Multilitteratus Incognitus

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...

I tried making that rhyme, to come up with a catchy title, but it didn't really work out... Oh well, maybe next time ;-) In any case, in the Research_MOOC Mailing list Alan Selig had an interesting question which I thought I would poke at for a while until I came to an answer (or at least something to add to the discussion) Alan Selig One final "wonderment" from my limited understanding of Connectivist Learning theory:  If the reflecting and remixing never leaves the head of the lurker, except perhaps in their own behavior, is it still learning? If the wider community never receives a benefit does that disqualify the experience as being learning? Well...I think that there are different levels of looking at this. First of all, is it learning if it never leaves the brain/mind of the lurker? Strictly speaking, if the "learning" never manifests itself outside of the mind, I don't think it's learning. This manifestation doesn't have to involve o...

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...

Another interesting post by Jaap in this week's (final week) of CCK11 made me think. Jaap writes: As a connectivist (CCK11) I do not like the words “acquisition of knowledge”, I like to that to be “connecting to information”. This made me think of the philosophy behind knowledge, how one sees knowledge and information (and ultimately wisdom?), and the semantics behind the words we use. Take for instance this phrase: Acquisition of Knowledge What does Acquisition of Knowledge imply? Well, we acquire something that in concrete, something already pre-made, ready for us to pick up and consume, use, or put it on a mantle. This view of knowledge is very behaviorist in its connotation. I don't necessarily subscribe to this idea. I think information can be given (example: don't touch the stove, it's hot) but there is no necessary knowledge of what happens if you touch a hot stove. As a kid I was told this time and time again, and I never touched a hot stove. A few m...

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?) This week in CCK11 we've got learning theories. luckily most of this stuff is a great review for me since we covered most of these theories quite a lot throughout the applied linguistics curriculum. We didn't much with connectivism though (which is why I am attending CCK11) since that was near the end of the semester. In any case, there is a a nice ten minute video on YouTube that goes over the various major theories of education. If you haven't heard of educational theories, this is quite a good back-of-the-napkin figure to get you started. If you're in instructional design and you haven...