Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, it's been a hot minute since I last jotted down some thoughts. Don't worry. blog, it's not you, it's me 😂. I also have a daily meditation/reflection journal that I used to jot things down in, even though sometimes it was "Doogie Houser style," that only gets an entry twice or thirce a week.  Gotta take a step back and do some more reflecting.  On the plus side, the weather is finally nice enough to get out and do a daily walk, something I used to do most summers until work (in all its multiple facets) got to be a bit too much. In any case, you didn't come here to read about my (lack of?) exercise and my busy schedule, did you? I thought I'd jot down some thoughts since it is July and summer is one-third gone (sigh). One of the things that I am not making as much progress on as I would have liked is course design. In all honesty, I thought that by now I would have chosen all my readings for the fall, started to put them into Canvas, and have Augu...

I feel like this took forever to do, but it's finally done! Last November we had a guest lecturer, Dr. Bessie Dendrinos , from the National and Kapodistrian Univerity of Athens, come speak to us on the subject of "Global Economy and the Urgent Need for Languages: American and European responses to foreign language learning exigency".  I recorded the video on a FlipCam (remember those?) and edited really quickly on Camtasia to add in some clearer slides.  The FlipCam isn't that bad.  I think a lavalier microphone and a tripod would do wonders for any future things I record.  The transcription (big thank you to Kathleen, Liz, and Laura) and the captioning on YouTube took a while since we're all new at this.  Let's see how the next one goes in terms of production

Image from Flickriver, Brian Hillegas A few days ago, and totally by stroke of chance, I happened upon a twitter discussion between @HybridPed ,  @otterscotter , @actualham , and a few others.  I am not sure what the original topic was but I came in when they were discussing assessment. Do we assess learning or competency? Some regarded learning as transcending competency and some saw competency as transcending learning. It's hard to to really have a meaningful exchange of ideas in 140 characters, especially when the twitter train grows and grows. When I jumped into this conversation I took the stance that what we assess is learning, not competency.  Competency, I would argue, is something that develops over a period of time. It is something you hone and improve.  Your skills (i.e. your competency is something) becomes improved the more your practice it. And, by practice, I mean being present while doing it and analyzing your own performance while doing the t...

My Twitter Analytics, 10/2014 Another day, another #dalmooc post :)  Don't worry, I won't spam my blog with DALMOOC posts (even if you want me to), I don't have that much time.  I think over the next few days I'll be posting more than usual in order to catch up a bit.   This post reflects a bit of the week 1 (last week's) course content and prodding questions. I am still exploring ProSolo, so no news there (except that I was surprised that my twitter feed comes into ProSolo.  I hope others don't mind seeing non-DALMOOC posts on my ProSolo profile. Week 1 seemed to be all about on-boarding, of tools and definitions.  So what is learning analytics?  According to the SOLAR definition, "Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs." It's a nice, succint, definition - which I had...

Well, in a week I will be in Edmonton starting off my EdD in distance education at Athabasca University.  I know that most North American doctoral students probably don't think of their dissertation topic this early (I haven't even completed my first course), but I want to be pro-active and work on the thing while taking courses.  So, Rebecca's post on Educational Design Research (EDR) was quite timely.  This isn't my first go around at a dissertation topic, my current topic has evolved over the past couple of years as I was thinking about what I want to do (and which university is best to pursue this). My initial idea was to blend my background in Instructional Design and MOOCs to teach a language, specifically designing a MOOC to teach Greek as a foreign language to novices. This actually came out of making a MOOC out of my MEd capstone .  This was circa 2011-2012 after my experiences with MobiMOOC, LAK11, CCK11 and before the xMOOCs invaded the scene.  ...

You are using it wrong... A little while back I was reading Rebecca's post titled When teaching online doesn’t mean ‘at a distance’ . Quite a few things came to mind, but they were too many for one blog post, so I thought I would do two separate ones.  One from my experiences as a program coordinator (and unofficial instructional designer) for the Applied Linguistics department where I work, and one for my role as an (adjunct) faculty member in the Instructional Design program.  This first post tackles the day job role (program coordinator). In the post, Rebecca writes that she taught a course, online, for a predominantly residential program. The students were thus using online tools to schedule face to face meetings, instead of  using  the tools to facilitate online meetings to get group work done.  This seems like a lost opportunity to us who have been using technology to communicate and work online for a while now, but to a novice the path of least resi...

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou...

Online Games & Narrative Course Logo Last summer, when I signed up for these things, I really didn't  keep proper timing of the courses I signed up for, because I was signed up for three concurrent MOOCs, while working a full time job, and messing around with other interesting things (MOOC related).  In any case, after several PACKED weeks, three MOOCs are done, and I have some thoughts about MOOC design and MOOC Process to go along with them from my own personal experiences. MOOC 1 The first MOOC was on Coursera, and it was  Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative with Jay Clayton  of Vanderbilt University. The thing that attracted me to this course was the aspect of online gaming and how it tied into other media. The theme was Lord of the Rings , which I am sort of lukewarm about. It's fine, but it's not the type of literature, or game for that matter, that I would spend a ton of time on.  The nice thing about the course was that the...

This past week, crazy events in Boston aside, two new MOOCs began: LTMOOC , on Blended Language Teaching, and the Phonetics and Phonology MOOC from the Virtual Linguistics Campus at the University of Marburg.  The Edx course on the Ancient Greek Hero took a hiatus week to allow people to catch up.  I am still sticking to the Ancient Greek Hero course, and I did try to catch up with the scrolls, a secondary reading that's meant to be "fast reading," but apparently I am not fast enough (I seem to be taking my time).  In any case, my strategy for the Edx course is to read the main reading, and participate in the course, and worry about the scrolls later. As far as the language MOOCs go, I decided to stick only with the Phonetics MOOC.  Blended learning is something that I already know about since I am an instructional designer, and given my applied linguistics background I can put 1 + 1 together; so with limited time and resources I opted to just keep an eye out on...

Well, now we're talking! ;-) I came across two MOOCs that are related to (one of) my subject(s) of study :-)  The first MOOC comes to us from Germany, although it looks like it will be conducted in English, and it's the Phonetics, Phonology and Transcription MOOC from the Virtual Linguistics Campus . I am actually quite psyched about this MOOC for several reasons: Phonetics and Phonology is something I've been wanting to undertake for a while, but haven't had the time; It uses a platform that I have not seen before, so I am curious on the technical end; It comes from a Non-English speaking country (I am interested in academic production in other languages, and how they are represented in MOOCs). Here is the intro video for the course: The second MOOC is LTMOOC (language teaching MOOC) which tackles the topic of blended language teaching. This probably won't be new to me (like the phonetics MOOC), but I signed up nevertheless because I am curious abo...

This week's Change topic was a nice break for me, allowed me to take a moment, catch up with other people's blogs, and the weekly session (which I made an attempt to visit while it was live, but I somehow missed it) was loose enough to allow for this break. In any case, the topic of this week was "Triangulating, weaving and connecting our learning." I've written before about disconnected knowledge (although I forget if it was a blog post here, somewhere else, or a comment on someone else's blog...) and disconnected knowledge is an issue when teaching and learning. One can't learn facts and figures in isolation, they are meaningless and we end up forgetting them anyway. If we can put them to use, that is one form of making these facts meaningful to us and thus providing for a mechanism to remember them. This week's topic reminded me of a mentor that I had in one of my master's programs. When I was a first-semester graduate student in the instru...

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?) This week in CCK11 we've got learning theories. luckily most of this stuff is a great review for me since we covered most of these theories quite a lot throughout the applied linguistics curriculum. We didn't much with connectivism though (which is why I am attending CCK11) since that was near the end of the semester. In any case, there is a a nice ten minute video on YouTube that goes over the various major theories of education. If you haven't heard of educational theories, this is quite a good back-of-the-napkin figure to get you started. If you're in instructional design and you haven...

This is it! Today is the day! Spring classes are over. The papers have been written. They've been proof-read and edited many, many, many times, and the projects have been completed. The papers will be handed in today! I suppose that there is that issue of that one final exam that I have to do for next week, but eh...I'll celebrate today :-)

I came across this article recently on Community Managers. For the past year or so, ever since I created a Ning community for the Instructional Design program, and helped/consulted on the creation of a Community for the Applied Linguistics online program, I've been advocating for a community manager for all online programs. What I've noticed is that there is a void in-between semesters, especially for students who are all over the world, but happen to be a student in our Online Programs. During the semester they've got access to Blackboard and they get to "see" their classmates again, and meet new ones. In between semesters they lose contact, unless they happen to have people on LinkedIn or Facebook (or old school email) or something along those lines. This was an interesting quote: Look at how difficult it is to maintain a clear line between LinkedIn and Facebook contacts. Even though many of us use the former for business and the latter for more personal commun...

This semester I am taking two culture related courses. One is about the overall view of culture and how it intersects with the axes of language, power-relations, race relations, historical relations and so on. The other course is all about how one goes about the task of integrating the culture of a foreign country (or group of people) when you are teaching the language of that country or group. One of the elements that has come up is that each person, and each culture, are in fact shaped by various socio-economic-political-historical (and more) powers that are in effects in the regions where they grew up, where their parents grew up, their friends, families and coworkers. Within this shaping we have the creation of artifacts that are relevant to that culture. Now snap forward to regular life outside the classroom. I was catching up on my reading of the FAIL blog, and I saw this image (you need to follow the link since it may not be appropriate for work). This is a picture of a road si...

Back to classes! This semester I am back to my norm of three classes a semester. After last semester's relatively relaxed atmosphere (because I only had one class), I wonder how I will cope with being back to full speed. This semester, again, I am focusing on applied linguistics, taking two core courses (one for the core of the program, and one for the concentration), and an elective course on English grammar. Sounds interesting! Can't wait!

Recently I had posed an open question to people out there to see how much they remember from their intro language courses. I then stumbled upon two relatively recent starred items in my google reader that I had not read yet: The role of grammar in language study and More on grammar . I have to say that I agree with Steve on both his posts, and this comes from personal experience. As an undergrad I spent a lot of time in language courses despite being a computer scientist. The reason I wanted to take language courses was communicative. I wanted to be able to communicate with natives in a spoken and written format. The curiosity about linguistics was a secondary factor. My professors were great, but I find that the format was rather formulaic and of a different era in language teaching. From what I gathered, my professors were literature people, not strictly foreign language pedagogy people, In Italian this wasn't a problem as I had already had French and I could translate my languag...