Multilitteratus Incognitus

A couple of weeks after the last session of 806 for this spring aired  I had an opportunity to observe the proceedings from across time and space (aren't recordings grand?).  Looking at the (small) crowd that attended the live session maybe I should have attended!  Anyway! It does should like next fall, or perhaps next spring once I am formally in 806, there might be a ton of people attending, so the check-ins might only be for people who are done with 805.  I like the check-ins as it provides me with a sense of what others are going through (the whole "suffering together" bit), but I also don't want an 806 session that goes on for 2 hours (or more).  I would almost prefer to have more sessions but  have them seriously capped at 90 minutes rather than have marathon sessions.  Something for pedagogical planning I guess :-)  I plan on attending 806 sessions (at least some of them) while I am in 805, so we'll see how that goes. In any case, this s...

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, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I get a lot of energy from seeing students in 620 participating the forums! That said, I am feeling pretty tired! I don't know it it's just "hump-week"  - you know, that week in the middle of the semester when you feel that you are climbing a steep hill and you just want to sit down, but you gotta keep moving - or just that I really need a vacation (or this damned cold that doesn't want to go... ) :-).  Either way, I hope that once the current project is done that I will feel like I am on a skateboard rolling down hill to the finish line - i.e. lots of fun, and a rush, and not ...

The other day I came across a post on someone's blog on group work, and I saw this funny (but true, at least to most of my experiences) graphic on group work.  One of the soft skills required to graduate in the MEd program I teach in is to be able to demonstrate the ability to work with others on projects and joint efforts.  This is quite broad as it doesn't specify whether someone is cooperating all the time, collaborating all the time, or choosing the situation and working accordingly. So, given my experiences working with others, in school, at work, and through extracurricular activities like Rhizo, I thought that it would be good to have a mix of individual activities and group activities in the course I just finished teaching.  This seemed to have worked out well enough.  As with any team project no one seems to come out of the activity without some minor bruising; working with others is a contact sport, at least as far as the ego is concerned†.  So,...

Continuing on my quest for 'inbox zero' for Pocket, here is another interesting post that deals with the personality of the instructor in the teaching and learning endeavor . There are actually two interesting strands here, one that deals with the instructor themselves, and one that deals with material creation.  I'll tackle the material creation first as I find that this is what piqued my initial interest.  Martin Weller writes a little bit about creating materials for the Open University and taking on the role of a member of the content creation team, as opposed to having his own personality. I find this interesting on two counts. First, in my own online education I have not, prior to starting my doctorate at Athabasca, attended an Open University. Through some of the coursework (namely EDDE 801) I got to see what some of the course packs look like in an Open University setting (assuming that some of the MEd materials shared with us are what a stereotypical course p...

Snowed in? Reading about Research? Here's a badge for you! I suspect that this won't be the last post on my blog with the EDDE 802 label, but for the purposes of a final assignment in 802 this is my reflective last post for the course.  EDDE 802 was fun, but it was a challenge.  The content wasn't as challenging as the framing: being placed in the role of an impartial researcher, with a specific epistemology, setting up specific balanced research experiments.  I guess one of my issues in writing like this is that it feels abnormal.  No one is bias-free, and picking one epistemological stance is like trying to pick one flavor of ice-cream at the ice-cream shop. With that in mind, our cohort had some great discussions both through official channels such as the Landing and Moodle, but also in our unofficial channel - the Cohort 7 Facebook page.  I think most of our "real" discussion occurred in the Facebook page and our refined ideas and posting made the...

Derby Wharf, Salem, MA - Jan 2015 (Storm: Juno) I am sure that last one is a word I just made up on the spot. It's been a slow week in 802.  I was reading Lisa's reflection on Lurking in 802 (she is in last year's cohort, so she is two courses ahead of us in Cohort 7), and how she viewed 802 at the time as a make or break experience for the Ed.D. program.  While 801 last semester was a whirlwind tour of Online and Distance Education , this semester is a whirlwind tour (or boot-camp perhaps) on the topic of Research and how to go about doing it.  The textbook, by Cohen and the gang , is something that I have read before (a few year ago), but this doesn't help a ton ;-)  There is a lot to unpack, and this book is dense.  Even if one could memorize everything (not a good way to learn, by the way), it's like going to philosophy course - you are there essentially to argue for and support your stance. You are also called upon to explain your underlying fra...

Hurray! The first semester of my doctoral studies is done!  Well, it was done last week, but as I wrote in the previous post (on #dalmooc) it's been one crazy semester.  I had hoped that I would blog once a week on the topic of EDDE 801 , getting some interesting nuggets of information each week to share , but between MOOC like #ccourses, work, and regular EDDE 801 work, no such luck.  I felt I was putting in enough time in EDDE 801 and that I gave everything into the closed system that is Moodle rather than on the blog.  So, here's one blog post to try to re-capture some thoughts I had while the semester was in progress. Early on one of the things I really dreaded were the synchronous sessions, every Tuesday at 8PM (my time).  My previous experience with synchronous sessions was not a good one, thus coloring my expectations for this course. Most of my previous experience has been one-way communication webinars (yaaaawn), or mandatory online course synchro...

I see a lot of WTF behavior from learners. This is bad... or is it? Oh hey!  It's week 6 in DALMOOC and I am actually "on time" this time!  Even if I weren't it's perfectly OK since there are cohorts starting all throughout the duration of the MOOC (or so I suspect), so whoever is reading this: Hello! This week the topic of DALMOOC is looking at behavior detectors (types of prediction models).  Behavior detection is a type of model (or types of models) that we can infer from the data collected in the system, or set of systems, that we discussed in previous weeks (like the LMS for example).  Some of these are behaviors like off-task behavior such as playing candy crush during class or doodling when you're supposed to be solving for x . Other behaviors are gaming the system, disengaged behaviors, careless errors, and WTF behaviors (without thinking fastidiously?  or...work time fun? you decide ;-) ). WTF behavior is working on the system but not the task ...

I took a small hiatus from Connected Courses in the last module because everything sort of piled on at the same time and  I had little space to breathe.  Yes, I've been dalmoocing, so I guess everything is a choice ;-).  I guess that was my jump-out week of connected courses, and now I am dipping in again. I love the language of cMOOCs ;-)  The truth is that I've felt a little fatigued with #ccourses.  I am not sure if it's the length, or the time I've been engaged with it (7 weeks if you consider the pre-course and that's before we got to Diversity, Equity, and Access ), so I guess I needed a little mental break.  I don't think this is an issue unique to MOOCs because I've been feeling a mild case of senioritis in my first EdD course. Luckily I've done all of my deliverables, submitted them, and have gotten feedback, so now I am participating with my peers and engaging in the participation aspect of the course. Anyway, these next two weeks are ab...

One of the things that has been keeping me busy this semester has been my inaugural semester as a Doctoral student at Athabasca University's Center for Distance Education.  The semester isn't over yet,but I am slowly working at hammering out some assignments for the course.  I've tried to be pro-active so that I can get the foundational reading done early in the semester so I can focus on reading some additional articles on MOOCs that have been on my to-read pile for a while.  I ended up getting all the readings done (the ones assigned by the faculty anyway), but I've been side-tracked reading interesting things that my classmates post :-) In any case, for the third assignment for my inaugural class I looked at MOOCs (no surprises there), and I discussed very briefly the historical overview of MOOCs (keep an eye out in December for the special issue of the CIEE journal, some good articles coming out on the topic of MOOCs), I discussed a bit some work I am doing with a...

Continuing with my exploration of DALMOOC, we've reached the end of Week 2 (only a few days late ;-)  ).  I've been playing with Tableau, which I can describe as Pivot Tables on steroids.  I briefly explored the idea of getting some IPEDS data to mess around with, however that proved to be a bit more challenging than I had anticipated. So, I ended up using the sample data of course evaluations to figure out how to work Tableau.  The following are some interesting visualizations of the data that I had: The one thing I realized, as I was playing around with the data, is that it's really important to really know what your data means.  I thought I knew what the categories meant, because I thought that institutions of higher education used similar lingo.  The more I played with the data, the more I realized that some things weren't what I was expecting them to be.  Thus, in order to know what is being described and portrayed through the visualiza...

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...

Here we are, week 2 of module 3 (so week 6) and half-way through the formal run of connected courses.  I spent most of last week catching up with stuff that was piling up in my Pocket account from previous weeks. In all honesty I wasn't quite sure what to make of this module.  Pretty much all of the things that were readings failed to spark my imagination, given that I had either read similar things in the past, or I had actually lived through them.  The thing that really started to spark my a few things was Mozilla's Web Literacy white paper. Then I was having a conversation with fellow MOOCer Luis , in real life, about literacies and then it hit me.  How do people engage on the web, in a cMOOC? Luis was telling me about issues with engaging with a cMOOC and fellow participants out on the web, and how the other two xMOOCs he is following along with seem much more engaging.  I think that this is because they have a form and format that graduate students know t...

Some Friday homework posted here.  I was listening to Audrey Watters's keynote address at CETIS a few weeks ago and I thought this would make some good material for thinking and a critique - so here it is.  Your thoughts? Watters, A. (2014, June). Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech. Keynote presented at the 2014 Center for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards Conference. Bolton, UK. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo2Q06Cczkk This review focuses on Audrey Watters’s keynote address at the CETIS 2014 conference. There are a number of elements that intrigued me enough to make it the focus of my second review.   This keynote is about the history of educational technology, but it artfully weaves together three distinct but related areas: First, Watters talks about prevailing narratives in the US-centric technology industry; secondly, she discusses Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their historical antecedents; an...

I suppose that it's not quite random, it's actually part of the work I am doing for my first doctoral course.  That said, I thought I would post this here (now that its been submitted) to see if others have read this particular article and what they think :) Power, T., & Morven-Gould, A. (2011). Head of gold, feet of clay: The online learning paradox. The International Review Of Research In Open And Distance Learning , 12(2), 19-39. Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/916/1739 The article’s thesis is that the paradox of online learning is this concurrent appearance of a boom and a bust. Since online learning, like any other complex system, is multifaceted this seems plausible. This piece has three main sections: (1) a literature review on attitudes toward distance education spanning 1999 to 2009; (2) a description and reconceptualization of the iron triangle which has three constraints cost, quality, and access; and finally (3) a propo...