Multilitteratus Incognitus

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle.  Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂.   As I was pondering other academic-y things over the start of my winter break, I was looking back at the year to see how things moved along.  I think I've written (or at least said) this before, but before I started my doctorate I felt like I had a rhythm so far as academic communities, activities, and outputs go, and things got disrupted while I was pursuing my EdD.  Coming out of that doctoral process, I felt like I took one exit off the freeway, while many of my other colleagues and friends took another. It feels like the end of a doctoral program is about rediscovering who you are and where things fit.  It s...

It is true that, as of this writing, there is much more serious stuff happening in the world today, both in the US and abroad, but this has been percolating in my brain for a while, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on one of my favorite topics: the MOOC. Now that I am done with my dissertation, and I've had a little time to rest my brain and refocus on what I want to geek out on, I've wanted to do a retrospective piece on MOOCs. I was going to call it a post-mortem  because I think that the time of the MOOC has passed. Don't get me wrong, I think there is still gas in the tank of companies like Coursera, Edx, and Futurelearn, but I wouldn't call them MOOCs. The innovative pedagogical stuff I saw early on doesn't quite seem to be there these days, with a focus going to AI, massification, and Machine Learning.   In any case, my idea for a post-mortem was particularly poignant because 2022 is the 10th anniversary of the year of the MOOC  (time flies...😮). T...

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash Back in December, I had an idea: 2022 is the 10 year anniversary since the "year of the MOOC," so why not write something about it? After all, open education and MOOCs are subjects that interest me a lot, still. MOOCs of course go back before 2012, and the year of the MOOC  in 2012 was really relevant in North America.  I've seen other proclamations for the year of the MOOC being 2013 or 2014, but that's in different contexts. Anyway, since it's 10 years from some  proclamation, and this year is actually one where I am free and clear from the obligations of dissertation writing, I thought it would be fun to revisit my old stomping grounds and do a 10-13 year retrospective research article (I need to get back into publishing somehow, no? 😂). I also have a title:  MOOC post-mortem: A decade(+) of MOOCs .  More on this title later. Anyway, I decided to start this project in a very predictable way.  I already had a treasure trov...

It's been a while since I've blogged about...anything, really! After a lot of writing, feedback, editing, some more feedback, some more editing, my dissertation is finally ready to be defended.  Since Dissertation Defense is a "DD", it reminded me a bit of the Dunkin' Donuts logo, so here's my New England mind thought it would be fun to create a logo to riff off the Dunks logo (how locals refer to Dunkin' Donuts). The first date of available availability was July 7, and I took it.  The 07/07 was a nice reduplication.  In retrospect, I should have chosen the 14th, so I could have 07/14/21 😂. Oh well, maybe for the next doctoral degree (ROFL). At the moment I am spending time reviewing what I submitted, taking notes, making a plan for the presentation, and getting ready for the 2 hours of questions.  With five (5) people on my examination committee and 20 minutes given to each member (and another 20 for me to present), that's going to be a long one. Mor...

  Wonder what's in this... It's been a crazy seven days.  As part of my narrative inquiry into collaborations that occurred in rhizo14 and rhizo15 (or collaborations that sprung up from the work that started there), I am writing a fictional account of a newbie rhizo-learner (sort of how I was a newbie back in rhizo14) who gets to meet rhizo-alumni from past courses and ask them about their collaborations.  This newbie is simultaneously my avatar, but also a persona that encapsulates some common features of the people I connected with to learn more about their experiences. I find the flexibility that narrative inquiry affords a bit freeing.  I can more easily change names, places, and situations, but I still can get to the main ideas that emerged from my conversations with rhizo14 alumni and collaborators.  Anyway, my fictional rhizo course that takes place in 2022 (June 2022, to be exact). I could have made up all the weekly provocation titles, and the course t...

The other day I had an interesting (but brief exchange) with Kelvin Bentley on twitter about MOOC completion.  This isn't really a topic that I come back to often, given that completion-rates for MOOCs, as a topic, seems to have kind of died down, but it is fun to come back to it. To my knowledge, no one has come up with some sort of taxonomy of the different degrees of completion of a MOOC†. But let me rewind for a second.  How did we get to the topic of MOOC completion?  Well, I've been attempting to make my extended CV more accessible (to me).  In the past, I used a WYSIWYG HTML publishing platform to manage my extended CV‡.  The idea was that I could easily export it and just push it on the web.  In practice, I never did this, and when I changed computers it became a hassle to maintain. So, I moved everything over to google docs for cleanup (and easier updates).  In cleaning up my CV sections (I am not done, btw!), I did make a startling se...

I didn't quite expect this, but it seems like everywhere you turn you see "a decade in review" news stories (radio and TV), "the internet" (in general) and blog posts, twitter threads, and Instagram stories (more specifically).  I hadn't really thought about doing one of these posts, but what the hay, why not join in? 😜 . The last decade has certainly been eventful.  I kicked off the decade by completing my last 2 master's programs, changing jobs (3 departments and 4 titles in the last 10 years), starting to teach, and participating in research. I absolutely loved Audrey Watter's 100 debacles of Ed-Tech , so I decided to pick a few and structure my post around this since most of these made an impact on my work-life, and some for my leisure. I am not going to pick through every one of those items, but I'll pick a few (and maybe add some of my own). New Media Consortium (Horizon report #100) This one was a shocker for me. The way the NMC...

The last week of EL30 was on the topic of Agency.  The video chat was quite interesting to watch but the topic of agency wasn't as big as I thought it would be (maybe time to rewatch? It's been a few weeks since I watched it).  The conversation started off with some interesting examples of community agency, but it seems to have gone beyond that. I have taken some snippets of the conversation and reflected a bit on them. Just to situate this blog post, here is the information about this week from the course page: "Each of the major developments in the internet - from the client-server model to platform-based interoperability to web3-based consensus networks - has been accompanied by a shift in agency. The relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments was shifted, for better or worse." One of the things that jumped out at me was an issue with analytics, an issue brought up by the discussants of the week: the data ...

Well, the penultimate topic for EL30 is on the subject of experience.  I wasn't quite sure, when I started watching that week's recorded chat , what I would get from the week, but unsurprisngly I had a few "AHA!!!" moments. From the course page: "It is a truism that we learn from experience, and yet creating a role for experience in learning has been one of the most difficult problems in education. And so much of education continues to rely on indirect methods depending on knowledge transfer - reading, lectures, videos - rather than hands-on practice and knowledge creation." One of the first connections that came to mind was a connection to an overall curriculum.  When someone attends your school, or even your program, should there be  a requirement to go out in the field and do something?  Let's say for my department (we educate applied linguists who aim to be language teachers), should everyone be required to do a practicum as part of their d...

Continuing on with my quest to experience the remainder of el30 before work begins again, today I'll write a bit about my thoughts about the topic of Week 7 which was community. From the course page for the week: "The traditional concept of community was built on sameness, on collections of people from the same family, speaking the same language, living in the same place, believing the same things. The fundamental challenge to community is to make decisions on matters affecting everybody while leaving to individuals, companies and institutions those matters not effectively managed by consensus." The interesting thing for me with this topic is that I sort of had an "AHAAAA!" moment (didn't quite scream it though...the all-caps was more for effect 😜).  My aha moment revolved around my dissertation proposal and the concept of collaboration in MOOCs and what came to mind is that there needs to be a certain amount or type of community to exist in orde...

Time-vortex initiated... loading Week 5 of EL30 ;-) eL30's topic in Week 5 was all about resources, and specifically OER.  This is a fun topic to return to from time to time to discuss, especially now given that my state seems to have taken it a step further by having a Massachusetts Open Education initiative which my university is promoting. There were a few things that came up as interesting in the interview, some newer to me, and some things that have come up in previous posts about OER. One interesting comment that came from the discussion is when Stephen mentioned during the chat that he is more reluctant to share a resource if it goes through a vetting/accrediting/QA process; not because he doesn't like quality, but because someone can just say "this resource doesn't deserve to be shared". I found this quite interesting. It's not that I disagree with Stephen, I too would be reluctant to share in an official capacity any work of mine if it meant t...

A week or so ago...well...maybe two weeks by now♣, the topic of eLearning 3.0 was identity , and the video guest of the week was Maha Bali .  I finally managed to view all of it, even though it was in 10 minute increments. My Pocket's save-for-later is getting rather lengthy now that I am saving articles on the daily to read at some other future time. This time of the semester is rather busy, so I guess that's my disclaimer for this post: I am only commenting on the video and points that were brought up. In looking at the notes I took during the vConnecting session during week 4 (mid-way through the MOOC!) there are a few organizing factors that sort of came to me, so I've organized the post in this manner. What's in a name? At the beginning of the conversation Stephen had a bit of a hard time getting the native pronunciation of Maha's name. It's interesting to kick off a discussion about identity in such a mundane way, but I think that the concept of a n...

Attempt at witty title probably failed :-) I guess I am a little rusty  with creating meaningful blog titles since I have not been blogging frequently recently.  Oh well. I will get back into the swing of things once I finish my EdD...or not... ;-) In any case, I am catching up with #el30, more specifically last week's guest Ben Werdmuller ( see recording here ). Interesting fun fact - Ben is the creator of Elgg, which is the platform that Athabasca University's " Landing " runs on. There were quite a few interesting things that came out of the conversation but there were two that really stuck out to me.  The first is that there was a strand of the conversation that dealt with taking back control of your online identity from the various platform providers, such as facebook, google, yahoo/verizon, twitter, and so on.  A lot of what we do, this blog inclusive, rests no someone else's platform.  If the platform decides to cease operation you lose not just...