Multilitteratus Incognitus

I came across Sarah's post on blogging questions (which I think was something started on the Reclaim Discord, so I thought I'd jump in. I was a bonus opportunity to post this Super Simple Badge , which I also created a while back, but didn't have a place to put it that made sense ;-) I guess this is a "tag you're it" sort of thing that I am just butting into. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Back in high school I had penpals. It was fun to keep in touch with my old town, get to hear about what my old friends were up to, and in turn share my own new adventures in my new city. When we all graduated from high school, many left home to go to University, and people's mailing addresses changed.  Keeping up with where people were those days was too much, and everyone's new adventures meant that there was little time to do the penpal thing.  Some old friends made the transition to email for asynchronous communication and IM for synchronous chat...

One of the items I've wanted to comment on for a while was a blog post posted by friend and colleague Rebecca Hogue .  Rebecca writes that she teaches courses (similar, or the same courses as I do at UMB anyway) and these courses would be well served by a decent eBook that is published (and updated) for the course.  I wholeheartedly agree!  For the past half a decade I've been thinking about trying to put together an edited volume for the introductory course in instructional design†, or just write the book myself. I've been thinking that this should be open access, given my philosophical leanings toward open access for education, however - just like Rebecca - I am not paid to teach full time. I teach because I like it, and I like to mentor others. Writing a book (or putting something edited together) takes up a lot of time and effort, and of course that needs to be maintained.  Expecting that someone will do it for free is not realistic.  It's a good thing...

Among the many streams of things happening these days is keeping tabs on some interesting things happening in my various internet circles.  I've resolved to just dip into my RSS stream and look at things periodically over a couple of days and not be as 'vigilant' as I have been in the past.  Too many things to focus on, not enough time for news.  That said, I came across an interesting post by Rebecca how   How much should you tell your students about the constraints/environment you are operating under when you are teaching? What do you think?  Rebecca is teaching a course that I had taught before at UMass, and is teaching the introductory course in instructional design I taught last semester. This is a really good question.  I've only taught credit-courses at UMass Boston (unless you count my internship last semester in Athabasca's  MEd program) and my own experience I've seen (and heard of) institutions that design everything for the inst...

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...

If I think about it long enough... I would say that rubber has met the road, with week 2 of EDDE803 almost over. People have started being active in the course forums, interesting perspectives and illustrative stories are shared and discussed, and projects are in progress! This semester we are joined by two members of Cohort 6, who I think will be added to our cohort, and thus adding to the diversity of our small EdD group. Metacognition and reflection seem to be big in this course, so as inspiration strikes I think I will keep some notes and thoughts as blog posts, in addition to whatever I keep in evernote. They might come in handy at the end of the semester. 803 Ponderings and News The first assignment has us going into teams to develop a competency profile for a distance education instructor.  Once our teams develop a competency profile, we collaborate with other teams to develop one of the entire course.  This seems to be part delphi process, part a way to be m...

Last week I was reading this article about abandoned campuses on Second Life - you know the virtual world that took the educational world by storm back in 2008(ish) and is now more or less synonymous with major flops and misdirects in educational technology. For the past few days I've been looking like a madman through old backups of screenshots I had taken when I was more active in second life; to be able to showcase my tall, skiny, blasé, goth avatar with black wings (specifically sitting with his feet on a conference room table).  After looking through my computers, and through some backup hard drives, I ended up with nothing.  There probably is something there, but I didn't really want to invest too much time in finding that specific picture of Milo Vuckovic (the avatar). Luckily I had one photo of my Flickr account with his name tagged.  For a brief moment  I did entertain the thought of downloading the SL client and seeing if my university's Island is s...

Yesterday another faculty member took on the role and responsibilities of department chair.  This is quite exciting for a variety of reasons, but one of them that comes to mind is that I get to experience things anew.  "Training" a new department chair, even though my colleague and I report to them, provides an opportunity to explain to someone new what the operating rules of the university are, from HR and Procurement to new staff hiring.  It's also a great opportunity to really problematize current policies and ways of doing things at the university. Reading Audrey Watters' keynote from #DigPed also contributed (a lot) I think to this mental gear churning. The thing that perturbed me these past few days has to do with teaching, and the increasing 'accountability' that instructors, teachers, and professors are expected to have in this new working environment.  The problem, however, as I see it is that no one is connecting the dots.  One of these HUGE d...

Well, here we are, part II of educational assumptions.  That last blog post was getting long, so here we are! These are still some ideas about things I jotted down in the margins, highlighted, or otherwise reacted to when reading a recent research article on Open Praxis by fellow MOOC researchers France and Jenny . Despite my issues and concerns with the article, it's still worth a read so that we can discuss the  things that came up in it.  In this blog post I am wrapping up the responses to some educational assumptions (or myths, depending on where you stand).  Courses are not experimental One of the views that came across in the article was that Cormier, as convener of Rhizo14, was experimenting on us learners. This seems to bring up two mental images.  The first is that we, as learners and participants, were in some sort of experiment, like the ones that IRBs warn you about (see Milgram for example), and that courses, whether MOOC or not, aren't by...

It's been a few days since I started writing about the various reactions I had (and started noting in the margins ;)  ) to a recent article from fellow MOOCers and MOOC researchers Frances and Jenny . I cut my previous post a bit shorter than I intended because it was getting long, and I didn't want it to go on and on. So this is a follow-up blog post t o that original post with some reactions, or thoughts, about what seemed to be to be underlying assumptions about what comes as part-and-parcel for education.  The article seemed to make some assumptions about education, and MOOCs in specific, that I thought should be addressed in some fashion: It is the responsibility of the convener/instructor of the course to play cop... ... be this a traffic cop who directs the flow of the course and "re-centers" it when it gets off course, a dispute cop who gets in between parties who are arguing about a certain topic, and a jail cop for people who don't observe the ...

Wow, it's not even Wednesday noon (half-way through week 1 of module 1) in Connected Courses and the feed is buzzing with the title (and/or #whyiteach).  Quite interesting.  Lots of things saved to pocket.  I will most likely read through them this weekend ;-)  In any case, I joked on twitter earlier that I should write a post on why I don't teach (who knows, this post may evolve to that near the end), but for now, I thought I would address some questions, and riff off of, or build upon, some comments from Randy, Cathy and Mike from this week's live session . The first question asked was: What was your favorite class to teach? I've only really taught two classes. I've directed workshops and one-on-one tutorials in the past, however these were really one-offs and there wasn't sustained engagement.   The first class I ever (really) taught was a course that I designed to introduce graduate students in instructional design to research methods.  This was a ...

I guess is teaching preparation time!  These past few weekends I've been going through my online course, updating due dates for assignments, and slowly starting to make the changed to the various modules that I had scribbled down as the course was in progress last spring.  It's still up in the air as to whether or not the class will run so I am thinking of applying for an assistantship for this fall semester. In any case, in preparation for this course (if it runs) I've signed up for a variety of MOOCs on Coursera and on Canvas.net that deal with the subject of teaching online. I figure that this is a good opportunity for me to get some professional development, but also to discover any materials that I was unaware of. This way I can share these materials with my students (the course is about course design and teaching online).  My Pocket reader had filled with a lot of reading to go through and evaluate.  As I was reading some of the materials this one stood out...

Well, last week of #rhizo14 and we're all pondering where to go from here, planning the next steps I guess.  Although I am getting the distinct feeling that participants are going through the stages of grief ;-)  In any case, the topic of this last week ties into enabling student independence, which was the topic of week 3, except that this week it feels more like kicking the birds out of the nest :) The other day, independent of rhizo14, I was having a conversation with one of my graduate assistants, who also happens to be in the graduate course I am teaching this semester (titled: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses ).  This, and #rhizo14, mixed and produced the following thought process, pondering, and question at the end of the post. (Historical background - if you want to skip, go down 3 paragraphs) The first time I taught this course (Spring 2013), I was a last minute substitution. The course designer, and regular faculty member teaching the course, ...

The medium is the message ... The medium is the curriculum ... The community is the medium ... The community is the curriculum! Well, we've made it to Week 5 of Rhizomatic Learning, and this week's topic shares it's title with the course itself!  The Community is The Curriculum .  Odd, to me this would have made a perfect final week (you know every end is a new beginning, circle of life learning type of thing).  Perhaps the end is nigh and this is Dave's subtle way of telling us ;-) Anyone, the community as curriculum poses some interesting questions for me and I'll explore the first two that came to mind (otherwise we'd be here all day). Background of Learners  It seems to me that courses like this one (and other highly engaging OOCs, engaging to me anyway) is that we are relying on two things from the participants of the MOOC.  The background of the learner (i.e. they aren't complete novices in the discipline), and they are self-starters.  We...