Multilitteratus Incognitus

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...

A few things happened this week which seemed to point to a nexus on grading, grades, and a throwback to Week 3 of Rhizo15 on what counts . The three thing that came together for me were Whitney's post from Week 3 , My own grades from EDDE 802, and me designing (or rather re-designing) the introductory course in instructional design which I will teach/facilitate/rhizolead this summer.  All these things happened independent of one another but in reading Whitney's post I realized that there was some sort of coming together in a nexus, or rather a vortex of grades and assessment. Part I:  A reaction to Whitney's post Whitney writes that she is not a fan of grades and that she has found them motivating at times, and demotivating at other times. This got me thinking about my own connection to grades.  People assume that since I have earned 3 master's degrees I am naturally some sort of smart person and that I care about grades. The reality is that I don't.  I don...

Good ol' Zoidberg asking Why Back when I was an MBA student, probably in a project management class, we were told that we should ask "why" five times in order to come to the root cause of the problem (I wonder why this is why kids seem to keep asking "why" incessantly ;-) ). It thus seems quite a propos that the first formal week (two weeks actually!) of Connected Courses are focused on Why we need a Why . As is the case with most cMOOCs there are some reading suggested by the good organizers of the MOOC, but most content will most likely come from fellow participants, which at the moment number to around 180(!). The live session isn't for another day or so, so I've decided  to tackle some ideas that came up in the readings for this week. Luckily most things were in a format that Pocket could read out loud to me so I was able to tackle most in my schedule ;-) First up, I came across Who are you and what are you doing here? which was quite odd. T...

Last year when I put out the call for the  Great Big MOOC Book , one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform , which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms at the time.  Well, since there wasn't much on Coursera to keep me going (too much of the same makes for a dull MOOC), and since rhizo14 is winding down (to some extent) I decided it was time to check out this platform. I originally signed up for two topics: Teaching Adult Learners , and Becoming and Confident Trainer . The Adult Learner topic was mostly to see what others say about the topic since I've already taken courses on this topic as part of my master's coursework.  The confident trainer was a bit of a repetition, but it was also an interesting look into corporate train...

I was reading this article on Slate the other day about Georgia Tech's MOOC based MA in Computer Science which will cost around $6,000 for those interested in taking part in it. Even though Georgia Tech's Online Education MOOC crashed and burned, I am really curious to see this launch and succeed. If this is the program they are thinking of going full MOOC on, I think it may just work. Why do I think this? Well, first of all, it's a program in the sciences. Unlike the humanities, the deliverable requirements, on the part of the learners, are a bit different. This is something that can can be seen in the Coursera and EdX platforms. Since their genesis was in the sciences, they are not immediately a good fit for a collaborative, social constructivist learning environment that has come to be expected in the social sciences. While I have no doubt that the platforms will evolve, there are some initial constraints there due to their science genesis. Since  the science home...

With the gamification almost over (this coming week is the final week), the Human Computer Interaction course on Coursera is just starting! Back in the day (2003-ish) I was finishing off my undergraduate degree in computer science and one of my final courses was a graduate course on User Interface Design, which I really enjoyed! I liked the subject matter, and the course was taught by a professor that I really liked (he was quite talented!) .  In any case, I guess that about high time that I got back into it! Right off the bat I noticed three things: 1. There are fewer videos each week as compared to gamification; 2. Scott Klemmer is quite different from Kevin Werback in presentation style; 3. There are three levels of certification in the course. This course runs for 8 weeks as opposed to 5 in gamification, and each week the videos seem to run for about an hour in total (as opposed to 2 in gamification). I actually didn't mind the 2 hours of video each week in gamificati...

I was reading this on Slashdot the other day about a person going back to school to complete their computer science degree. Here's a quick quote: I recently went back to college to finish my CS degree, however this time I moved to a new school. My previous school taught only C++, except for a few higher level electives (OpenGL). The school I am now attending teaches what seems like every language in the book. The first two semesters are Java, and then you move to Python, C, Bash, Oracle, and Assembly. While I feel that it would be nice to get a well-rounded introduction to the programming world, I also feel that I am going to come out of school not having the expertise required in a single language to land a good job. After reading the syllabi, all the higher level classes appear to teach concepts rather than work to develop advanced techniques in a specific language. Which method of teaching is going to better provide me with the experience I need, as well as the experience an em...

Well OK, not really. I don't know if this story transpired on a Monday - it was just a catchy title :-) Anyway, I had heard of this story about a student accused of copyright infringement and possibly academic dishonesty for posting his own code online! I did not know much of the story until I read the whole story on Inside Higher Ed . If you haven't seen it, go have a quick read - it IS pretty ridiculous. Basically there is a student in a data structures class (aaaahh, brings back fond memories) and after an assignment was due and everyone had submitted their answers to the professor he posted his answers to the web. The professor went bananas and tried to assert that he had copyright over the answers and that the student was committing academic dishonesty for posting the answers. This guy is pretty stupid (too many years in front of a CRT?) If I write my own code - you don't have copyright. If I post the answers after the assignement is due, I am not helping anyone ch...