Multilitteratus Incognitus

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...

I am back home, and with vacation behind me I guess it's time to get back to work.  I've got the day-job for which I've already created a list of tasks to undertake; the teaching of my newly renumbered course INSDSG 684 (formerly 619) and the updates I want to make to the course materials as well as gearing up for my #altcred experiment, version 2.0; and finally the Great Big MOOC Book which I need to kick into high gear (two big things on the docket: additional reviewers and a publisher). While I was away in Greece I participated in an online Orientation session for my EdD program which starts in August.  The timing was a bit brutal since I needed to be up at 03:00 (Greek time) to participate in an online session that was 18:00 MT. Regardless I did enjoy hearing from my classmates and professors, people who I will get to know more over the next four years.  One of the questions we were prompted to answer as part of our introduction was where do we see ourselves in fi...

Well,  we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing!  This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments (PLE).  Thus, this week the penultimate secret badge has been revealed, and it is the  No Walled Gardens badge. Criteria : The earner of this badge has incorporated at least two Web 2.0 tools and/or services into the design of their LMS-based online course. This design is incorporated in such a way that it should prompt students in that course to start developing their own PLEs. Rationale: Now, I understand that not everyone will be able to incorporate this aspect into their courses, especially the students who are working in corporate training or health-care training and...

I am attending, and presenting, at NERCOMP 2014 today. As I was checking Blackboard over the past couple of days and "grading" feedback pieces submitted by my students, I noticed an interesting trend in the feedback (and some emails sent by students) that reminded me of #Rhizo14 (week 2?): encouraging independence. We are now in week 8 (of 13) in this course and students are put into groups of three from now until the end of the semester. They are each working on their own, independent, final project - but they are in peer review groups. The question that I got, from a lot of students, was "what are we supposed to do in our groups?" Of course, I am paraphrasing here, but the underlying current was: we've assigned groups, well now what? what do you want us to do?  I should point out here that this is the 3rd round of groups in this course.  The first two were self-selecting groups, so in the third one I stepped in to make sure that people were working w...

Well, it seems one more week has passed by in INSDSG619, and one more badge had been earned by some learners, and therefore revealed to everyone! Last week the Discussion Initiator was revealed, and this week, the Discussion Kinder has come out! Discussion Kindler Description: This badge is awarded to students who have made an effort to keep the discussion going by responding to peers and helping to tease out nuances in the discussion. Criteria:  For at least six weeks (half the semester), a student needs to post at least 5 responses to peer contributed posts per week. These replies to peers' posts need to meet the full rubric criteria for responses Rationale: Over the past few years, both teaching and observing online posting behaviors of students, I've noticed that there are some students that go the extra mile and post more than the minimum of required replies to their peers.  Thus, they keep the discussion going, they ask expository questions, they guide th...

We are now in the middle of Week 7 (of 13) of the course I am teaching (INSDSG 619: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses) and one more of the secret badge is revealed! Discussion Initiator Criteria:  Must hit all elements of the discussion board grading rubric, Must be the first to respond in any given week, Must be a post that encourages other to respond and engage in discussion (i.e. have at least 3 responses to it), Must be a post that kindles the discussion (i.e. Original poster needs to respond to fellow student's responses, not ignore his/her own post), Rationale: I've noticed over the past three years that I've been teaching that there are some students who always (or often) take the leap and start the weekly discussion off by contributing an initial discussion forum post for that week.  I do know, from my conversations with current and past students, that there are some students who prefer to stay back for a few days, see what other people writ...

Alright, so I guess we are entering the final frontier of #rhizo14 here, with week 11.  Perhaps I should stop counting weeks and call this series of posts "This Week in Rhizo14" ;-)  Last week I missed some discussions on P2PU, which I've gone back and answered some questions directed to me, but I think this ends my formal mingling in P2PU for Rhizo14 and I will focus more one the PLE aspect on Facebook and the blog. There were a number of interesting discussions last week.  Rebecca asks, in her blog, about the value of Blogging , this coming from one of her students this semester. While I have posted on Rebecca's blog, I thought I would discuss a little more here about educational blogging and this blog. In 2008 I needed a blog for education purposes. It was a class requirement, so I started ID Stuff, which is what I use now for MOOCs and other educational blogging. Before that I had blogged about a variety of topics, so I kept the title of the blog more encompa...

Well, Week 4 has begun in the graduate course I am teaching, and it was time to tally up some numbers to see if any secret badges needed to be released and awarded to students in the course.  Of the 8 secret badges I designed for this course, four of them have been discovered by students one-quarter of the way through the course! This is actually pretty nifty!  So what are the secret badges that were revealed this weekend? Helping Hand Description: A helping hand can be like a compass showing you the way to the solution. Criteria: To earn this badge a learner needs to respond to at least two fellow learner's troubleshooting question with an answer that gets the initial learner "unstuck" from where they currently are stuck in their project, or in the course. More info: The idea behind this badge was to reward students who help out others students with some of the technical issues in class. For example a student may not know how to "collect" discussion ...

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...

When I signed up for this class, I knew what to expect, up to a certain point, because I had already taken a hybrid class a couple of years ago that relied heavily on Prometheus (the system that was in place before Blackboard). The one concern was that I wasn't sure how the whole assignment creation, submission, grading aspect would work. My hybrid class was big on actual deliverables, and did not place much emphasis on the discussion aspect - it was either 5% or 10% of the grade. I think that collaboration is a cornerstone of learning, both in f2f environments and in online classes. Without collaboration students are missing out on an aspect of learning that enables them to better connect what they are learning with what they already know, and it enables new knowledge creation through the sharing of information. In a regular f2f class there may be a group of classmates that regularly meet and discuss things about the class, but most classes tend to 'clump' people together...

1) Anderson cites studies that claim that effective instruction is learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered, and community centered. Given these dimensions, what impact does technology mediation have on instruction? I would say that technology mediation positively affects instruction in these areas, for both hybrid and purely online courses. Through technology mediation, we can have community centered learning, where every student can have access to the class's public forum and participate, in a democratic fashion, in the class. They analyses, thoughts, and opinions on what has been read or discussed can be freely posted. These posts can then be read and responded to by fellow classmates and the instructor. In this sense, it's sort of like sitting in a big circle and having a discussion, but not having to worry about place and time constraints as much. In a f2f environment you have 180 minutes per week, in an online environment...

Is there any validity to the arguments of David Noble, Hubert Dreyus, and Mark Bauerline or are they just curmedgeony Luddites? I can't really lump everyone in the same category so I will break this down: Bauerline: I don't thin he is a Luddite because, as he said, he does indeed use technology. I was left with my jaw hanging after listening to the interview. From what he said, I think that his "research" is really one sided. He uses the excuse that (paraphrasing here) by the time he puts together a research proposal and gets all his ducks in a row (grants,staff, etc.) the technology will have changed and thus the value of technology cannot be tested. I think that this is fundamentally wrong. Sure the platform may change, but the underlying principles of the technology (examples: blogging, microblogging, social networks, LMS) do not change, the technology adapts to better serve that vision for which the technology was invented. I listened to the subsequent...

In Foundations of Educational Theory for Online Learning , Mohamed Ally argues that no one school of thought on learning is used exclusively in online design, and that an online developer must know the different approaches to learning in order to select the appropriate instructional strategies (p. 6). Personally I agree with Ally's assertions, not only for Online teaching and learning, but also for face to face. I've been a student for quite a long time. In the past couple of years I have been paying attention to not only to my learning preferences (and learning style) but also what worked for my classmates. At grad student meetings where students would discuss which classes they wanted to take and other students gave them my two cents, I often asked students questions to determine their learning preferences and then suggest a professor whose teach...

The inaugural post for INS DSG 619: Design and Instruction of Online Courses 1. What made you want to take this course? I thought that this course looked pretty interesting. I believe that I can use what I learn in the class for both current work requirements and for hobbies. I think I will be able to use the material at work to create online classes that deal with library related training - this is the work aspect.  One of my interests is teaching Greek online, either in a synchronous or an asynchronous manner - this is the hobby aspect (haven't quite figured out if I want to do this full time, and if so, how to do it). 2. What are three things that anyone who knows you, knows about you? The three things that people who know me know about me are: 1. I am fluent in Greek 2. I work for the UMass Boston Library 3. This is my second semester in the ID program