Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, It's week 9 of Rhizo14 (or week 3 of the after party of rhizo14, depending on how you look at it.)  Last week we had a discussion on de-mobing teachers (I guess enabling teachers to not teach to the test?). To be honest I lurked a bit last week on facebook since the day job, the other work obligations, the DML conference (which was awesome!) and subsequent weekend food poisoning made me miss out on Rhizo, and get behind on the FutureLearn Corpus Linguistics course. Anyway, how apropos that we've just promoted the Week 10 topic to Week 9!  All about Lurkers! The overall question proposed for Week 9 is "Why do we need lurkers?" If you go back through my MOOC blog posts, which at the moment number somewhere in the 170 range (how the heck did that happen?) you can see that I haven't really thought much about lurkers in MOOCs, and in thinking about designing MOOCs, I don't think of lurkers much then either. The reason I don't think of lurkers muc...

This blog post might be long...but what the heck, a long post every now and again is OK ;-). These are my thoughts on Sessions that I attended. Some were great...and some not so much (they had potential but did not deliver)     Digital Badges on Campus: More than Just a Game With: Mike Soupios, Danielle Mirliss, Thomas McGee from Seton Hall University   This was my first session of the day, and it did not disappoint! The presenters were all from Seton Hall University and they were describing the initial phases of their campus engagement tool. They implemented an OpenBadge compliant system which they introduced to their incoming freshman population. The initial badges that students got wet fairly easy to get, as with any social system that awards badges, in order to get people used to the idea of the reward. The system debuted this summer when students came to their campus preview activities. They got a badge for attending the preview (week?) as well as participating in ac...

This year the New Media Consortium conference was held in Boston and hosted by MIT, so it was a good opportunity to attend given that it is my own back yard. In this post, I don't plan to recount blow by blow each session, but rather post what seemed most interesting about each. In the welcome keynot was made by Joichi Ito, the MIT media lab director, and the topic was on innovation in open networks ( check out the recording on iTunes U here ) . Even though I missed the first half hour of the talk die to commuting the remaining 45 were inspirational, perhaps because I already ascribe to the principles of open. One of the main takeaways from this talk was to just to it. If you have an idea and it's within your financial means, just do it. Don't conduct (costly) feasibility studies to see if it's worth spending the cash to work on your idea. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work. Thus, don't be afraid to fail, and of course, learn from your mistakes ...