Multilitteratus Incognitus

**sigh** The mobile client ate my post! I will try to reconstitute as much of it as I remember ;-) In this blog post I am continuing the train of though started by thinking about different levels of participation, and my blog post on MOOC registration.  Since MOOCs are generally not taken for credit, and since they generally don't need to conform to some sort of departmental outcomes standard (i.e. this course addresses Program Level Outcome A, D, and E), it would be easier for a MOOC, than in a traditional course, to design several tracks and have different requirements for those tracks. There might also be options for a create-your-track, depending on the course of course. When a participant registers for a MOOC they can pick their track(s) and the system can monitor the participant's progress.  I think of this like Nike+'s  goal setting. For example my goal was to do 72 miles in 2 (or 3) months. Sure, for a hard core runner that's probably nothing.  For a des...

Well, one more campus technology conference and expo is done! The Campus Technology annual summer conference is the nation’s premier higher education technology conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning using the latest in applications, social software and immersive platforms. Initially I was thinking about writing a blog post per day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), but I had way too many interesting conversations with presenters, participants, and vendors to be able to do this (brain stops working after a certain point, you see).  So I thought I would pick 3 of my top sessions, and my top vendor of the show and talk a bit about these. KEYNOTES First of all, the keynotes by Mark Milliron (Chancellor of Western Governor's University) on "Deeper Learning Conversations ...

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. ...

I was reading an article on tablet computing that @ rjhogue  had emailed me and it brought to mind (again) the need to be able to rethink your processes and your affordances when working with a new medium. For example, looking at eBooks, most eBooks are just text - which is fine, but it doesn't utilize the medium (iPad) very well.  Now take a look at Operation Ajax , a graphic novel on the iPad, based on real life events, that really takes advantage of the medium.  The graphics aren't static (so no plain page turns), it incorporates actual film reel footage from the time period, and it includes images and recently declassified files, which allow you to jump out of the narrative to get additional info on the characters, the back story and other facts important to the story. This is a good example not just for comics and books, but also for eLearning! CIA : Operation Ajax for the iPad from Cognito Comics on Vimeo .

Despite the fact that I am technically a digital native (BS and meaningless as this term might be) I still cling to paper - perhaps because it's cheap and (up until recently) freely available.  With a plethora of academic articles piling up, and eBooks to read (granted, most are public domain like the Divine Comedy and The Prince), I thought I would shed my reliance on paper this semester and go paper free as much as possible. I am working on a couple of papers, one solo and one with the MobiMOOC Research Team, and there are academic articles that I need to read (or re-read) in order to complete the research. Since I can't print out as much as I did before, I thought this is a perfect time (since we are at the beginning of each research project) to see if paperless is the way to go (for me at least). We are producing digital scholarship (my previous articles can be found on my Scribd account ), but up to now, for me at least, a component of that research was done on paper...l...

Well, the first workshop was today and it was quite interesting.  As I suspected there were quite a few K-12 teachers there interested in getting started with iOS app development so this can trickle down into the high school computer science curriculum; there were some higher education folks there as well. Even though the workshop was all day, you can't really get that deep into app development in eight hours.  Most of the workshop consisted in getting us oriented toward the apple developer accounts and with getting around xcode.  We messed around with interface builder and xcode and learned how to connect the UI elements to the code - but there was little (almost no) coding involved.  Considering I haven't programmed in close to ten years now, this wasn't bad.  Now I just need to get started with the Stanford iTunesU podcasts on iOS development...and perhaps come up with some interesting idea for mLearning (or something m-related) to develop a sample applicat...