Multilitteratus Incognitus

I've been trying to catch up with things I've saved in my Pocket reading list over the course of this past semester, and one of the articles (or blog posts?) came across was about how MOOCs have failed to democratize education, and given that this was one of the fundamental goals of MOOCs this is a problem. I don't think I know where exactly this goal, or rhetoric, about democratizing education came from.  I suspect that it was somewhere in the xMOOC discourse around the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012.  Even if xMOOC providers, and their proponents, didn't initiate this discourse, they certainly capitalized on it by providing cases of poor learners, who would normally not be served by higher education given their backgrounds, and MOOCs could help. It's easy when you have prodigies to start with, but that's a whole other story. The point is that xMOOC providers just added some fuel to the fire since this discourse suited them. And, it's not a bad...

One of the first things to deal with when tackling any topic is quantifying what we are talking about.  Since this is MobiMOOC, one of the key terms that ought to come up in the discussion is what exactly is mobile learning?  This discussion did indeed come up yesterday ( see forum here ). Let me just say that mLearning definitions are probably incomplete and they are subject to an ever evolving understanding of what constitutes  mobility and  learning .  Initial definitions were very hardware-centric and hardware-specific, and chances are the further back you go, the more hardware-centric and specific they are. This is fine because those definitions comes from a point in time when mLearning was the new kid on the block and we probably looked at demonstrable instances of mobile usage, and that happened to be mobile phones and PDAs. Clive asks some pretty interesting questions (and these are questions that I've heard in the past). If I use my laptop on a...

I was just about to give up on eduMOOC when this thread was started (or rather evolved from a previous thread) about what is an isn't a MOOC.  A Similar discussion came up on the Wikieducator list for eduMOOC.  A MOOC is a M assive O nline O pen C ourse, or so says the acronym. The concept of a MOOC was articulated by Cormier and Siemens (2010) in Educause ( free read ). The words Massive, Online and Course seem to pose no problem in defining a MOOC, however the word open  does.  What is  open? The key points that Cormier and Siemens hit upon are Open Curriculum, Open Educators and Open Learners.  Open educators seems to be about the practice of professional reflection (in open environments) and becoming a better educator through such practice. It also seems to have elements of Freirean ( Pedagogy of the Oppressed ) philosophy in that the educator and the learner are on the same level and are working toward the same goals.  Open learners as a conce...

This came across my twitter stream today, pretty interesting what you can do with a Prezi (haven't spent much time on Prezi - I suppose I should once I finish Applied Linguistics and I have some more free time on my hands :-) ) Definition of a PLE on Prezi