Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was watching David Wiley's two videos ( video 1 and video 2 ) on Open content, open publishing and open educational resource, oh and creative commons licensing too! I haven't had the chance yet to read the articles yet - but I plan on doing that before the weekend comes. I thought I would start off this week's Change thoughts on Open Content with my own history with it - and the cognitive dissonance that goes along with it! So one side of the brain acts in the persona of the student .  As a student (and I've been a student for a very long time), I am all for open content!  I wanted to see the professor's syllabus before the semester started. I wanted to know what the course content would be so I could prepare for the course in advance, or just figure out which courses would work well together. I also wanted my professors to have their content as open content because it meant that I didn't have to keep reams of printed paper material (not always searchable) ...

Wow, I honestly didn't think that my open pondering about "knowing" would get this traction - but this is the beauty of the massive open course (and heck...perhaps this is a great example of collective learning!) First, Brainy Smurf wrote an interesting post about the process (or perhaps the indicators) which are necessary for him to write a response to something he finds online. I have to say that he's hit the nail on the head with most indicators. I do dislike errors in blog posts - but I do take certain into consideration: if I read something that has errors in insidehighered.com  or chronicle.com , then I am less likely to respond because I feel like the bar is higher - those people are not my peers.  If I read something in this MOOC, despite any minor grammar issues I am more likely to respond because I see MOOC participants as peers. As far as profiles go (i.e. does the profile provide any info on the person), that's not are as a high factor for me beca...

Εδώ και κάτι εβδομάδες έχει αρχήσει ένα Μαζικό Ανοιχτό και Διαδικτυακό Μάθημα (ΜΑΔιΜα; ή μήπως ΜαΔΑΜα;) κοινώς γνωστό στα Αγγλικά ως MOOC (Massive Online Open Course). Στα προηγούμενα MOOC (ας χρησιμοποιήσουμε λατινικού χαρακτήρες γιατί το ΜΑΔιΜΑ δεν μου ακούγεται και ωραίο) έγραφα μόνο στα Αγγλικά, αλλά ευκαιρία γράψουμε και στα Ελληνικά και να εκπροσωπήσουμε λίγο την Ελλάδα στην διεθνή παιδαγωγική σκηνή.  Αυτή την περασμένη εβδομάδα το θέμα στο Change MOOC (με θέμα την αλλαγή της παιδείας) ήταν η Συλλογική Μάθηση. Η ιδέα πίσω από την συλλογική μάθηση είναι η μάθηση που χρησιμοποιεί την συλλογική γνώση. Αυτό που είναι διαφορετικό στην συλλογική γνώση είναι το ότι ο Ένας και οι Πολλοί είναι αναπόσπαστοι ο ένας από τον άλλον ( παραπάνω πληροφορίες εδώ, στο άρθρο της Άλλισον Λίτλετζον ). Κοίτα, ενδιαφέρον η σκέψη, αλλά πιστεύω πως πάντα είχαμε αυτή την συλλογική παιδεία. Στο κάτω κάτω εδώ και χρόνια έχουμε βιβλιοθήκες που είναι συλλογές από την ανθρώπινη γνώση και τις χρησιμοποιούμ...

The other day I came across a recent #change11 post by Jaap on his blog and there was an interesting question: Do we need to know each other when we are sharing knowledge and collaborating? This is a case where I had an immediate response, then I thought back to my own personal examples of sharing...and then I ended up with no answer at all, but rather I was left with a giant question mark (i.e. this needs some research) My initial answer, without giving it much thought, was: of course we need to know one another to share information!  - This reaction came from my own preferences when meeting and talking to people. If I don't know someone I tend to size them up before I offer up any information. They also tend to be the conversation initiators. Then, I had to take a step back and evaluate my online interactions, examples of which would be on forums like macosx.com and howardforums.com . In my online interactions I have  initiated conversations, both in the forms of que...

This week in Change MOOC, we see in Littlejohn's position paper that one of the things that one of the things that binds people together in collective learning is the creation of a social object. The example given is a group of scientists coming together to produce some sort of report. Littlejohn asks us, the MOOC participants, to share our view of what binds people in collective learning. While the creation of a social object is indeed something to think about - take for example my (and possibly your) many, many, many group experiences where you needed to come together to produce something - in my case it was homework and school presentations during my Masters programs and various projects at work. I think that this work-based view of what binds us is limiting and I think it's incorrect. I don't think that as a species our imperative, our raison d'être, is to produce stuff. I think that this is potentially a sign of our consumption-based society; and you can't...

On my commute home last night I had the opportunity to catch up with the initial readings for this week on Change MOOC . The topic this week is collective learning with Allison Littlejohn . I have to say that the concept was rather interesting, and technology has certainly enabled the possibility for Massive  collective learning - but the idea of collective learning isn't new. Some early personal examples of collective learning is my long term participation in forums like macosx.com and howardforums.com . I did spend a number of years discussing and learning when I was active on those sites, and I probably taught (or provided info for) many other members then, and maybe even now since the archives of those discussions are available. I also spent time (admittedly less than these two forums) on topics like PDAs, PocketPCs, and in communities like the NewtonTalk community. Again, through participation and through lurking I learned a lot. Even in the pre-internet era (yes, I was t...

I was sitting on the train this afternoon On the train catching up on the Digital Scholar (Martin Weller's book from last week on Change MOOC), reading some of the seed-posts from this week's facilitator and reading some initial posts from people who've already written something on thus week's topic (collective learning). I have a few blog post to dos on my list for the next couple of days (which require more text and brain power than I have now...otherwise I'd get crackin' on writing those thoughts down right now) but I had this idea for gRSShopper: a digg feature for blog posts. If you really like a participant's blog post (or diigo submission or tweet or whatever) you could +1 them. Then top posts could rise up at the end of the MOOC as something to revisit if you didn't get through them the first time around. OK that was the idea. What do you think? - Posted using BlogPress from my Newton 3000 (iPad)

This was a pretty interesting keynote presentation on the future of the profession. I guess it was great that a former boss called me a "loudmouth with big ideas"...even though he didn't know it at the time ;-)

I have to say that I am a bit behind on my self imposed goals for this week in Change11. I had intended to read all of the Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice, but I was only able to read about 4 chapters some were "assigned" through the MOOC, and others looked interesting enough for a side track. The book remains in my ReadItLater list on my iPad so I will probably finish it this week anyway (it's interesting and easy to read, so it shouldn't be a problem). The thing that kept coming to mind while reading the certain chapters (and the chapter devoted to publishing) was the academic carrot or stick: tenure and promotion. If committees that determine your tenure (or non-tenure) and your promotions and merit raises don't value digital scholarship, but rather value the traditional journal, you (as a young budding tenure track faculty member) might be tempted to forsake open scholarship in favor of the closer "norm" for your o...

Despite the fact that I am technically a digital native (BS and meaningless as this term might be) I still cling to paper - perhaps because it's cheap and (up until recently) freely available.  With a plethora of academic articles piling up, and eBooks to read (granted, most are public domain like the Divine Comedy and The Prince), I thought I would shed my reliance on paper this semester and go paper free as much as possible. I am working on a couple of papers, one solo and one with the MobiMOOC Research Team, and there are academic articles that I need to read (or re-read) in order to complete the research. Since I can't print out as much as I did before, I thought this is a perfect time (since we are at the beginning of each research project) to see if paperless is the way to go (for me at least). We are producing digital scholarship (my previous articles can be found on my Scribd account ), but up to now, for me at least, a component of that research was done on paper...l...

This of this blog post as a pre-test: my thoughts on Digital Scholarship prior to reading any of the materials (to be fair, I viewed the intro video by Martin Weller last night).  So this week is Digital Scholarship week on Change MOOC  (is the "c" in this MOOC for "class" or "conference"? lol :-)  ), and the topic on hand is Digital Scholarship; a topic that's been talked about on one of my favorite educational podcasts: Digital Campus . Maybe I am just too literal, but isn't scholarship considered scholarship no matter what the medium? Of course the medium can impose constraints, or it can allow the scholar to include or with with things that are unique to that medium and thus scholarship doesn't just become unidimentional (i.e. papers with words, tables and charts in them) but rather multidimentional, including not just words, charts and tables, but also audio, video, 3D worlds (let's not get in Second Life just now - I don't like ...

I thought it would be great to start a blog post about misconceptions that you've come across about mLearning that you would like to share.  To kick this off here's what I've heard a lot: "you can't even begin to look at mLearning until everyone has an iPad (or other tablet)" FALSE! You can indeed start to look (and implement!) a load of mLearning options.  Good mLearning is not device  dependent - good mLearning (like all learning) is based on a solid needs analysis, a solid learner analysis, and working with what you have that works in the environmental context that you need it to work in.  Sometimes it will be an iPad, other times it might be a Walkman and a Palm Pilot (yeah I know, I purposely picked "antiquated" technologies just to make a point) mLearning is not just  eLearning on a mobile device.

I finally had an opportunity to view the presentation by Dr. Zoraini Wati Abas (video below) for Week 2 of Change11. I must admit that having read the blog posts prior to viewing the presentation did influence how I viewed the presentation.  First I read Jaap's blog post , which lead me to Louise's blog . Both Jaap and Louise had some questions, and I viewed the presentation based on these questions.  Here are some thoughts (by the way, great to "see" you again Jaap!) Do you use SMS for activating student academic behavior because it is cheap or because it is the best way to get results? - by Jaap My feeling is that SMS it just ubiquitous. Given sufficient mobile phone penetration, and free incoming SMS (something that is NOT the case in the US), SMS was the cheapest and most universal way to get something done. Do you trust the answers of the students where they tell you they are very pleased with the SMS? Are the students just being polite? - by Jaap If answer...

I am happy to see that the topic of MOOCs as a language learning tool have come up in Change11! Again, even though I am not a PhD student yet, I am considering topics for a potential dissertation. The idea is that if I have an idea going in, and it's partially developed, I won't be stuck in dissertation purgatory :-) In any case, I've been participating in, and observing, various MOOCs over the past nine months and what's emerged is that different MOOCs take different approaches to the running of the class.  Some are more loose (see eduMOOC) and some are more controlled (I think LAK11 was more controlled), and of course there are other MOOCs that are somewhere in-between those two spectrums.  In thinking of a language learning MOOC (at least my potential dissertation topic), I am thinking of a MOOC that is more on the controlled side. The MOOC is going to be an introduction to Modern Greek, so there are some standards, some criteria, that students would have to m...

Ha! Got you to look! OK! OK!, all juvenile attempts to get attention aside, I don't really mean what I wrote in the title! It was a not-so-clever ploy to get you to this post.  As a matter of fact mLearning is not a fad! Well, I guess if you consider Computers in general to be a fad, then mLearning and mobile devices are a fad too, I guess it depends on your world view.  For me, and for the mainstream mLearning is a nice extension to learning that should be explored and taken advantage of. The main problem with mLearning, at least the main problem I've encountered in my professional life, is that people expect mLearning devices to be just like computers, where you sit down for XX-minutes, you view so many minutes of instructional video or animation, you perform an activity, and you take a test.  This, the mobile device, is not an appropriate modality for this type of learning!  You cannot shoehorn a certain type of pedagogy into the mobile realm....well, I suppos...

I love MOOCs, because it gives me an opportunity to meet interesting people and read what they have to say.  It's both educational and a discovery tool!  In any case, I read a blog post by Alex Reid today on the aversion to badges (you know, those things that you get for "achieving" stuff in various places and services." (I'd link to the article but my laptop has crashed three times today while trying to link to it :-) - just Google it it's called "welcome to badge world"  ) In any case, I read his article and I actually do not disagree! I think that people have taken credentialing (and badges are a type of credential) to a level that is a bit too far.  They place too much emphasis on the credential rather than what the credential implies. An example of this are academic badges like the degrees one earns. When you look at a human resources job posting you see that emphasis on the degree, rather than the skills implied by attaining such a degree ...

ChangeMOOC has started! Even though it's still an introductory week where people get to know each other (should I bother posting a "hello, my name is..." type of blog post?) it is the start of the MOOC for all intents and purposes. The one things that is really striking about this MOOC is the name... change what ? is what I want to know. Granted if you look at the course schedule it's all about education. I guess the subheading for this MOOC is education, learning and technology , so I guess we are changing them, but eduMOOC just finished a few weeks ago, and that was all about Online Learning Today...and Tomorrow . So I guess ChangeMOOC is a superset of what eduMOOC was about?  Either way, the week by week topics look interesting and interest piquing. I was planning on taking some Sloan-C workshops this fall, but between research projects and the ChangeMOOC, I think I won't have time.  Perhaps I will revisit the idea of SloanC workshops later on :-) #chan...

Thanks to Rebecca and her " Does a MOOC need a Needs Analysis? " post I was reminded that I needed to subscribe to George Siemens' blog :-)  George has a recent post titled " Who are MOOCs for? Confused Personal Thoughts " in which he admits that previous MOOCs haven't been user needs driven, but rather driven by the facilitators themselves. His description reminded me a little of BarCamps or CoffeeCamps. It also sheds some lights as to why some MOOCs were better than others.  MobiMOOC and CCK were quite good in my mind, but eduMOOC not so much (I am looking forward to the next iteration of eduMOOC though!) Rebecca has some pretty good questions and insights into this, but I wanted to add my own two cents. I am considering creating a MOOC as part of my PhD dissertation research. Now, it should be said that I am not a PhD student yet, and the PhD program I want to attend hasn't lifted off yet (PhD in Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston - starting proba...

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 ...