Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was going for a News show feel with that title. I don't think it came across.  The more I think about it the more I am thinking that video might satiate my dramatic tendencies - but that would take more acting talent and more time.  It's just text for now! If you have an idea for a name for a Mock News Show (like the Daily Show but for EdTech, drop a comment ;-) ) So, week 5 Rhizo15 - this means that there is only one more week left if I am not mistaken. Dave talks about the doom and gloom of community . It's such an invasive species.  It assimilates all that it touches. Oh my!  Just to set the stage here Dave asks if community is just replacing one authority - the instructor - for another, which I would guess he means the Hegemony of the Group.  Is the course becoming an echo chamber?  Does the rhizome choke the air out of everything it touches? I am pretty sure that Dave is being controversial here (surprised?) and possibly a little tongue in c...

It feels a bit like I've had my nose close to the grind stone for the past few weeks.  I looked at my blog to see when was the last time I blogged about class, and it was close to 20 days ago.  In semester-terms I think that counts as "forever-ago".  To some extent it feels like a great weight has been lifted.  The first (of two) major papers is completed and delivered (awaiting marking and feedback), and the presentation on Discourse Analysis as a research method is done as well.  I suppose I could have waited until March (a couple of weeks later) to present, but nothing like a little pressure to gain the benefits of front-loading work, and enjoy the benefits of getting a leg up on subsequent assignments. Doing a presentation on Discourse Analysis was actually quite a lot of fun.  While I had gone through materials on DA before, I have wanted to read some of Jim Gee's work on DA (considering the one degree of separation that he has with our department)...

Whooooa! What is all this? Alright, we're in Week six of DALMOOC, but as usual I am posting a week behind.  In previous weeks I was having a top of fun playing with Gephi and Tableau. Even thought the source material wasn't that meaningful to me I was having fun exploring the potential of these tools for analytics. This week we got our hands on Rapidminer a free(mium) piece of software that provides an environment for machine learning, data mining and predictive analysis.  Sounds pretty cool, doesn't it?  I do have to say that the drag and drop aspect of the application does make it ridiculously easy quickly put together some blocks to analyze a chunk of data. The caveat is that you need to know what the heck you are doing (and obviously I didn't ;-) ).  I was having loads of issues navigating the application, and I somehow managed to not get some windows that I needed in order to input information to, and I couldn't find where to find the functions that I...

Week 6 CCK11 blog connections I was trying for a smarter title for this episode of #dalmooc thoughts, but I guess I have to go with Armchair Analyst since I ended up not spending a ton of time with either Gephi or Tableau last week. So, the reflection for week 4 is mostly on theoretical grounds; things I've been thinking about (with regard to learning analytics) and "a ha" moments from the videos posted. I think week 3 and week 4 blend together for me.  For example, in looking at analytics the advice, or recommendation, given is that an exploration of a chunk of data should be question driven rather than data-driven.  Just because you have the data it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get something out of it.  I agree with this in principle, and many times I think that this is true.  For instance, looking back at one of our previous weeks, we saw the analytics cycle.  We see that questions we want to ask (and hopefully answer) inform what sort of data...