Multilitteratus Incognitus

Check, check. Is this thing on? Linguistics isn't generally considered a topic, like one of those sexy STEM courses, that everyone talks about when they talk about degrees and fields to study for job related purposes. For this reason we haven't seen a lot of linguistics related MOOCs.  Last year we had the Virtual Linguistics Campus offer three MOOCs using their own approach to teaching MOOCs which seemed more like self-paced eLearning. I didn't complain (much) because it was, after all, courses in linguistics. This time around, the University of Lancaster is offering a course on Corpus Linguistics, which I have naturally signed up for.  There is at least one colleague from the #rhizo14 MOOC taking this course, so I am curious to see what they think of the course after all is said and done.  In the meantime, I have some initial thoughts on the course itself, as well as the mechanics of the future learn platform, as they are realized through this MOOC. The first ...

Seems like Week 1 of #edcmooc is now done, and I've read (or in some cases reviewed) the readings and videos that they had posted as resources for Week 1. During the Week 1 live session recap and discussion there was an indication that there were 20,000 registrants for the MOOC.  I'd be interested in seeing how many of those 20,000 follow through and "complete" the MOOC, whatever "completion" means to the organizers of the course. For that matter, I'd like to know what "completion" means since, unlike other Coursera courses, there are no silly quizzes at the end of each week. I understand that some people want some sort of formative assessment, but I tend to think that multiple choice quizzes are not adequate to indicate whether people "get it" or not.  I suspect that in this course there will be an "aha moment" around week 4 when it suddenly clicks for people.  If you are in #edcmooc, and are reading this blog post, my re...

It's been about a month since I finished reading all the books, articles, news-items and non-print media items for my research on Digital Natives . I also went through and I classified everything, took notes and in general just got prepared to write, but I have not done so. Part of it is that I can't bear to rehash the sheer amount of bullshit and "common  wisdom" that's been mindlessly reproduced by some scholars, even if this rehashing is so that I can disprove the concept of the digital native.  I've did make some headway this week in completing a draft of the introduction which sets the pace for the article, but I need to whip myself into shape and get this article going! :-)  Perhaps this is something to undertake this weekend.  I guess the silver lining here is that in stagnating in this project I was able to read Noam Chomsky's Failed States (awesome book by the way), Catch-22 (another great book), Microserfs and I am finishing off Marshall McLuh...