Multilitteratus Incognitus

Recently I read an article on Your Training Edge which aims to correct misconceptions surrounding MOOCs. The title of this particular post, and I guess myth that they tried to correct, was " MOOCs Aren’t Interactive, So There’s No Real Learning Taking Place ". The basic idea in this misconception is really preposterous.  I don't know when interactive became synonymous with learning , but it is clearly a flawed concept.  Yes, interactivity can aid in learning, but just because something isn't interactive it doesn't mean that learning is taking place, and vice versa - if something is interactive it doesn't mean that learning is taking place.  I can think of a lot of cases where there isn't interactivity, but learning happens never the less. Three examples that come to mind are: self-paced eLearning, while you might have some  interactivity (matching games, clicking "next" on the player, and so on), this interactivity is really token interact...

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forum A couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems , you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come up based on your usage pattern of the system. Now, those systems aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they can serve as ways of finding some diamond in the rough that you didn't know exist.  Think about it, both in a shopping or entertainment venue, and a MOOC you have one potentially huge issue: limited time to devote, a large sea of information to go through in order to find what might entertain you, or pique your intellectual interest and  get you engaged with some subject.  Last summer, at the end of Campus Technology 2013, I was having food and dr...

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...

This week's readings bring back memories; memories of computer science (creating algorithms in C to traverse a network) and memories of my MBA (organizational development).  Fun stuff! Krebs' reading was short, but quite interesting nevertheless.  What stood out for me was this Common wisdom in personal networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always so. What really matters is where those connections lead to -- and how they connect the otherwise unconnected! I tend to see this common wisdom with "open networkers" on LinkedIn and other social networks (my apologies if you are an open networker).  I never really got into "open networking", connecting to anyone who wanted to connect with me, simply because there was no connection there to begin with. Now on occasion I do make a request to connect with someone whose work I've read and liked, but I guess one could argue that there is a weak connection there to begin with - I...