Multilitteratus Incognitus

"Fractured Spock" - by me and Net Art Generator, for #clmooc Over the past couple of years, since the silly acronym "SPOC" was invented to denote a course that was the antithesis to the MOOC, a Small Private Online Course , I've had issues with the acronym, and took exception to this new discovery  on the part of schools that newly invented  this form of education, considering that there are schools that have been doing it since the early aughts. In any case, I was finally going through my Pocket account today, trying to read as many things as I've saved for later reading since Rhizo15 when I came across a couple of articles that really made me roll my eyes a bit and made me want to facepalm... The first article is a featured article in Harvard Magazine, July/August issue, titled Is Small Beautiful? This was a fairly quick read, but I couldn't help but think that this was mostly a PR piece on the part of Harvard and Harvardx. There is a lot ...

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things.  One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14) is this other research, which I would call Delphi based in its methodology, on why we take MOOCs, why we participate in them, and why we stick, or not stick, to them. I thought that this would be something interesting to participate in since I am not sure I've recorded why I've been participating in MOOCs (as you will note, the MOOC tag is the biggest one on this blog). The other epithets used online, thus far, for those who keep engaging in MOOCs is MOOCaholic .  I don't know if I like that epithet because it doesn't necessarily describe me right at this momen...

It's week 2 in FSLT, and the topic of this week is group participation. One of the things mentioned this week by the facilitators are the roles that people take in group work , which was quite interesting, as I could see  people in my past group work experience taking on those roles consciously or subconsciously. In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last week), which got me thinking. One of the things that I've been pondering is the mode of participation.  In MOOCs like Change11 and CCK11 the main mode of participation seems to have been Blogging, and aggregation of those blog posts through a daily newsletter.  Other modes included tweeting, posting on delicious, and using the basic commenting systems on gRSShopper.  It is true, at least for me, that in these two MOOCs I did not miss the discussion board element and I fully embraced blogging (and commenting on other people's blogs) as a way to participate and follow the lear...

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design degree) and my comprehensive exams (for Applied Linguistics) to pay too much attention to PLENK and CCK09. With formal schooling done (at least for now) and with no courses to take at the university I decided to experiment with MOOCs.   In January a friend and colleague, @cdetorres, recommended LAK11 - Learning Analytics. This was to be my first MOOC. It was quite interesting, I did learn quite a lot, and it just highlighted that I was interested in a topic, learning analytics, that I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering. The course was quite fast paced; a lot of things to do, in w...

The other day, while I was on the train and on my way home I was reading the most recent Change11 blog posts. I was going to comment on each one of these blog posts individually, but I realized that there as a thread developing in each one that made them fit together pretty nicely. First, I read brainysmurf's " if you don't like messy learning don't play in the snow " post.  Brainysmurf comments on Jon Dron's comment that MOOCs are "not easy, this [therefore] will be demotivating and inefficient." Brainy says the following: Wow, that scares me because I think he’s right! If learning (in a mooc or elsewhere) is not easy, it seems that a number of learners will lose motivation. What does that say about the willingness of an individual or group to risk, to fail, to learn from failure, to get up and try again? Does *everything* in our world have to be faster, more efficient and require less effort now? To what degree do we actually learn from an...

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs.  Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated , and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging . Tony writes (and this is not the only thing he writes so read his entire post): There could be all kinds of reasons for the shortage of comments on this week’s topic, but I was more struck by the form in which they occurred. Participants did not comment directly to my post for this week, but within their own blogs. I call this the syndrome of the selfish blogger. We all do this. If we have something interesting to say, we’d rather say it on our own web site than someone else’s (it would be nice though if the post was also copied to the site that originated the topic). I had to go and cull all the comments from the #Ch...

ChangeMOOC has started! Even though it's still an introductory week where people get to know each other (should I bother posting a "hello, my name is..." type of blog post?) it is the start of the MOOC for all intents and purposes. The one things that is really striking about this MOOC is the name... change what ? is what I want to know. Granted if you look at the course schedule it's all about education. I guess the subheading for this MOOC is education, learning and technology , so I guess we are changing them, but eduMOOC just finished a few weeks ago, and that was all about Online Learning Today...and Tomorrow . So I guess ChangeMOOC is a superset of what eduMOOC was about?  Either way, the week by week topics look interesting and interest piquing. I was planning on taking some Sloan-C workshops this fall, but between research projects and the ChangeMOOC, I think I won't have time.  Perhaps I will revisit the idea of SloanC workshops later on :-) #chan...

Another MOOC is almost in the can (to borrow terminology from TWiT).  I have to say that even though I was really interested in this MOOC, eduMOOC that is, I really have a hard time finding something that really made it stand out. This was my fourth MOOC this year and I can easily say that MobiMOOC and CCK11 were the two top MOOCs.  LAK11 was good, but it was way, way, too compressed for my liking, not enough time to take stock in what was talked about, and what was read. eduMOOC, in contrast to the other MOOCs this year, was almost like an informal social. There was a google site with information, and a weekly breakdown, but it really didn't feel like a "course," it felt like it was lacking direction. I think that it was a worthwhile experiment, considering that the MOOC format is relatively new and a lot of research is left to be done on this format, but I really didn't consider it much of a course. I wonder if it fails the MOOC litmus test since the C stands for ...

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 past week I was talking to local folks at the University about eduMOOC, and MOOCs in general seeing as I am thinking of implementing a MOOC for language learning for my PhD thesis. OK, I am not in a PhD program yet, but it helps to start thinking about these things in advance so you're not stuck in Dissertation Purgatory. In any case, people don't know what a MOOC is; how is a MOOC different from an online course? How is it different from OpenCourseWare ? How is it different from the Open Learning Initiative ? I do my best to describe MOOCs, but it seems to me that this is a good opportunity for us, active MOOC participants and MOOC facilitators, to put together a Book on MOOCs. I know that there is the MOOC model for Digital Practice but it doesn't really address many areas of MOOCs that people traditionally think of when they think of classes, such as learner engament, learner assessment, learner profiles from previous MOOCs (that might give you an idea of who mig...

Well, this week we are reaching the half-way point of eduMOOC and I am not sure what to make of it. In previous MOOCs, thinking back to CCK11 and MobiMOOC11 I thought that I had more engagement in the main discussion space. Even though CCK11 was aggregated through gRSShopper I still felt like the discussion was centralized.  CCK11 felt more like a lecture hall filled with orators that stepped up on the soap-box, said their thing, and others could react to it, or provide their own views; based of course on the weekly topics of discussion. In contrast eduMOOC seems to run on the concept of a conference where there is one central space for a keynote speech (this space seems to be Google Groups), where there was a big bang of activity in the first week and then the discussion quieted as most people went to break-out sessions and few stayed in the main hall to discuss a topic or two of interest. Even though I am involved in eduMOOC, being part of a niche group (or what may feel like a...

Well, eduMOOC starts today! This will be my fourth MOOC, and it seems to be the most chaotic to date, even more chaotic than CCK11! It seems like LAK11, perhaps due to its theme, didn't have many active participants, which made it easier to follow. CCK11 was a but more chaotic, but gRSShopper made it easier to find and prune blog posts of interest to read and comment back on. mobiMOOC was less chaotic than CCK11 (at least for me) because all discussion was in a central place - like in LAK11, but it was a manageable volume of information. eduMOOC seems to have two strikes against it - A TON of volume and it's a bit chaotic. The course is hosted on google groups and it seems like some of the participants don't know where to say their hellos, as a consequence there are many "hello, I am..." threads (in addition to the official thread), and people respond to those which makes thread mushroom out of control and fragment the discussion. I do wonder if this is an...

Note: I had originally written this for the UMassOnline blog, but since it's not posted yet, I am cross posting here :-) This past December I graduated from the Masters in Applied Linguistics program and I am no longer a formal student [i.e. someone in a degree or certificate granting program]. This doesn't mean that I haven't been busy.  A relatively new phenomenon in learning has cropped up in recent years - that of the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC for short). These past few months I've been taking part in several different MOOCs, dealing with topics such as Learning Analytics [LAK11], Connected Knowledge [CCK11], and more recently mLearning [ mobiMOOC ]. There are other MOOCs that I decided to skip this time around (Digital Story Telling and PLENK).  Some MOOCs use traditional Learning Management Systems like Moodle, while others use a more distributed architecture, using freely available Web 2.0 tools to create content, comment on this content, and...