Multilitteratus Incognitus

It's been a while since I last just sat down to think  and write about something (like the good old days when I was cMOOCing...).  These past few weeks have been about conferences, and getting back on track with my dissertation proposal (although I think I am the only one who is keeping a score on that at this point). In my attempt to get back to writing, and engaging with friends and colleagues out there in the wild blue yonder which is the internet, I thought I would pick through my accumulated Pocket list until it's almost empty.  One of the ponderings of interest came by means of an article on Inside Higher Ed titled  Academic Identities and Terminal Degrees , where the overall question was:  Does one need an academic terminal degree to identify professionally with that discipline? And, as Josh goes on to explicate Can only someone with a Ph.D. in economics call herself an economist? Do you need a Ph.D. in history to be a historian? How about socio...

What does that spell?  elp-ss-ss ;-) OK...well that sounded more funny in my head... Anyway! Week 5 of NRC01PL (last week! All caught up! yay!) was about Learning Performance Support Systems.  My first introduction to LPSS (a brief one at that) was in an instructional design course almost 10 years ago (if my memory works).  The funny thing is that we did talk about LPSS (without using that label) in a Knowledge Management course while I was doing my MBA.  The lesson here?  Interdisciplinarity is indeed a thing worthwhile practicing! :-) When we learned about LPSS way back when, it was within a corporate learning context. The idea of an LPSS, which in my knowledge management course tied into communities of practice, was that employees, who are also learners, have access to a system to get realtime, just-in-time, help with whatever they are doing.  An example of this might be, for example, a short video on how to print something from your computer to ...

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...

Some nice artwork, no doubt by @merryspaniel :-) Time just seems to fly by this semester.  I don't know if it's because I am busy, or if (as the old saying goes) time flies when you're having fun! This past week we skipped the usual introductions and check-ins in 806, affectionately known by some as the therapy portion to the live session.  I actually didn't mind it considering that this is the 3rd session and I've started to recognize some familiar names in the chatbox of Adobe Connect.  Some introductions and check-ins are fine, however sometimes they span 45 minutes and it makes the presentation portion seem longer.  I think the balance point is this:  If you have one presentation then you do check-ins, if you have multiple you skip them. This past week we had two presentations.  One by Mary McNabb (not sure which cohort), and one by Joanne Buckland (also not sure which cohort).  In addition we had a research interlude presented by cohort ...

Well, after a couple of month of not paying the Ning bill UMassID.com is dead!  Well, the domain is still fine, @cdetorres got that one for 10 years, but the Ning community that it pointed to is pretty much dead. So what is was UMassID.com? Well, back in 2008, when I started my MEd in instructional design, the outgoing class was looking for a new president for the student association (GIDA - Graduate Instructional Design Association).  This association - I later found out, started at some point in the early 90's (the program began in 1984). Since I didn't want to see the hard work of previous officers go to waste, I thought I would step up and take over the presidency.  At the time, someone's final project for a course was to look into communities of practice, and as part of it they created a Ning community , which at the time provided freemium service, so for the student the community was free. Within a few months of taking over I discovered that the network...

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...

What do you get when you mix connected courses, thinking about academia, and cold medicine?  The answer is a blog post (which I hope makes sense) :-) As I was jotting down my initial thoughts on co-learning in the previous post I completely forgot to address some of the initial thinking questions for this module.  Here are some initial thoughts on co-learning and how I would address these questions: What is co-learning and why employ it? For me co-learning is when two or more people are working together to solve a problem and learn something new.  As I wrote in my previous post, the individuals in this community do not all need to start from the same point. There can, and will, be learners that are more advanced in certain areas as compared to others.  This is perfectly fine, and it's realistic to expect this.  This can be a community of practice, it can be a broad network of learning, or a loosely connected network of learning that centers around a hashta...

This past week I also looked at the OCW module of #ioe12. The assigned video was the announcement of the OpenCourseWare project back in 2001 (more than 10 years ago! Who would have thunk it!).  Now, reading about the OCW back then, I got the impression that these were going to be courses  and not just materials. That OCW would be something like what MOOCs are today rather than a publisher or materials. When I first looked at OCW I was really disappointed.  These were not courses!  They were materials, exams, readings and course notes.  Some OCW materials were more "complete"than others, so an interested student (with loads of motivation and resourcefulness)  would be able to  self-study, but some materials were really incomplete and not conducive to self-study.  I saw this as a major #fail. This really colored my perception of OCW. At this year's NMC conference (11 years later!) I did attend a session on OCW and my misconceptions abo...

I came across this video near the end of last semester, but I did not have time to watch it. I've written about Tribes, the book by Seth Godin, that relates to communities of practice, management, marketing, communities (and so many other things). Here's the man himself talking about tribes. The video is only 17 minutes long - it's well worth the viewing time!

I was reading a post the other day called Who owns information . It's been quite a few years since my Knowledge Management class, but I think I've read the article that Jane is referring to. I think the question here is not Who owns the information , but rather Why do you share information. In my knowledge management class we went through different ideas a tactics to use to get employees who have a wealth of knowledge in certain areas to write KB (knowledge base) articles so that employees who are not in the know can access this KB and tap into the knowledge that these people have. If you are part of an institution trying to get your members to engage in a community of practice your job is cut out for you. One of the ways to encourage employees contribute is to create a happy and positive environment in which the employees feel like sharing. If the environment is negative employees will most likely not share what they know because it gives them power. The trick here is to def...

I came across this article on Mashable a few weeks ago about the traits of a good community manager. Granted this article is concerned more with commerce rather than academia, however I do think that the traits do translate one-to-one in academia. I encourage people to go to mashable and read the article. Here are a few of my thoughts on it. 1. Love your job Well this is a d'uh for almost any job (otherwise you will be a miserable sob hehehe). I found the comment that a community manager should be very approachable quite pertinent. Community managers are the community's front face, the maitre D' in a sense and if you don't like the snooty Maitre D' in this restaurant you will probably go somewhere else. 2. Empower the community and promote others (as well as self). This quite important in a community of practice. People are veritable fountains of knowledge, they just don't know it. Encouraging people to participate unlocks that knowledge for the benefit of t...

I was reading this blog post earlier this month about the collapse of the TR-DEV community of practice on an eLearning blog. Now Communities of Practice (or CoP) is something of an interest to me. In the MBA program I viewed it from the lens of enabling employees to share knowledge within the company. In the Instructional Design program I've created a CoP of faculty, students and alumni as a space to meet outside of class to share ideas, comment on each others work for feedback purposes and share any good jobs that come along. In my personal life I am a member of several boards to keep up with advances in different technologies. Now, what happens when the board owner or owner of a CoP decides to call it quits? Who owns this data? Can someone in good conscience just delete the CoP like the TR-DEV list did? For example, I am a member of the NewtonTalk community which deals with all issues Newton ( apple newton that is). The list has been active for a decade now and there is lots of...