Multilitteratus Incognitus

This week I've been at the NMC conference (and Monday I was sidelined with a summer cold, no fun), so I've skipped out on most of this week's fslt12 activities. I've been thinking about this microteaching activity, and what I can teaching in 10 minutes. The activity reminds me of a reality TV show, the next Food Network Star, where contestants have to show that they can do something, in a short period of time (a promo video for their show) that they would be expanding on (supposedly) during the full episode. So, what could I teach in 10 minutes? The big issue is that I am thinking too big! Then, it hit me! I could go back to my tech-training background and show people how to use the cameras in their iPhones. Sure, it's not super academic, but what if I were an assistant for DS106? DS106 has the Daily Create activity, where learners in DS106 (and interested participants) can use their phones to participate in this activity. So, here is a quick 10 minute lesson pl...

This blog post might be long...but what the heck, a long post every now and again is OK ;-). These are my thoughts on Sessions that I attended. Some were great...and some not so much (they had potential but did not deliver)     Digital Badges on Campus: More than Just a Game With: Mike Soupios, Danielle Mirliss, Thomas McGee from Seton Hall University   This was my first session of the day, and it did not disappoint! The presenters were all from Seton Hall University and they were describing the initial phases of their campus engagement tool. They implemented an OpenBadge compliant system which they introduced to their incoming freshman population. The initial badges that students got wet fairly easy to get, as with any social system that awards badges, in order to get people used to the idea of the reward. The system debuted this summer when students came to their campus preview activities. They got a badge for attending the preview (week?) as well as participating in ac...

This year the New Media Consortium conference was held in Boston and hosted by MIT, so it was a good opportunity to attend given that it is my own back yard. In this post, I don't plan to recount blow by blow each session, but rather post what seemed most interesting about each. In the welcome keynot was made by Joichi Ito, the MIT media lab director, and the topic was on innovation in open networks ( check out the recording on iTunes U here ) . Even though I missed the first half hour of the talk die to commuting the remaining 45 were inspirational, perhaps because I already ascribe to the principles of open. One of the main takeaways from this talk was to just to it. If you have an idea and it's within your financial means, just do it. Don't conduct (costly) feasibility studies to see if it's worth spending the cash to work on your idea. The worst that can happen is that it doesn't work. Thus, don't be afraid to fail, and of course, learn from your mistakes ...

Hmmm...I was glancing over at my calendar telling me to work on DS106 the other day (an alarm that I set last spring for this summer), and I decided to head on over to DS106 and check it out...only to find out that it had started already (week 4 if I am not mistaken).  Oh well.  I missed the boat but not by much! So, this time I will take a queue from a few of my MOOC acquaintances and set goals.  I realize that I don't have enough time to partake in the full DS106 experience, so my goals for this summer, with regard to DS106, are the following: June: Every Tuesday and Thursday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog ) July:  Every Tuesday and Thursday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog) August: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog) If this goes well, in September I will undertake 2 assignments...and re-evaluate from there :) I am curious ...

Well, actually, it's the start of two new MOOCs! I know that Change11 and DS106 are still going, but change11 seems to be on life support. It seems to me anyway that the same 4-5 people are posting, and even though there are interesting people in these final weeks, most people have moved on, which is too bad. I still read the daily digest, and those 4-5 people post some thought provoking stuff, but I just have nothing to add to the conversation, so I lurk :-) With DS106 I don't feel that creative (which is a bummer), so I've resolved that once the summer comes and I have more mental bandwidth (too many work projects taking up space now) I plan on doing two challenges every week and work through the assignments in the summer months. I've wanted to get a podcast off the ground for a while, so doing something for DS106 should kill two birds with one stone ;-) Anyone interested in doing a "MOOC Talk Weekly" with me? LOL :-) Anyway, so what are these two ne...

Last week I had a conversation with Lou McGill, a researcher collecting data for the Change11 MOOC. Our conversation was quite interesting and it seemed to be revolving around learner self-awareness and goal setting. I did take th change MOOC survey, but I have no idea what my responses were when I took it - it seems like such a long time ago (I know I have a copy of the responses, I am just too lazy to look them up). In talking with Lou, I am wondering what sort of goals (or non goals) oth participants of MOOCs have. For example, none of the MOOCs I've participated in (except for DS106) we're MOOCs where I explicitly set goals for myself. I participated (and continue to participate) out of curiosity about the topic and the medium. If I get something out of it (in tms of declarative knowledge) OK, if not, that's OK too, because I will probably get a lead on an interesting research article to read, or I will interact with interersting people. I look forward to reading what ...

Nothing really dies on the internet :-)  Sometimes that is a bad thing, sometimes it's a good thing! A few years back, I had wanted to join a social network (like MySpace and Facebook) but where the language was Greek.  I discovered a few like Zuni (facebook-like in that it was only for college students at the time, it's now defunct), and fatsa (Greek for "face" or rather "mug"). Fatsa never really did it for me because it was a bit like the TV show "Jersey Shore." Despite the fact that I have told this network numerous times to remove my profile, it's still there.  Well, lucky me, because this is one place I had put that photo I had mentioned in my previous post - the old office, affectionately known as the bat cave . Thinking pose, in half-tone, circa 2003, alpha version

This past week I've been trying like a mad man to find a photo that I took in 2005, using Photo Booth on MacOS 10.4 when it first came out.  At the time, I was employed by Media Services and worked with a great group of people.  Alas, my office was reminiscent of the Batcave. Despite being on the first floor there were no windows, the fluorescent lighting felt piercing to the eye (so I had some spotlights strategically placed in the office) so my office was a perfect candidate for a painting using  chiaroscuro . It was also cold (year round!) a bit damp (not great for the media playback equipment that I had stored there) and the air quality was questionable.  This was the background of that photo.A few months after that photo was taken I switched jobs and went to another building. This week (six years later) I am back in that old building, in a new job, but this time I am on the sixth floor (all the way up!), with a window that provides natural light, a p...

I had come across Jupidu's post on Sensemaking in a MOOC a while back, but I haven't had much time to respond to it just yet (until now I guess ;-)  ).  I was actually thinking of my participation in MOOCs in general; as well as the two MOOCs I am now participating in - those being Change11 and DS106.  I was actually thinking of points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in specifically and I thought I would do a bit of compare and contrast between the two: Sensemaking works around identity creation – in every environment f2f or virtual I’m building my identity and this “self” is in continuous interaction with the environment and with the other learners as well. Sensemaking works retrospective – I’m making sense out of experiences reflecting about them, as I’m doing it now with this article I want to write. And therefore sensemaking is influenced by my memory of situations. Sensemaking is social – of course it is in the Mooc! I’m a kind of aware of some the learners who participate in th...

A couple of years back I was taking a lunch-time walk around the harbor walk  which goes by my university campus. In the summer I walk every day (3-5 miles) at lunch time, but when the weather gets colder I tend to cut back. In any case, this was taken in the fall, it was a bit chilly and drizzling (not a big deal) and there he was, Elmo, abandoned (there are condos nearby so some kid probably forgot him).  I also saw this as a perfect opportunity to mess around with a free photo app that I had gotten for my iPhone.    I think the grayness really does bring out how bad the weather was (no one else was around outside) and a generally jovial toy monster is longing for his owner to come back and get him.   

I haven't yet read the Web 2.0 Storytelling chapter on DS106 - I've skimmed through it and it looks pretty interesting -I think it's going to go on my spring break reading list (so sometime in March).  I did however (quickly) go over the O'Reily " what is Web 2.0 " and the educause 7 things of Creative Commons (which admittedly I have read before but not in a long time). My main thought about Web 2.0 is that we ought to not be calling it "Web 2.0" but rather just call it "the web."  Perhaps back in the early to mid 2000s when this stuff was new it was useful to differentiate how the "old' web was different from the "new" web.  The new web however has been with us for quite some time now, so it's no longer new.  As a matter of fact any newness is iterative, a "Web 2.0.010" if you will. We don't pay attention to iterations (no matter how amazing they are) we just use them - so why fixate on the "...

Happy February to all! I thought that this week's DS106 assignment should be something random, so I went with the illustrated recaptcha assignment suggestion whereby you are given the task to illustrate one of those random recaptcha images.  I must have hit that button to give me another captcha many times because I couldn't get inspired by any of the random text.  In the end I got something that looked like Peachill Insurrection. My initial thought was something out of Super Mario (Peachill maybe something named after Princess Peach), maybe some protesting or fighting Goombas or Hammer Brothers...but I couldn't find any fan art of insurrecting goombas to add to images of rolling (peach)hills. So here's a mashup of Super Mario (World) hills with an image of the Warsaw insurrection (from wikipedia).

I decided to try my hand at one of the assignments for DS106 this week, and I went with the Big Photo Remix. The idea was to take a photo from the big picture and add typography to change its meaning.  I don't think I was that great in the typography aspect, but changing its meaning I may have done a better job ;-) The actual photo is of people at the train station going home for new years.  Of course, when I saw this photo a (funny) alternative meaning is that of the graduate student rushing to where there is free food on campus - the stereotype being that graduate students take advantage of all possible free meals on campus (I know that as a graduate student I have done some of this, but I am not sure how true the stereotype is)

This week, the main topic of DS106 seems to be personal cyberinfrastucture, and the reading from Gardner Campbell associated with this week is available on Educause . It was an interesting reading, and a short one at that.  The main idea is that instead of giving students a prepackaged webspace where they can only run HTML (or maybe PHP), get them a free virtual server where they can run anything they want (like Apache, wordpress, coldfusion, etc.) so that they can experiment freely. It is through this experimentation that they will learn.  I must say I agree that people learn through experimentation - I must have pulled my old (first) Mac open a few times to peek inside, and I must have corrupted my system volume  quite a lot of times to see what makes a computer work (or not work!). This also fits in with another MOOC that I've been following along (a little less now since it's becoming less and less structured) - change11 and the theme of changing higher education. ...

This must be the easiest thing I've ever had to do for a course - absolutely nothing ;-) The preparatory items for this week include getting you own domain, which I have ( http://www.club-admiralty.com ) and getting some web server space. Having had a website for a long time that stuff is done. My website is designed using Rapidweaver. If you are a mac user, and you want something lighter weight than dreamweaver, wish awesome support, check out realmacsoftware  and their Rapidweaver product. Why do I still use blogger?  Well, as a CMS I like it, and if I change web hosting providers I don't need to worry about my content.  RapidWeaver has a nice 3rd party plug-in that harvests your content from your blogger blog and re-displays my blogger content using the theme settings that are available on my site ( click here for an example of this blog redisplayed on my site ).  The one glitch I haven't worked out is this: when using Disqus as my comment system, on my redisp...

The other day I was talking about digital storytelling with some colleagues and I decided to recommend Ds106 , the digital storytelling MOOC that ran last year. The material is still all out there, so people could still take it as OER and just self-pace through the material.  Last year I was in a bit of MOOC overload, with LAK11, CCK11, MobiMOOC, eduMOOC and Change that I didn't have much time to add Ds106 to the list (after all, CCK and MobiMOOC were both in Spring, at the same time as DS106). In any case, I went to the website and I saw that DS106 is running again this spring! Sure I have a few research projects on the stove, and I will be keeping a eye out on Change11, but it might be worth following along DS106. I see it as a good excuse to get my hand dirty and do some digital storytelling work that I can then learn from an incorporate into my instructional design.  The schedule for the course looks interesting and not that "heavy."   DS106 should be interesting. ...