Multilitteratus Incognitus

Disclaimer/Heads-up: This is a short post connected to my work on the Creative Commons Workshop (aka “mini book report” or “homework”). It’s not meant to be an exhaustive copyright analysis, nor legal advice. Reader discretion is advised. Oh yes - this is also licensed under CC-BY 4.0 😃 For this final post for CC-Cert will look briefly at Greece, specifically with regard to Copyright and Creative Commons usage. Πνευματική ιδιοκτησία (intellectual property) or πνευματικά δικαιώματα (intellectual rights) are the Greek terms for denoting copyright, as well as the borrowed term “copyright” itself. The entity, in Greece, that “guards” the rights of IP holders is the Hellenic Copyright Organization (OPI) “ supervises the operation of the system for protecting the authors and the related rights rightsholders; safeguards the rights of the users and the public; balances the interests of copyright sectors with those of industrial property sectors; incorporates and adjusts in Greece t...

This blogpost is connected to my participation in this fall’s Creative Commons Certification course . The track that I picked was the educator track, but I’ll deviate a bit from the traditional educator track♦ and put on the hat of a college administrator♥. In my day job, I am the main administrative person for an online master’s program. To borrow a phrase - the “Soup to Nuts” guy for my program.  I am there when prospective students ask questions about our program, help shepherd them through the admissions process if our program is the right fit for their needs, help guide them through the program, and see them through to graduation. Sometimes I am also the alumni contact.  That’s not to say I am alone in this endeavor, there are many people who are part of this intricate machine: from faculty who teach courses, to colleagues at the Registrar’s office who actually schedule courses, colleagues in Admissions, and even other students in the program who help provide an...

Over the few weeks and interesting discussion has been taking place over the Creative Commons Open Platform mailing list . The Creative Commons group has created, and is now offering, CC certification.  The certification consists of a 10-week online course with a traditional number of students in the cohort (around 20), and there is a cost associated with it ($500). I'll be honest, when I saw the cost I did an eyeroll (at no one in particular).  My initial reaction was that I too shared the sentiment that some people on the mailing list reacted to: I've been in the realm of CC for more than five years.  I have (or think I have) a solid understanding of CC.  Why does this thing cost $500.  The fact that Maha speaks highly of her experiences in the course did serve as a  means to get over my original reaction to it - which got me thinking...and which brought me back to another point that friends, colleagues, and I have discussed for a while:  the diff...

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. ...

A few things happened this week which seemed to point to a nexus on grading, grades, and a throwback to Week 3 of Rhizo15 on what counts . The three thing that came together for me were Whitney's post from Week 3 , My own grades from EDDE 802, and me designing (or rather re-designing) the introductory course in instructional design which I will teach/facilitate/rhizolead this summer.  All these things happened independent of one another but in reading Whitney's post I realized that there was some sort of coming together in a nexus, or rather a vortex of grades and assessment. Part I:  A reaction to Whitney's post Whitney writes that she is not a fan of grades and that she has found them motivating at times, and demotivating at other times. This got me thinking about my own connection to grades.  People assume that since I have earned 3 master's degrees I am naturally some sort of smart person and that I care about grades. The reality is that I don't.  I don...

Well, in a week I will be in Edmonton starting off my EdD in distance education at Athabasca University.  I know that most North American doctoral students probably don't think of their dissertation topic this early (I haven't even completed my first course), but I want to be pro-active and work on the thing while taking courses.  So, Rebecca's post on Educational Design Research (EDR) was quite timely.  This isn't my first go around at a dissertation topic, my current topic has evolved over the past couple of years as I was thinking about what I want to do (and which university is best to pursue this). My initial idea was to blend my background in Instructional Design and MOOCs to teach a language, specifically designing a MOOC to teach Greek as a foreign language to novices. This actually came out of making a MOOC out of my MEd capstone .  This was circa 2011-2012 after my experiences with MobiMOOC, LAK11, CCK11 and before the xMOOCs invaded the scene.  ...

With coursera MOOCs kind of slow this time of year, I decided to try out a MOOC on the subject of "Open" on P2PU. After my first P2PU course, #rhizo14, I thought I would flex the mental muscle a bit and get some P2PU experience.  The topic of this week asks us to ponder what Openness means to us as individual participants.  To be honest I haven't really sat down to write up what I think of Openess.  I've certainly discussed the topic with colleagues and friends over beer or coffee, but it's been on specific topics, like MOOCs.  Many in the xMOOC arena consider "open" to mean "free".  The previous post I wrote should have you convinced, to some degree, that Open isn't free. There is some cost associated with it whether or not you get it gratis . That said, for me Open is about a philosophy.  It may mean a number of things: 1. free-of-cost :  In some instances, such as all those free MOOCs that you can sign up for (even this one!) you ...

It's week 7 in OLDSMOOC, and as we are windowing down we are tackling the topic of Evaluation . I will be switching tracks again, from the Blended Mobile Learning course (that I've been working on for a while), and going back to the idea of offering the course as a cMOOC. Going through OLDSMOOC I've gotten some good ideas about how to implement my own cMOOC.  I've been thinking a lot about the recommended paths that are available in some weeks (the short and the long path). This, in combination with badging, and deliverable, is making me think about the assessment aspect of the MOOC; but let's not get sidetracked, let's talk about evaluation. In terms of evaluation decisions, what immediately comes to mind are these: Should the content for this learning design be expanded, reduced, or remain the same? One of the tricky things about MOOCs is that you will always have critics, since there will be instances (many of them) where the MOOC does not hit the sweet sp...

This morning while commuting to work I had the opportunity to the last of this week's reading from David Wiley and Erin Edwards (Change MOOC) on Online Self-Organizing Social Systems . I have to say that this really piqued my interested. While reading the document I was transported back to my MBA days when I first started learning more about the topic of Knowledge Management and the work of Etienne Wenger . I am a big fan of communities of practice and I have attempted to get an instructional design community of practice going with mixed results (mixed results are just my opinion, other's opinions may vary- more in article form here ). I have realized for a while now that instructional design and knowledge management go hand in hand however I had never bothered to actually put anything to formally bind them.  At times instructional design can seem very rigid, after all it is a systems view of learning, and there is a process to getting things done (also known as "a meth...