Multilitteratus Incognitus

A long time ago (in technology terms), in an academia very close to us, there were stories of professors who suspended their MOOCs, or decided rant in the class forums and ultimately to walk away because the MOOC wasn't what they expected, and we all (probably) rolled our collective eyes. OK, maybe we didn't all roll our collective eyes, but I remember thinking that the "participate or get the heck out" and "read the fine  textbook" were really incompatible with the MOOC framework. Initially I was somewhat anti-lurker.  I'm not saying I am pro-lurker now, it's just that I don't think that lurkers pose tragedy of the commons issues, so just let them be.  They don't detract from people who want to learn and experiment.  To me, at the time, it seemed like an instructor who wanted to do what many have done in the past. Take a face to face class, and translate it, almost one for one, to online without really thinking about the affordances. ...

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...

CCK11 Tweet visualization Alright, after a few days of being sidelined with a seasonal cold, I'm back on #dalmooc.  Still catching up, but I have a feeling I am getting closer to being at the same pace as the rest of the MOOC ;-)  In any case, this is a reflection on week 3 where we started messing around with social network analysis (SNA).  This is cool because it's something that I had started doing on another MOOC on coursera, with Gephi, so it was an opportunity to get back on and messing with the tool. So, what is SNA?  SNA is the use of network theory to analyze social networks.  Each person in this network is represented by a node (or edge), and nodes  can be connected to other nodes with a vertex (or many vertices). These connections can indicate a variety of things (depending on what you are examing), however for my usage in educational contexts I am thinking of vertices as indicators of message flow, who sends messages to whom in a network...

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things.  One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14) is this other research, which I would call Delphi based in its methodology, on why we take MOOCs, why we participate in them, and why we stick, or not stick, to them. I thought that this would be something interesting to participate in since I am not sure I've recorded why I've been participating in MOOCs (as you will note, the MOOC tag is the biggest one on this blog). The other epithets used online, thus far, for those who keep engaging in MOOCs is MOOCaholic .  I don't know if I like that epithet because it doesn't necessarily describe me right at this momen...

It's Open Teaching time on #ioe12! Having been involved with MOOCs for close to a couple of years now (in the fringes early on, and on the main stage since January 2011), I thought I knew quite a lot about open teaching, but Wiley video presentation surprised me and I learned something new!  I had run across Wiley's syllabi on Open Content  a while back, (before this course) but I wasn't aware that the goal was to also have students suggest topics as well!  When I heard that (in the presentation) I thought to myself "hmmm...it would be cool if learners actually did do this, but somehow I don't they will..." and lo and behold they did not!  I do agree that it's probably a perceived power dynamic between teacher and student. Students are not empowered to suggest topics in our culture, so it didn't surprise me that students did not contribute to the syllabus.  Maybe something to change, culturally, in the future. Language in such open courses is somet...

It's Open Content week on Introduction to Open Education with David Wiley (well, it was Open Content week a while back, but I just got to it!) This week, at least compared to the previous two weeks, there was little reading and materials (perhaps this is a good week to work on the Research Badge, eh? ;-)  ) and, at least for me, I think I have come across these materials before in Change11 and perhaps CCK11. David talked a bit about Open Content during Change 11 Week 5 . It is a pretty interesting concept, his open content idea pre-dates creative commons, and I think he was glad someone took charge of the legalese and made the concept happen. It was also nice to have someone openly discuss the fact that they didn't so so well in their initial try.  Failure seems to have a negative connotation in our society, even if iteratively we end up working things out in the end. One of the things that holds great promise, for me anyway, is the open textbook concept.  Small OERs...

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...

I had come across Jupidu's post on Sensemaking in a MOOC a while back, but I haven't had much time to respond to it just yet (until now I guess ;-)  ).  I was actually thinking of my participation in MOOCs in general; as well as the two MOOCs I am now participating in - those being Change11 and DS106.  I was actually thinking of points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in specifically and I thought I would do a bit of compare and contrast between the two: Sensemaking works around identity creation – in every environment f2f or virtual I’m building my identity and this “self” is in continuous interaction with the environment and with the other learners as well. Sensemaking works retrospective – I’m making sense out of experiences reflecting about them, as I’m doing it now with this article I want to write. And therefore sensemaking is influenced by my memory of situations. Sensemaking is social – of course it is in the Mooc! I’m a kind of aware of some the learners who participate in th...

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design degree) and my comprehensive exams (for Applied Linguistics) to pay too much attention to PLENK and CCK09. With formal schooling done (at least for now) and with no courses to take at the university I decided to experiment with MOOCs.   In January a friend and colleague, @cdetorres, recommended LAK11 - Learning Analytics. This was to be my first MOOC. It was quite interesting, I did learn quite a lot, and it just highlighted that I was interested in a topic, learning analytics, that I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering. The course was quite fast paced; a lot of things to do, in w...

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs.  Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated , and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging . Tony writes (and this is not the only thing he writes so read his entire post): There could be all kinds of reasons for the shortage of comments on this week’s topic, but I was more struck by the form in which they occurred. Participants did not comment directly to my post for this week, but within their own blogs. I call this the syndrome of the selfish blogger. We all do this. If we have something interesting to say, we’d rather say it on our own web site than someone else’s (it would be nice though if the post was also copied to the site that originated the topic). I had to go and cull all the comments from the #Ch...

OK, so it's week two of ChangeMOOC and I am looking at  the Course Outline which points me to a Google Spreadsheet.  I see that the topic this week is Mobile Learning (über-cool!) and I am asked to go to another page where supposedly I will have access to some content, activities, and other things that one would expect in a learning module.  Now there are two problems here: (1) Too many clicks: Perhaps I am spoiled from CCK11, but CCK11 was much more organized in terms of content.  The Course Outline page for CCK11 gives you links to each weekly module, and each module in turn has recommended readings, viewings, and activities. So, to get from MOOC homepage, to content it's two clicks.  In contrast, Change is three clicks to get to the guest host's blog/webpage/CMS, and then it depends how deeply the content is buried. (2) Clear content postings per week. Now, future weeks may fix this problem, but this week the problem is t...

Another MOOC is almost in the can (to borrow terminology from TWiT).  I have to say that even though I was really interested in this MOOC, eduMOOC that is, I really have a hard time finding something that really made it stand out. This was my fourth MOOC this year and I can easily say that MobiMOOC and CCK11 were the two top MOOCs.  LAK11 was good, but it was way, way, too compressed for my liking, not enough time to take stock in what was talked about, and what was read. eduMOOC, in contrast to the other MOOCs this year, was almost like an informal social. There was a google site with information, and a weekly breakdown, but it really didn't feel like a "course," it felt like it was lacking direction. I think that it was a worthwhile experiment, considering that the MOOC format is relatively new and a lot of research is left to be done on this format, but I really didn't consider it much of a course. I wonder if it fails the MOOC litmus test since the C stands for ...

Note: I had originally written this for the UMassOnline blog, but since it's not posted yet, I am cross posting here :-) This past December I graduated from the Masters in Applied Linguistics program and I am no longer a formal student [i.e. someone in a degree or certificate granting program]. This doesn't mean that I haven't been busy.  A relatively new phenomenon in learning has cropped up in recent years - that of the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC for short). These past few months I've been taking part in several different MOOCs, dealing with topics such as Learning Analytics [LAK11], Connected Knowledge [CCK11], and more recently mLearning [ mobiMOOC ]. There are other MOOCs that I decided to skip this time around (Digital Story Telling and PLENK).  Some MOOCs use traditional Learning Management Systems like Moodle, while others use a more distributed architecture, using freely available Web 2.0 tools to create content, comment on this content, and...

I just had quite an interesting realization - it's only the end of Week 2 on mobiMOOC (1/3 done with the course) and there are already a ton  of resources that have been contributed by participants; a lot of these resources are scholarly resources in the form of studies and published research articles on mLearning.  This is pretty cool!  There is also a delicious mobiMOOC repository  available which is pretty cool.  I've been thinking of starting a Zotero share so we can put all of these academic articles, with proper citations and bibliographic information, somewhere where people can have access to them in one place (instead of being inside many separate google group email postings).  Perhaps this is something that I might start undertaking over the weekend, or next week.  Truthfully I haven't had much chance to go through the citations already provided, so I want to create this bibliography for myself, for future use, but I think it would be worthwhi...

Another interesting post by Jaap in this week's (final week) of CCK11 made me think. Jaap writes: As a connectivist (CCK11) I do not like the words “acquisition of knowledge”, I like to that to be “connecting to information”. This made me think of the philosophy behind knowledge, how one sees knowledge and information (and ultimately wisdom?), and the semantics behind the words we use. Take for instance this phrase: Acquisition of Knowledge What does Acquisition of Knowledge imply? Well, we acquire something that in concrete, something already pre-made, ready for us to pick up and consume, use, or put it on a mantle. This view of knowledge is very behaviorist in its connotation. I don't necessarily subscribe to this idea. I think information can be given (example: don't touch the stove, it's hot) but there is no necessary knowledge of what happens if you touch a hot stove. As a kid I was told this time and time again, and I never touched a hot stove. A few m...

This is it, last week of CCK11. I went through the materials, well...I mostly skimmed through them to be honest, but I really did have a blast going through them, especially Stephen's 1998 prognostications of technology and education in the future . In 1998 I graduated high school and started my undergraduate studies at the University. It's interesting that ideas, such as the PAD (or PADD if you are a star trek fan)are spot-on! Still not quite there with a few things, but we're getting there. If I could point at one thing that's great about ubiquitous technology it would be that it has the potential to open doors. Things like TED , online library catalogs, availability of library databases, and initiatives like OpenCourseWare and various MOOCs make it so that more knowledge, more education, and more access to subject matter specialists is available, for free, to many more people than before. This leaves it up the individual learner to take advantage of these sources...

We are nearing the end of CCK11, (and we're starting mobiMOOC at the same time!) and I came across this post by Jaap , asking a few question on how connectivism fits in with with established teaching methods. I've got a few thoughts on the issue... What does a teacher see of connectivism? What will change in education as a result of connectivism? What does a connectivist lesson look like? Connectivist principles, I think, do exist in schools, it just depends on what type of schools you look at. I think Jean Anyon 's commentary, albeit 30 years old at this point, show that there isn't just one type of pedagogy in our schools.  What does a connectivist lesson look like?  I'd say probably something like what is done in Montessori schools . Would this work in public schools? Of course! If we want to throw resources at our schools to pursue this type of teaching and learning. What are the implications of connectivism for the school? If New Brunswick wants to chan...

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted to learn.  I am not sure how face-to-face immersion works, but I assume that online immersion probably works around the same lines.  I'd have to do some more research and looking information up to be sure. In any case, thinking ahead to a PhD, I am wondering if anyone has researched open education, or MOOCs, or both in the field of Applied Linguistics and language learning. This might be something that I would be interested in doing and I am wondering if there are people out there in CCK11 that have learned a language just by interacting with others online (and supplement...

Being on vacation this week, and with little access to a computer and a monitor, my CCK11 involvement is pretty mobile- reading posts and materials on my iPhone and blogging from it as well. I've been using my phone for the same things in the past (email, RSS and PDF reading) so it's not such a change from the norm - with the exception that I am using this tiny screen in a more sustained matter than simply consuming small bites of info at a time. The last couple of CCK11 topics, Power and Openness have been pretty interesting; Power was covered quite a few times in my Applied Linguistics curriculum (in one of the readings Freire mentioned one of my professors: Dr. Donaldo Macedo - pretty cool) so the readings were a nice adjunct to things I had already read. More on Power in a future post, this one is devoted to open educational resources and on one of my efforts. Last semester, my last as a master's level student, I formed a small study group of applied linguistics studen...

I've been mostly lurking these past couple of weeks on CCK11. I've enjoyed reading both assigned readings and reading through blog entries of participants. Most blog entries are in English, which isn't surprising considering that this MOOC is run in English, but at least once, if not, more times per week I've seen postings in Italian , French and Portuguese - I'm sure I've seen Spanish as well, but I really don't remember. I definitely saw some Spanish in LAK11. While I do enjoy reading ( good ) content in English, it's always a breath of fresh air to read it in other languages! I minored in Italian and German as an undergraduate, I self-studied Spanish (in isolation, so my communicative competence isn't that great...but reading is OK) and I took 4 years of French in high school and I spent a year or so in French chat rooms in college (the early days of Yahoo! Chat). For me reading in a second language isn't that difficult - it's ch...