Multilitteratus Incognitus

This semester is turning out to be one that is quite busy.  It was a good idea to not teach a graduate this semester so I can focus on my dissertation proposal, however (like that irresistible desert at the end of the meal) various collaborative projects have come in to fill the "void" left in my schedule from not teaching (the one that is supposed to be going into dissertation prep), and these projects have me thinking. First is the aspect of Hybrid Presence.  Suzan and I coined this term to describe something between Teaching Presence and Learner Presence for the most recent Networked learning conference.  We are currently working more on this topic for an upcoming book chapter. Second is gamification.  A term that has come in and out of my list of curiosities that I want to play around more with.  I've done some work on this for school, and for professional organization presentations, but nothing big in terms of an article (in my ALECS proposal it wa...

One of the presentations this week in EDDE 803 was from a fellow classmate that talked a bit about simulations.  In the ensuing discussion I was reminded of a course I took as part of my MBA which used simulations.  I thought that this would be a worthwhile post for here (as well as class) - at the very least it's one chronicle of my learning journey prior to the EdD. Queue flashback visuals and music When I was doing my MBA, one of my courses was a supply chain management course (fun with math and probability). One of the course activities was for us to break up into groups of 4 (so we had 4-5 groups in the course) and we were manager of a widget making factory. We needed to pick production size, route to retail, and predict demand (given certain finite factors) in different stores. The goals was (of course) to maximize profit. The game sort of looked like SimCity - sort of-, so for some of us it was also a bit of nostalgia (having grown up with that game). The game...

It feels like it's been a long time since I've written here.  Well, still here, still alive, still cracking away at those books, and articles, and assignments for 803.  Initially, before this course started,I thought it would be a walk in the park given my background in instructional design.  Maybe that was my error.  While, content-wise, it is a walk in the park (given my background) I think I swung the pnedulum a little too hard in the other direction looking to make this course more challenging for me. So for one of my big assigments I picked gamification as a topic - a topic I knew a little something about thanks to two xMOOCs I completed.  However, instead of resting on my laurels and using what I had learned in those MOOCs, I decided to try and read at least 5 of my (unread) books on gamification and games in the classroom (self-imposed goal) to gain some greater understanding on the topic before I wrote about it. In the end, a lot of what I picked up...

Well, in addition to being Back to the Future Day (you know, October 21, 2015), I noticed that my count-down on my phone is telling me that it is also exactly mid-semester!  We have completed 44 days of coursework and there are 44 more days to go!  EDDE803 is progressing smoothly I would say, the internship in MDDE 620 is still pretty interesting, and the forums there are quite active. I get a lot of energy from seeing students in 620 participating the forums! That said, I am feeling pretty tired! I don't know it it's just "hump-week"  - you know, that week in the middle of the semester when you feel that you are climbing a steep hill and you just want to sit down, but you gotta keep moving - or just that I really need a vacation (or this damned cold that doesn't want to go... ) :-).  Either way, I hope that once the current project is done that I will feel like I am on a skateboard rolling down hill to the finish line - i.e. lots of fun, and a rush, and not ...

Time seems to be on fast forward these days.  Either that or I have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them in.  When did week 5 just end?  Time flies when you're having fun, and when you have a ton of your plate I guess.  The past couple of weeks on EDDE 803 have been relatively 'quiet'.  We haven't had discussion forums, and our live session was cancelled due to unforeseen events.  The internship is fast and furious with a lot of discussion forum posts, and I assume that the short gradeable assignments will start to come in at some point soon in that course. In the internship I actually ended up partly grading the first of the papers that came in. I grade it first, and the instructor of record looks it over does the final actual grading, this way the learner gets feedback and I get feedback as well. Since I've been teaching for a few years I am approaching this as an opportunity for peer review, so I am approaching my role as an intern...

Last year when I put out the call for the  Great Big MOOC Book , one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform , which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms at the time.  Well, since there wasn't much on Coursera to keep me going (too much of the same makes for a dull MOOC), and since rhizo14 is winding down (to some extent) I decided it was time to check out this platform. I originally signed up for two topics: Teaching Adult Learners , and Becoming and Confident Trainer . The Adult Learner topic was mostly to see what others say about the topic since I've already taken courses on this topic as part of my master's coursework.  The confident trainer was a bit of a repetition, but it was also an interesting look into corporate train...

Last week was the last formal week of #rhizo14.  Even though we crazy lunatics have taken over Dave's P2PU course site and are continuing the course on our own (for now), life goes on and other MOOCs start and finish.  This week was the week I completed the Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam , and the course Diseño, Organización y Evaluación de videojuegos y gamificación (design, organization, and evaluation of video games, and gamification)from the Universidad Europea, using the Miriadax platform. The former was taught in English, using the all too familiar Coursera model, while the latter was taught presented entirely in Spanish (with one or two interviews in English). The Communications course isn't technically over, next week in the final week, but the final exam was this week.  Since I am done with both, I think it's good to have a little post-mortem analysis. Coursera - Intro to Communication The novelty that got me into t...

Well, my first xMOOC is now complete! For this first time around in my xMOOC explorations I chose a coursera course on Gamification.  This was a good choice because the video lectures were engaging! It turns out that the instructor has a law degree, so I guess his great presentation skills are now easily explained ;-) There were a few highlights and a few dim-lights to the course.  As far as the highlights go, as I said the video lectures were quite good! I really did enjoy listening, and seeing, the video presentations each week. Kevin Werbach was a great speaker, and while I think that the  lectures were prepared, he didn't sound like he was reading a prompter, in other words he was natural and not robotic. This made the material flow pretty well. I also liked that there were about 2 hours worth of videos each week, this feels more like a "real" course than just having some small videos to watch.  I do realize that this is discipline specific and that some discip...

So this week Gamification , with Kevin Werbach of UPenn started! After close to two years of working on, what is now termed, cMOOCs (connectivist MOOCs), I decided to check out an "xMOOC" (institutional MOOC) to see what the learning experience is. I hope to be able to write a weekly recap about my coursera experiences :-) So, the gamification course is a six-week course on gamification from a management background, which ties into my MBA background. The course isn't designed to teach game development, but rather give a broad overview of gamification, and gamification techniques as they apply to a management background.  Nice! The course itself revolves around some mandatory videos of the instructor (in total Week 1 was about 2 hours worth of video, broken down in 10 minute segments). The videos themselves are quite doable, even when you are in the office. You can easily download them and put them on a mobile device to view during your commute (this is a nice example ...

We have now entered week 5 (of 6) of GameMOOC, and I completely forgot to add a quick synopsis of take-aways for the past couple of weeks (time flies!)  So here is a quick synopsis of notable things in these two weeks. Week 3: Gamification Week 3 was all about gamification. There were a number of interesting discussion thread this week, and one of them (which also produced a n interesting blog post ) on the risks of rewards!  This reminded me a lot of the literature review that I did while researching intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for an Academic Checkins article that I have now submitted to the international journal of instructional technology & distance learning (fingers crossed that it will get accepted!).  While doing my lit review, I looked at motivation in educational journals, psychology journals, and...even economics journals! What I found out is that external rewards aren't always bad.  It's not the external reward that is de...

Last week was a pretty interesting week in Games MOOC . The main idea behind the week was to try out some new games and explore the game dynamics.  There were a few recommendations, among them RuneScape , a free (or freemium?) online MMORPG.  I thought I would give it the "ol' college try" and try out something new, but RuneScape just was not cooperating with me!  That, plus I was at the Campus Technology conference (see recent blog posts) so I wasn't really able to really try out RuneScape.  Perhaps another time.  One of my main issues with RuneScape was that Java was not cooperating with me (so browser version was a no-go) and the downloaded version had some sort of issue where my mouse needed to be x-many pixels south of where I needed to click in order for the click to register (20-30 pixels it seemed).  This meant that it was a bit frustrating to even start to explore.  Maybe when I get back to it I can use Jing or something to record w...

Finally catching up with gamesmooc this week ;-) I haven't quite gotten to playing games just yet (runescape is not cooperating with me), but I did read over the text-based materials (thanks to Pocket!) and views the TED talks.  This particular one was pretty interesting.  The example she gives of Herodotus of the Lydians playing games one day and eating another, thus surviving an 18 year famine by eating on alternative days is quite a nice example of flow . It also ties in nicely with a story I read today of " Death by Diablo " where a teen died, presumably after playing Diablo for 40 hours without break for food or sleep.  Maybe he had an underlying condition that precipitated his death - but it seems like even in a state of flow you can't ignore basic needs (water, food, sleep, bathroom breaks) for very long. Another interesting thing, a tie-in to learning theory, is a comment she makes about World of Warcraft  and quests, where even the lower level players ar...

With Week 2 of Game MOOC starting up today, I thought it would be worth while to write a couple of observations from the inaugural week of this MOOC. Last week's content was quite interesting. I still see a lot of people still introducing themselves in the "welcome and introduce yourself" forum, so I guess many more people are coming on-board, even at the end of the first week. The video of Jim Gee (reposted here) was quite interesting and engaging, and the games that the Guild Council (MOOC facilitators) had us sample weren't that bad. To be honest, I would not have tried any of these games out if I didn't have to. My time is a bit limited, and these learning games don't generally fit in with me as a learner, and don't fall into the demographic if people who might be in a course of mine. That said, I did enjoy the games (despite some of them being frustrating, but I guess that was the point) and had some interesting discussions with a few participa...

This is keynote address from Games for Change. Pretty interesting! Big "G" Games.

OK, I may have bitten off more than I can chew (challenge accepted!).  I saw that some former MOOC participants have a new MOOC on games in education. This was too interesting to pass up.  Even though next week will be busy with a Sloan-C workshop, and the Campus Technology conference, it's only one week. I can still participate in 5 out of the 6 weeks on this MOOC :-) I am seriously looking forward to this.  Week 1 has a video keynote by Jim Gee, which should be interesting :-)

Life and Death Screenshot This week is gaming and simulation week (if you haven't guessed from the posts that I've been posting and responding to) on Change11 with guest Clark Aldrich . As usual, I've skipped the live session since there is more than enough content on the blogs and what's been provided by the guest facilitators. The reading matter for this week is a short book by Clark titled Designing Sims the Clark Aldrich way . The book was quite succinct and on the small side, perhaps an abbreviated version of  The Complete guide to Simulations and Serious Games , in other words a good quick read to get you situated in what one needs to do in order to get simulations off the ground for instructional purposes.  This book, for me, was quite interesting because it bridged my computer science and UI design backgrounds, with my management background, and my instructional design background - it was pretty cool to see all of these converge in an area (simulations) t...

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...