Multilitteratus Incognitus

Udemy is one of those platforms that frequently gets lumped into the "MOOC provider" category. Perhaps, these days, with the term being anything you want it to be, Udemy fits into this category.  Over the past few weeks I've been experimenting with their courses to see what Udemy is all about.  originally (a year or so ago), when I first went to Udemy I experienced sticker-shock.  The courses (or at least those one the homepage) were not free. This was not something that I was expecting to see from a MOOC platform. That said, this time around, I fished around and found six free courses.  Three were more like professional development workshops, traditional self-paced learning, and three were created by academics.  The three more academic courses were Ancient Greek Religion , Intercultural Communication , and a political science course on American Democracy . From a motivational perspective, I assigned up for these courses because they were free, and they were...

I was thinking about what to create for my digital artefact for EDCMOOC.  My initial thought was to create a sample dialogue between a fictionalized EDCMOOC student and Prof. Eliza.  Prof. Eliza would be, of course, based on the the venerable ELIZA computer therapist program. I could then go in and modify the specific psychotherapy lines with something specific to education. In the faceless environment no one knows if you are a dog , so in online education how do we know if a professor isn't just a machine pretending to be human?  In any case, this was meant to be a parody. There were two directions I could go once I got the dialogue all set: I was going to ask a friend to run some lines with me, and they would play the role of Professor Eliza. The computerized responses as said by a human would/should make people think about appropriateness of responses of professors to learners and how helpful they are. Or, I could text chat with Professor Eliza and record that, ...

So... week 1 of OLDS MOOC is about to be done! When I signed up, I wasnt' sure what my participation level would be (so I didn't set hard objectives for myself). I did want to work on the MOOC as much as I could, given the constrains of every day life.  Week 1 wasn't bad.  I did create a cloud in CloudWorks to consolidate my own learnings and interactions in the MOOC in one easy to find place. Supposedly this will come in handy, as well, when the organizers are deciding whether someone's participation is badge-worthy :-) I must say that CloudWorks was a bit confusing in the beginning, but I think I have gotten the hang of it.  The one issue I still have is how to remove a cloud from a cloudscape after you have added it!  For example, my main cloud (the one where I am keeping track of my own participation) is also in the Dreambazaar. This was done by mistake, but I don't see a way of removing my cloud (and this keeping the dreambazaar clean).  Oh well, live ...

Yesterday, while commuting, I had written a longer post about my MOOC-coverage fatigue.  It seems as though MOOC coverage has gotten out of proportion and it's spilled over to other non educational news outlets that I frequent, where I go for non-educational news. In any case, it seems as though the Google Blogger client of my iPhone ate my post.  Maybe for the best, because I feel like I was getting to have a cranky "get off my lawn" slant to it ;-)† In any case, in thinking about re-writing that post, I was skimming some recent MOOC related news on Inside Higher Education, the Chronicle and the non academia blogs that suddenly have picked up and started reporting on MOOCs since they are the subject of venture capital news. Despite being an MBA, I don't get all excited about VC news, I am more interested about the product than figuring out right away how to make money with it. While going through a day's worth of RSS feeds, I just had this crystallize: Many ...

The other day, seeing that there were a couple of videos in the HCI that were available. Since I didn't have time to watch them during lunch, and as established coursera has no offline viewing for their courses, I decided to try my luck with the iPhone while commuting. Since I do use coursera, and I do watch videos on my iPad when I am at home from time to time (on wifi), it would make sense that I would be able to do the same on my iPhone. Thus with 20 minutes left in my commute, and two 17 minute videos to watch, it seemed like a no-brainer. Well, the image I got was the image on he right, in plain English: video not playable. What gives? This can't possibly be a technology constraint, so it must be a course design and delivery constraint. It reminds me of the continuing discussion (well, a series of post in actuality) thinking about the constraints that LMS/CMS design place on teaching and learning, based on the assumptions that go into designing an LMS. It seems to me...

We are now in Week 4 (of 5!) of BlendKit2012 and the subject of the week is content and assessments . The questions to ponder for this week are as follows: In what experiences (direct or vicarious) will you have students participate during your blended learning course?  In what ways do you see these experiences as part of the assessment process? Which experiences will result in student work that you score?  How will you present content to students in the blended learning course you are designing? Will students encounter content only in one modality (e.g., face-to-face only), or will you devise an approach in which content is introduced in one modality and elaborated upon in the other? What will this look like?  Will there be a consistent pattern to the presentation of content, introduction of learning activities, student submission of assignments, and instructor feedback (formal and informal) in your blended learning course? How can you ensure that students experien...

BlendKit, prepare to have your mind blown! OK, I am a exaggerating a bit, but I am going to come to this MOOC from a non-traditional approach. I've been thinking about the DIY activities, and I have to say that the DYI tools (4th column, DIY project deliverables) are pretty nifty; not just for blended learning, but also for instructional design purposes in general. Now, I don't think I will have a ton of time to complete all DIY deliverables; and, considering that the course I am working with is only a proposal which may, or may not become a full course†, I think it's best to not spend a whole lot of time on a specific course until it's approved to run (given other competing time issues). In any case, my guinea pig course is a course on Mobile Learning that I developed (at least in syllabus form) in the past year. The funny thing is that I originally conceived of this course as a blended course; however due to business factors (more online students interested in t...

This is it! The final week of MobiMOOC is upon us!  I have to say that this MOOC really passed by so quick that it was really hard to keep up with it :-) Last year's mobimooc seemed like it was much longer than 6 weeks (in a good way), and this year's mobimooc seemed shorter than the 3 weeks that it runs. Comparatively, I think last year I joined the mobimooc with the intention to be a moderately active participant, and I ended up being "memorably" active, while this year I started with the intention of being memorably active...but I guess I'll have to settle for moderately active :-) .  There were a few issues, for me anyway, with this year's mobimooc - and most of them were around scheduling.  In April and May (original MobiMOOC) courses are near the end (or have already ended), so there is a little more head space to participate in the MOOC. In September, however, the story is a bit different. Courses are just starting, there is an initial crazyness as...

It's been a whirlwind tour in mobimooc this year.  Week 2 is almost done (I count my weeks by a 5-day weekday, rather than 7 days) and only one more week to go! I feel that I have not been as active in MobiMOOC this year as I was in the previous year.  Perhaps it's because MobiMOOC is only half of the duration of last year's MOOC.  It would be interesting to see how often I posted last year (per week) and this year :-) In any case, what has come up this year (that I think wasn't there last year) is a discussion on the nuances of mLearning and what constitutes mLearning, as compared to other types of learning (I call these  x Learning) such as uLearning (ubiquitous), eLearning (electronic), oLearning (online),  iLearning (internet) and so on. Here are some questions and points that were posed to spark discussion on the topic: Does M-learning start when E-learning comes to the end? E-learning doesn't feed our needs thus M-learning were born to fill the gap? ...

One of the first things to deal with when tackling any topic is quantifying what we are talking about.  Since this is MobiMOOC, one of the key terms that ought to come up in the discussion is what exactly is mobile learning?  This discussion did indeed come up yesterday ( see forum here ). Let me just say that mLearning definitions are probably incomplete and they are subject to an ever evolving understanding of what constitutes  mobility and  learning .  Initial definitions were very hardware-centric and hardware-specific, and chances are the further back you go, the more hardware-centric and specific they are. This is fine because those definitions comes from a point in time when mLearning was the new kid on the block and we probably looked at demonstrable instances of mobile usage, and that happened to be mobile phones and PDAs. Clive asks some pretty interesting questions (and these are questions that I've heard in the past). If I use my laptop on a...

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 ...

Here is a preview of the facilitator lineup for MobiMOOC12 (straight from the MobiMOOC group!) With the start of the course still two months away, our grand group of   facilitators was completed last week and here are the guides-on-the-side   for all the upcoming mobile learning topics (in completely random order).   All of us cover 4 continents and 9 different mobile learning topics: Mobile learning theory/pedagogy : Geoff< http://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffstead >(Stead) is a mobile massive brain from Cambridge, UK, with an enormous   amount of zest and creativity. Who better to provide an overview of mobile   learning theories and pedagogies then his creative mind? Corporate learning : Amit < http://www.linkedin.com/in/gargamit100 > (Garg)   from India has inspired companies to go mobile based on strong business   plans, goal oriented design and intuitive learning. He shares what he knows   with all that want to hear. Amit is a true e...

I am in the process of finishing up the Mobile Learning Manager certification course (also known as mLeMan) and I am on the final unit.  Here are a couple of interesting videos.  (More on my experience with mLeMan later on...if I don't forget ;-)  ) The first is Mobile Madness: Making Sense of the Converged , Multidevice World from: IDCeXchange   held on 4/292011 This second video is  Mobility, Clouds and Intelligent Industries: Positioning for the 3rd Wave of IT Industry Growth

Seems like this will be the summer of professional development :-) On a tip from Igne I signed up for the Mobile Learning Manager certification course which is a self-paced learning program to certify managers of mobile learning initiatives. I think the US equivalent would be a training manager, focusing on mobile learning.  The course is a bit rough around the edges (which is why they wanted some guinea pigs this time around ;-)  ) but so far it's enjoyable!  More on this as I experience more. On a tip (or rather blog post) from Serena Turri, I saw that OER Foundation is offering a free five week course on Open Content Licensing for Educators . This course is free to join and offered on Moodle.  At this point they are already on Week 3, so I have to catch up a bit - but luckily (contentwise) I am not a n00bie, so I can really jump in an start interacting :)  More on this, as I interact more.

Here's a quick recap of yesterday's NMC12 breakout sessions. I decided to skip the morning plenary- 2 hours of 15 minute presentations is a little too much for me, and I can get those on iTunesU anyway ;-). Yesterday's breakout sessions were mostly interesting (and I had quite a few interesting side conversations!)   Exploring a Tablet Application for the seminar Classroom With Eric Gordon from: Emerson College And Drew Harry from: MIT   This was the first session the day (and if I am not mistaken I had seen something like his last January at the NERCOMP mobile session). We've seen tablet (or laptop) applications that tap into the backchannel in large lectures to capture the pulse of the classroom, but the idea behind this particular application was to tap into the "backchannel" in small lecture group (15 or fewer, based on the design of the application) and the idea is to be able to propose topics for discussion and to track discussion topic time. There wa...

This is my first semester teaching (yay!) and since we're eventually migrating to Blackboard Lean 9 on my campus I've decided to be part of a pre-pilot using Coursesites (fantastic and free service, by the way, if you are looking for a free LMS). One of the perks of coursesites, that briefly was taken away from us last year but is now back, is access to Blackboard Mobile on iOS, Android and Blackberry (hopefully a windows phone version soon?).  In any case, since I don't have a computer at home that I regularly have access to, I tend to use my iPad and Blackboard Mobile to keep on top of things.  While Bb Mobile is a great app, it does have a few shortcomings that I hope Blackboard addresses in the near future.  Some of it is (or should be) easy to implement, while other things might need a little more work on the back end to make feasible.  So here is my laundry list: What's New and Due This is a great feature of Bb Learn - it essentially gives you (student and...

It's been an interesting run for Change11, and we are now at Week 15 with the topic of Authentic learning.   Next week, and the week after next, are break weeks, so no new content, at least from a subject matter expert perspective.  I wonder if the daily mailer will still be coming to our inboxes, or whether that will take a break as well. I think I've reached my natural saturation point with course materials for this course. Readings, both this week's seed post, and other participants' blog posts, have accumulated in my ReadItLater account which I have little (mental) energy to read.  Perhaps I will that this opportunity to go out an play in the cold, yet sunny, weather and re-energize my creative batteries :-) By the way...I thought that this week's topic was authentic learning.  I just checked the seed post (just to see how long it was) and it seems like another mLearning topic.   I've added the free eBook on mLearning to my to-read list but perh...

While looking up the most recent issue of  Language Learning and Technology I came across their most recent call for papers. This time around the topic is mobile language learning, both topics I am interested in!  I was wondering if there are any change MOOC participants out there who are interested in mLearning, and Language Learning to work as part of a collaborative research team on the theme :-) Here's the actual call for papers: There has been increased interest in portable technologies which allow learners to access tools for learning languages in virtually any time or place that suits them. The quickly developing functionalities of mobile phones, MP3 players, laptop and tablet computers, and other hand-held devices with touch screen technology mean that the range of possibilities for language learning has greatly diversified. GodwinJones (2011), for example, points out that iPhone and Android phones have ushered in a phenomenal expansion in the development of Apps ...

I was reading Micheal's blog the other night and I realized that the Conference Proceedings for mLearn 2011 are now up!  You can download them from the Conference website , or you can read them on Scribd (see bellow) In other news, it seems like the MobiMOOC research team is big in China :-) We were contacted yesterday by PhD students (under the direction of their advisor) to see if we would consent to have our mLearn paper translated into Chinese for publication in a core Chinese academic journal - this is both a great honor and über cool! mLearn 2011 (BeiJing) Conference Proceedings

Congrats to everyone in the MobiMOOC research group for getting the  Best Paper Award at the mLearn 2011 conference!  In addition to myself, the team is made up of  (alphabetical order):   Sean C. Abajian ,  Inge deWaard ,  Michael Sean Gallagher ,  Rebecca Hogue ,  Nilgün Özdamar Keskin , and  Osvaldo Rodriguez  . A big thank you to Rebecca, Michael and  Nilgun for representing our team at mLearn in Beijing (wish I could have gone but oh well, looking forward to meeting the rest of the team in person one of these days :-)  )  I wonder if the presentation was video recorded. Inge has uploaded our paper at Academia.edu for anyone who is interested and the conference slides up on SlideShare (link bellow). I have to say that I really enjoyed working collaboratively with the MobiMOOC research team both on this project and on projects we are currently working on. While there is still place for solo-research activity, I t...