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...

Some Friday homework posted here.  I was listening to Audrey Watters's keynote address at CETIS a few weeks ago and I thought this would make some good material for thinking and a critique - so here it is.  Your thoughts? Watters, A. (2014, June). Un-Fathom-able: The Hidden History of Ed-Tech. Keynote presented at the 2014 Center for Educational Technology, Interoperability and Standards Conference. Bolton, UK. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo2Q06Cczkk This review focuses on Audrey Watters’s keynote address at the CETIS 2014 conference. There are a number of elements that intrigued me enough to make it the focus of my second review.   This keynote is about the history of educational technology, but it artfully weaves together three distinct but related areas: First, Watters talks about prevailing narratives in the US-centric technology industry; secondly, she discusses Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and their historical antecedents; an...

Well, we've made it to Week 4 of #rhizo14, a full two-thirds done with this rhizomatic thing. But wait, if rhizomes are all middle with no beginning and end, what does two-thirds actually mean? I guess the topic of the week is the printed medium, and the overall question of "is Books making us stupid?"  The question brought up immediately the mental image of Homer Simpson, from the show The Simpsons , pondering one such question. Dave, in his opening salvo this week tells us that there is something in Books that he distrusts, in that books encourages objectivity, distance, a feeling of being removed from the audience. Something less participatory.  This is quite an interesting thought, considering that many (of a certain generation) would claim that Google (and the Internet) is making us stupid and we are losing out literacy skills because we aren't reading as much.  Just like those concerns over Google are unfounded, so is this concern about Books (in general)....