust, but it's all in t...

The other day, while catching up on my (ever growing) pocket reading list, I came across a post from, friend and fellow MobiMOOC colleague, Inge on MOOCs.  It was a rather on-the-nose post about MOOCs, learning, assessment, and the discourse used in MOOCs about learners. Concurrently I am working with a Rhizo team on a social network analysis post where the topic of 'completion' came up, and we started discussing  the real connotations of completion.  How does one measure 'completion' in a MOOC? Is it a worthwhile metric? and what about engagement?  Finally, to add to this volatile mix of intellectual ideas, I am working on a conferece presentation, with fellow lifelong learner and MOOCer Suzan†. These raw materials made me think back to the early discussions on MOOCs (before the 'x' ones came out) and discussions about lurkers in MOOCs.  Before the xMOOC came out we didn't seem to frame non-visible members of the community as 'dropouts' b...

"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, I guess it's time to start really committing some braincells (and time) to DALMOOC, the Data, Analytics, and Learning MOOC that started last week on EdX.  I wasn't going to attend this MOOC, to be honest about it, but seeing that George Siemens was behind this, I knew that there was an experimental aspect to it. Learning analytics is not new to me, my first MOOC (cMOOC) in fact was LAK11 (Learning Analytics and Knowledge) which I jumped into right after I finished my Applied Linguistics studies. So, now that I have cleared my plate of a number of coursera MOOCs (decided to give myself the "audit" status and just download the videos for later viewing - maybe in January or something), and that most of my assignments are done for EDDE 801, I can devote a little more time to writing in the open web about academic stuff and ponderings about academic stuff. So, what brought me to DALMOOC? The first thing that brought me to it is this xMOOC/cMOOC structure tha...

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: ...

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou...

A while back, when #EDCMOOC was getting setup for the first time, a fellow colleague, co-author, and member of the MobiMOOC research team , recommended the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC offered by the University of Edinburgh. I think the school was his alma matter and he had good words to say about the organizers. This is always a plus. Well, first time around I was too busy - I think I was actually too involved with other MOOCs to have the mental bandwidth to participate in #edcmooc. The second time I don't even remember what was happening (was I in summer mode?), so let's scratch that one off.  The third time is upon us! What the heck, I thought to myself, might as well sign up.  The Game Based Learning MOOC  is almost over, and I think I have the bandwidth for #edcmooc now. Since this is the first week, I went in and had a peek to see how they've set it up. I have to say that this MOOC is, at first glance, doing well on a number of counts; something to rea...

The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle conte...

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...

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...

This is it! The final week of MobiMOOC is upon us!  I have to say that this MOOC really passed by so quick that it was really hard to keep up with it :-) Last year's mobimooc seemed like it was much longer than 6 weeks (in a good way), and this year's mobimooc seemed shorter than the 3 weeks that it runs. Comparatively, I think last year I joined the mobimooc with the intention to be a moderately active participant, and I ended up being "memorably" active, while this year I started with the intention of being memorably active...but I guess I'll have to settle for moderately active :-) .  There were a few issues, for me anyway, with this year's mobimooc - and most of them were around scheduling.  In April and May (original MobiMOOC) courses are near the end (or have already ended), so there is a little more head space to participate in the MOOC. In September, however, the story is a bit different. Courses are just starting, there is an initial crazyness as...

It's been a whirlwind tour in mobimooc this year.  Week 2 is almost done (I count my weeks by a 5-day weekday, rather than 7 days) and only one more week to go! I feel that I have not been as active in MobiMOOC this year as I was in the previous year.  Perhaps it's because MobiMOOC is only half of the duration of last year's MOOC.  It would be interesting to see how often I posted last year (per week) and this year :-) In any case, what has come up this year (that I think wasn't there last year) is a discussion on the nuances of mLearning and what constitutes mLearning, as compared to other types of learning (I call these  x Learning) such as uLearning (ubiquitous), eLearning (electronic), oLearning (online),  iLearning (internet) and so on. Here are some questions and points that were posed to spark discussion on the topic: Does M-learning start when E-learning comes to the end? E-learning doesn't feed our needs thus M-learning were born to fill the gap? ...