Multilitteratus Incognitus

It seems that Inside Higher Education is playing a game of 7 questions . I thought that it would be interesting to respond to these when I has little more brain space to write some more in-depth answer instead of "agree or disagree" which was the original prompt.  These might very well fit into my Educational Leadership course now that I think of it.  So the questions are in italics , and my responses are in regular text. 1) A higher education program where students graduate with a credential, but without substantial career development, is a failed experience. It depends! I don't necessarily see higher education as being concurrent  with career development.  Sometimes, in some programs, and certainly depending on the degree, the benefits of higher education are seen in the long term, not just in the short term after graduation (i.e. gaining a new job or obtaining a promotion).  Some programs require  apprenticeships or practica.  In such cases I ...

Yesterday morning I was catching up on some #cfhe12 blog posts by Bryan Alexander (who I have not seen in a MOOC in ages), a blog post about d efining MOOCs  by Rolin Moe ,  and my colleague Rebecca who writes about the ease and usefulness in MOOCs†. First, let me respond to Rolin's points (since I happened to read his blog post first). There are lots of people looking at the future of academic publishing, pushing for an open movement. Some academic journals have gone open, but the majority of journals carry a high price tag which only exists as price opportunistic for educational institutions (and some rare corporations and organizations). Yet academic journals are part of the lifeblood of scientific research, especially for soft sciences (such as education). By only working with open resources, a cMOOC cuts many of these empirical, peer-reviewed research works out of its circulation, having instead to pull from free resources that often lack academic rigor. For a...

This week (at least for me) the topic of #ioe12 was Open Access. Open Access isn't all that new to me (having worked for an academic library for quite some time) but the materials still had a few new bits of information for me.  I keep forgetting the difference between OA Gold and OA Green.  For some reason "Green" is associated with money (dollars are green), so I had it in my head that OA Green was "author pays" while OA Gold was "author doesn't pay." I was surprised to find (in the video) what the actual cost of some journals is! Considering that it is a "free" enterprise (in that authors and peer reviewers don't get paid), to have a journal subscription cost thousands of dollars is just ludicrous.  I also find it equally ludicrous that there are Open Access Journals where the author has to pay to get published.  I suppose, in the end, the money source needs to come from somewhere. However, considering that authors already put in...

This morning in the local news there was a story about MITx , an set of courses that are designed to be done through the Web, with no face to face component that people can take for free.  While the course will have an assessment component, if people want the credential of having  taken and passed that course there will be a nominal fee for logging into a secure environment to take additional exams to certify their mastery of the subject. While this isn's really a MOOC, it is an interesting experiment in education.  The resources for these courses will need to be out in the public domain or under a creative commons license in order to make things work in free environment.  Additionally, unlike OCW which I view more as a repository of "things" that a course contains (which you could roll into a full fledged course by yourself), MITx courses will be designed  courses for this environment. Not many details are available yet, but I know that I don...

The MobiMOOC research team has been working on our third paper, further analyzing aspects of MOOCs, and MobiMOOC in specific.  Our forthcoming paper tackles the topic of emotive language usage in MOOC discussions as a predictor of continued, or future, participation in the course. We are currently in the process of going over and refining the paper, but I don't want to give away the punchline before it's done in its totality :-) In any case, I've taken the lead on this project to see which journal we can publish our findings in.and I have found a journal whose theme is online learning and asynchronous networks, which fits in with MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy (although, to be honest I don't know how much MOOC pedagogy there is out there...perhaps something to put our heads together about). Anyway, I was looking over the author submission guidelines to see what sort of format they wish to have us submit our paper in terms of citations, footnotes* and text formatting; and ...

Αυτή την εβδομάδα στο Change11 MOOC, το θέμα είναι το OCW ή OpenCourseWare. Όπως μάλλον γνωρίζετε το OCW  άρχισε εδώ στα λημέρια μου στο γνωστό MIT και από εκεί επεκτάθηκε σε άλλα πανεπιστήμια, και ένα από αυτά είναι και το δικό μου. Συγκριτικά το δικό μου πανεπιστήμιο δεν είναι στην ίδια κατηγορία όσον αφορά το μέγεθος των πόρων που έχουμε στο δικό μας OCW. Αυτό που αναρωτιόμουν είναι αν στην Ελλάδα, που  πολύ εκπαιδευτική ύλη φαίνεται να είναι public domain. Αν δεν κάνω λάθος τα βιβλία του ΟΕΔΒ είναι δωρεάν στους φοιτητές και είναι public domain, έτσι; Η Ελλάδα θα ήταν καλό περιβάλλον για μια ακαδημαϊκή αναγέννηση, με κάθε ΤΕΙ και ΑΕΙ να έχει κάποιο OCW, και τα βιβλία να διανέμονται δωρεάν και σε μορφή ePub, καθώς φυσικά και άλλα δεδομένα όπως ασκήσεις, σημειώσεις, παρουσιάσεις και άλλα σχετικά. Δεν ξέρω, μπορεί να είμαι πολύ αλτρουιστής και να μου πει κανείς «εδώ η Ελλάδα καίγεται, ο κόσμος άστεγος και πεινασμένος και εσύ μου μιλάς για OCW;» Εντάξει, η Ελλάδα έχει ...

It seems like it's OCW ( open courseware ) week at ChangeMOOC .  When I read the initial description (it referring to OER) I was wondering what sort of readings or thoughts would be seeding this week's discussions. In my initial post for the week I made reference to the paradox of OER (I think it was David Wiley who originally wrote about it), but I am glad that this week is about OCW. I have to say that personally I have a love-hate relationship with OCW.  I love that OCW exists; I think it is an awesome concept because not only does it open up academia, it offer cross-pollination opportunities with other colleagues in other schools (that you don't necessarily know of), it makes courses more transparent to your current and future students, and it offers opportunities for people to self-study if they can't come to your institution or can't afford your institution.  I often look for OCW content in my own disciplines to see what other institutions are doing...

Cette semaine sur ChangeMOOC le thème est vers les ressources éducatives libres pour l'apprentissage. Notre hôte est Rory McGreal de l' université d' Athabasca au Canada. Le thème des RELs n'est pas nouveaux dans ce MOOC. Aujourd'hui nous n'avons pas d'aces sur les matérielles de la semaine et donc je ne sais pas quels sont les objectifs de la semaine et quoi veut Mr. McGreal communiqué à nous. Je dois admettre que le titre du module de cette semaine, pour moi, est un peu déroutant parce que la raison d'être pour les RELs est l'apprentissage, alors est il pas redondant de dire "REL pour l'apprentissage"? Ou peut être il y a des usages des RELs dehors l'apprentissage que je ne connais pas! Pour moi, les RELs, comme une idée sont intéressants, mais (de mon expérience) c'est trop difficile trouver des RELs qu'on peut utiliser sans pain dans leur cours. La majorité des RELs sont très spécialisés ou ils sont trop général, a...

I was reading this post yesterday by Paul Prisloo on his reflections on Open Content .  I found his post enlightening because through my studies I had not really encountered to topic of history of distance education  and the evolution of distance education has been of interest to me.  I have to say that I somewhat  agree with Paul's view that lecturers (professors) are in the teaching business and not necessarily in the content creation business.  Any content creation (aside from scholarly publishing which is another activity that professors undertake) is really a happy by-product of preparing for teaching and carrying out that teaching.  I do however disagree  with Paul on two issues. Paul seems to diminish the curation  aspect of teaching. From what I gathered, Paul doesn't really see the collection and curation of a set of materials (yes, other people's scholarly output) as something that is worth while recognizing.  I think he is dead w...

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...

I was watching David Wiley's two videos ( video 1 and video 2 ) on Open content, open publishing and open educational resource, oh and creative commons licensing too! I haven't had the chance yet to read the articles yet - but I plan on doing that before the weekend comes. I thought I would start off this week's Change thoughts on Open Content with my own history with it - and the cognitive dissonance that goes along with it! So one side of the brain acts in the persona of the student .  As a student (and I've been a student for a very long time), I am all for open content!  I wanted to see the professor's syllabus before the semester started. I wanted to know what the course content would be so I could prepare for the course in advance, or just figure out which courses would work well together. I also wanted my professors to have their content as open content because it meant that I didn't have to keep reams of printed paper material (not always searchable) ...

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted to learn.  I am not sure how face-to-face immersion works, but I assume that online immersion probably works around the same lines.  I'd have to do some more research and looking information up to be sure. In any case, thinking ahead to a PhD, I am wondering if anyone has researched open education, or MOOCs, or both in the field of Applied Linguistics and language learning. This might be something that I would be interested in doing and I am wondering if there are people out there in CCK11 that have learned a language just by interacting with others online (and supplement...