Multilitteratus Incognitus

The more I read chapter in  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future , the more I am starting to feel like Anton Ego from the animated movie Ratatouille ;-)  It's not that I am aiming to write harsh reviews of the stuff I read, but I kind of feel like the anticipation I have for reading some published things about MOOCs just aren't met with the appropriate level of satisfaction from reading what I am reading. This time I am reviewing chapter 7, which is titled  Beyond the Phenomenon: Assessment in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) .  The abstract is as follows: MOOC course offerings and enrollments continue to show an upward spiral with an increasing focus on completion rates. The completion rates of below 10 percent in MOOCs pose a serious challenge in designing effective pedagogical techniques and evolving assessment criterion for such a large population of learners. With more institutions ...

First week of the new semester!  Last semester, with everything going on I decided to put off reviewing a book I told people I'd review, but for this semester I think I'll just forget ahead and get this done.  So, back for another review of a chapter in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future  (an IGI global title).  This time I am reviewing chapter 5, which is titled Internationalising social world education using Massive Open Online Courses .   The abstract is as follows: Internationalising the curriculum is a priority of universities worldwide and increasingly a focus of social work education. Social workers espouse principles of global justice and community development yet social work in Australia remains locally focused. A review of international and local trends in the literature on ePedagogy and social work education within the context of internationalising th...

Back for another review of a chapter in the book titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future  (an IGI global title).  This time I am reviewing (a little) chapter 3 and jumping off from there.  The chapter title is " Professional Learning through MOOCs?: A Trans-Disciplinary Framework for Building Knowledge, Inquiry, and Expertise ", and based on the title it really had me hooked! This is a chapter that I was really looking forward to reading because it seemed like a good chapter to tackle workplace learning, professional development, talent development, and where MOOCs fit into this arena.  If you remember last year, some people had professed 2015 (or was it 2014?) to be the year that MOOCs made it into the enterprise (LOL). Anyway, the abstract for this chapter is as follows: This chapter will locate debates around MOOCs within a discussion on the purposes of higher education for prof...

Happy Labor Day everyone! The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments ( Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they were from a while back, so I thought I would address them here. Comment 1 I'm not sure how you can say that "MOOCs first appeared in 2008." Remove the word "online" from MOOC and you have International Correspondence Schools. Response I think the underlying current of this comment is "everything old is new again." Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone is claiming that MOOCs are this whole new genesis that came from nothing and is here to change the world like nobody's business. However, one can't dismiss that this c...

A weird thing happened the other day. I was on my Google+ profile, looking to get the URL for my Google Reader Shared Items . By mistake I tapped on the URL for my google scholar profile and I noticed that one of my articles had a citation. A citation? A citation! For one of my co-authored articles? It seemed so!  But who would cite us? Don't get me wrong, I believe that the quality of the work I put out, and the quality of work that my collaborators put out, is exceptional. On the other hand, I am a young academic and I really don't expect anyone to be citing us this soon. The paper that was cited was our recent IRRODL paper on Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education  and it was cited in Levy & Schrire's The Case of a Massive Open Online Course at a College of Education . I have to say, in addition to excitement (about getting cited), I also had a small degree of paranoia.  I know my information is out there, heck...

I was reading Micheal's blog the other night and I realized that the Conference Proceedings for mLearn 2011 are now up!  You can download them from the Conference website , or you can read them on Scribd (see bellow) In other news, it seems like the MobiMOOC research team is big in China :-) We were contacted yesterday by PhD students (under the direction of their advisor) to see if we would consent to have our mLearn paper translated into Chinese for publication in a core Chinese academic journal - this is both a great honor and über cool! mLearn 2011 (BeiJing) Conference Proceedings

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is the topic of research, writing, and publishing. If you want to be in academia research and publishing is a must while if you want to be in the private sector it may not be as important (I am guessing it's not - but if you are of differing opinion leave a comment!) In thinking of research and publishing one of the questions that comes to mind is to go at it alone for the most part (i.e. researching and publishing mostly stuff you work on your own, and keep collaboration limited), or to collaborate with people for the most part keeping some special topics for yourself (something that you don't want to share with others or something that is so specialized that you can't collaborate). Having worked in groups, and alone, through four masters programs I haven't come to a conclusion which method I prefer. As a lone wolf I can set the tone and the schedule. If I want to slack off one day but really go at it another ...

MobiMOOC ended last week, but the list is still going, much to my surprise! Granted it's not as active as it was before when it was in session, but a bunch of us interested people do continue to contribute - as a matter of fact we're planning on co-authoring a collaborative paper on the whole thing!  I don't really know what the progress of that will be since I am not the team leader on it, but I do look forward to collaborating with all the awesome people I met on mobiMOOC. On the Digital Natives article front, I was finally able to finish the rough draft (yay!) It's about 4000 words long (without the bibliography!) which I think might be a bit long for most journals.  Now I just have to proof read it, edit it, and then decide which journal I want to submit it it.  My preference would be an Open Access Journal so that it is available for free. Once I figure out where to submit it, I can work on proper formatting of references and bibliography. Do you happen to h...

I was looking at the website of the journal (Human Architecture) in which I published an article last summer and I saw that it's out!  The journal hasn't hit SocIndex or EBSCO yet, but I guess it's official :-) Check it out either at okcir.com (link above), or the copy I've placed on my Scribd account

I came across this article on First Monday on Folksonomies a while back but I never really got around to reading it until now. It is an interesting article and if you have some time go and read it. It gives the uninitiated a brief look at organization of information in the past, and how folksonomies differ from what has come before them. It seems to me that the criticism of folksonomies are a little snooty given by this example: Yet not everyone was convinced that folksonomies would deliver on this promise. The absence of rules in assigning tags has been feared to lead to quality problems, including imprecision, overlap, duplication, ambiguity, and erroneous identification (Dotsika, 2007; Guy and Tonkin, 2006). Others expressed doubt that user–generated tags would ever “organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters” (Rosenfeld, 2005). With no guidelines for tag production, what was there to prevent all that potentially useful information out th...