Multilitteratus Incognitus

Over the few weeks and interesting discussion has been taking place over the Creative Commons Open Platform mailing list . The Creative Commons group has created, and is now offering, CC certification.  The certification consists of a 10-week online course with a traditional number of students in the cohort (around 20), and there is a cost associated with it ($500). I'll be honest, when I saw the cost I did an eyeroll (at no one in particular).  My initial reaction was that I too shared the sentiment that some people on the mailing list reacted to: I've been in the realm of CC for more than five years.  I have (or think I have) a solid understanding of CC.  Why does this thing cost $500.  The fact that Maha speaks highly of her experiences in the course did serve as a  means to get over my original reaction to it - which got me thinking...and which brought me back to another point that friends, colleagues, and I have discussed for a while:  the diff...

Another story I had in my Pocket account (for what seems like forever) is this story from campus technology talking about how nano-degrees are disrupting higher education .  I don't know about you, but it seems to me that people just love the word disrupt , or the pairing disruptive innovation .  I have a feeling that in 10-15 years when we're past this fad we will look back at this time period with the same sense of nostalgia that we look upon movies made in the 80s (you know, all of the movies that have synth-music playing). Regardless of where you call it a nanodegree, an x-series set of courses, or a certificate this concept isn't new, and the article points to this fact that this isn't new. Certificates have been around for quite some time, and both higher education institutions and professional associations offer a wide variety of certification options for learners.  The professional associations, such as ATD or SHRM for example,  in theory, should have th...

"Instructional Designer" - by AK & Net Art Generator - for #CLMOOC Continuing on my quest to read through what I've accumulated in my Pocket account, I came across a blog with the title  Learning Experience Design: A Better Title Than Instructional Design? The title was catchy enough for me to save it to pocket for later reading (which seemed to be forever ago).  In any case, Christy seems to be making the point that people, who are not in the field of instructional design, are perplexed when someone tells them that they are Instructional Designers, or that they earned their degree in Instructional Design.  What the heck does that mean?  What is an instructional designer qualified to do? This is a good conversation to have over a drink or a cup of coffee, but since my instructional designer friends are nowhere to be found, it's blogging time! That's a good question, and I am sure that if you ask 10 different instructional designers what they do, ther...

It's the final stretch of 2014! This makes it my fourth year in exploring MOOCs - boy does time fly!  When I started off with LAK11 I was really just looking for ways to continue learning for free.  While I do get a tuition benefit at work, this also involves standard semesters of 13 weeks, getting work-release time (since online learning isn't covered by the benefit) and retaining the motivation to keep going through a predefined course and syllabus.  Even when MobiMOOC happened and we formed the MobiMOOC research team I really didn't foresee that the, oddly named, MOOC would catch on fire the way it did.  At the time I was eager to get some initial thoughts together on how to put together a MOOC (now they are called cMOOCs) and put together a Great Big MOOC Book , with others, that was a right mix of research and practice.  Since the MOOC has really expanded a lot over the years, with many different things being called a "MOOC" the original idea might be be...

A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins.  Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like.  While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both internal and external.  One of the potential issues with extrinsic motivators such as the various "goodies" that you get for checking into places†. While there wasn't a magic bullet (at least in the background research I did) for a good balance between internal and external motivators there was one huge warning: be very careful of external rewards for doing things. They slowly start to replace internal motivation that was there, and if you remove those external rewards, there is a danger of internal motivation not being there to sustain the learner.  This was somewhere in the back...

View from Itea, Greece Some people bring a book on vacation (which I have) and others immerse themselves in the local culture (which I am also doing to some extent), but since I find myself lucky enough to be vacationing somewhere with fast wifi access I decided to continue to MOOC while I am on vacation from the day job. I honestly don't know how well the experiment will go, but I decided to follow three MOOCs. One on FutureLearn, focusing on management (making those connections with my MBA), and two MOOCs on MiriadaX, the Spanish MOOC platform: one focusing on social media and marketing, and another focusing on media studies called "the 3rd golden age of television." I didn't really think about my MOOCing until I had a back and forth with a friend and colleague on a Facebook about "completing MOOCs" and whoever completes one gets a unicorn ;). I guess the point he was trying to make is that completion is mission impossible. This made me think of my presen...

Last week I got an email from the MOOC guys running the VLC MOOC, and one of the topics was in the email was all about the certification process. In going through this MOOC (really a self-paced eLearning course, but more on that down below), I would like some sort of proof that I went through it (just in case someone asks), but by and large I really don't care for certification for individual courses. What I care about is the knowledge. Here is what I got from the VLC: Class Certification and Class End The class finishes on 31 May. Participants who have shown activity will be sent a certificate. We distinguish the following activities: - ActivityClass 0: no activity --> no certificate  - Activity Class 1: worksheet average < 60% --> confirmation of participation  - Activity Class 2: worksheet average >= 60% --> qualified certificate The certificates will be sent as E-Mail attachments in electronic form ready for printout. By the way, for the fut...

I am in the process of finishing up the Mobile Learning Manager certification course (also known as mLeMan) and I am on the final unit.  Here are a couple of interesting videos.  (More on my experience with mLeMan later on...if I don't forget ;-)  ) The first is Mobile Madness: Making Sense of the Converged , Multidevice World from: IDCeXchange   held on 4/292011 This second video is  Mobility, Clouds and Intelligent Industries: Positioning for the 3rd Wave of IT Industry Growth

Seems like this will be the summer of professional development :-) On a tip from Igne I signed up for the Mobile Learning Manager certification course which is a self-paced learning program to certify managers of mobile learning initiatives. I think the US equivalent would be a training manager, focusing on mobile learning.  The course is a bit rough around the edges (which is why they wanted some guinea pigs this time around ;-)  ) but so far it's enjoyable!  More on this as I experience more. On a tip (or rather blog post) from Serena Turri, I saw that OER Foundation is offering a free five week course on Open Content Licensing for Educators . This course is free to join and offered on Moodle.  At this point they are already on Week 3, so I have to catch up a bit - but luckily (contentwise) I am not a n00bie, so I can really jump in an start interacting :)  More on this, as I interact more.