Multilitteratus Incognitus

So. It is finally upon me!  The time to put pen to paper (or in my case tap some keys on the keyboard to throw some stuff called text into a Google Doc) in order to start putting together my dissertation proposal.  In some respects I am doing this backwards.  I am taking a Research Methods course this summer as a way of getting re-acquainted with some things, and to get better acquainted with others.  I think that the more you practice something the better you become at it. And, heck, one of the assignments in this course really lends itself to (1) getting at least part of the research methods section done, and (2) getting some feedback on it before I go into my actual dissertation prep seminar in the fall (EDDE 805). So, what am I doing "backward".  Well, typically (as I am told) you are meant to start with an intro chapter which talks a bit about your setup.  This is generally something like 15-20 pages.  Then you have a chapter on the review o...

Even though this semester is relatively calm, compared to last semester, I still find myself not writing as much as I think I would like.  I've set aside, temporarily, the book I was meant to have finished reviewing last October, on MOOCs, until the semester ends and I can focus on them a little more. One reason for the refocus of energies is EDDE 804. We are focusing on leadership in education, and I am finding myself spending a lot more time pondering the topic.  I was going to be "ruthlessly pragmatic" and just focus on the assessments, but the cohort members provide for some really interesting discussion and points to ponder.  Another thought that crossed my mind was this: am I over MOOCs?  There was a time when I used to check out coursera, edx, futurelearn, and the other not-so-usual suspects for new courses, however these days going to those sites seems more like a chore than anything else.  I've downloaded a whole bunch of videos from previous courses...

...and along with it the usual cast of characters and their zany antics (picture a 90s cartoon here). The debate and brainstorming currently happening is how to welcome new members in a new MOOC when we've all started developing connections, bonds, and rhizomes together over the past couple of years.  Will anonymity work? New Groups? Delete old groups? Tea & Biscuits to welcome new members? Hmmmm... Simon Ensor's Anonymous Rhizo

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...

A report from the field.... Traveling home is a good opportunity to catch up with posts made by fellow #rhizo15  participants. It's also a good time to read books and articles. I thought that for this commute I would go to rhizo because Latour is taking forever to make his point in the Actor-Network Theory book I am reading for another rhizo project. I just read a post, by fellow participation, on blogging for class (darned link won't post in this mobile blogging app...) which for me thinking. For the courses I design I have an activity each week which serves as formative evaluation for the course but also serves as an opportunity for some reflection and introspection on the part of the learner. This is usually done as a quiz at the end of the week, but I am thinking of giving learners the option to blog about thus, this having something more free form. I don't want to give extra points if it's done as a blog (perhaps a special badge for the bloggers could...

It seems like I am living in a time-warp this semester :)  I had saved an article to read, and respond to, titled " Motivating Faculty to Teach Online " that was published in Inside Higher Education. I could have sworn that I saved this back in the fall at some point, but looking at the date it was earlier this month. I am not sure if time flowing slowly is a good thing or a bad thing.  In any case, my motivation for responding to this article as been like a seesaw.  Some days when I see it in my Pocket reader I am all gung-ho about responding to it...and then there are days where I shrug my shoulders and wonder what the point is to responding to such an article . Just to set the frame here: I work for an institution as a manager of an online MA program.  I love what I do. I've been working with faculty for the past 15 years, in a variety of roles, and throughout these 15 years I've seen faculty, and their various motivations, through a variety of lenses. ...

September is here! New academic year has begun, the campus is again full of life (and lacking parking), and I am back to school as a student, this time at Athabasca University!  I am also looking forward to a number of MOOCs that are beginning this month, among them Connected Courses , which promises to be an interesting cMOOC.  Perhaps I am insulting the course by calling it a MOOC (MOOCs these days seem to have a bad reputation), but it seems like the label that works best for it at the moment.  When compared to xMOOCs, there aren't a lot of cMOOCs offered, so time to savor the learning opportunity here. Once again I've signed up for quite a few MOOCs (almost all of them xMOOCs) on coursera and futurelearn but I've decided on a different tactic for them.  I've decided to give grazing a try.  In previous attempts at MOOC learning I've been quite determined to follow the path set out by the course designers and facilitators.  Dot every i , and cross ev...

A couple of years ago I was working on hashing out this idea of Academic Check-ins.  Think of it as Foursquare meets informal learning meets campus engagement meets alternative credentialing. A paper came out of that brainstorming with a proposal of what such a system might look like.  While working on hashing out some ideas I wanted to dive deeper into this concept of motivation, both internal and external.  One of the potential issues with extrinsic motivators such as the various "goodies" that you get for checking into places†. While there wasn't a magic bullet (at least in the background research I did) for a good balance between internal and external motivators there was one huge warning: be very careful of external rewards for doing things. They slowly start to replace internal motivation that was there, and if you remove those external rewards, there is a danger of internal motivation not being there to sustain the learner.  This was somewhere in the back...

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...

Well,  we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing!  This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments (PLE).  Thus, this week the penultimate secret badge has been revealed, and it is the  No Walled Gardens badge. Criteria : The earner of this badge has incorporated at least two Web 2.0 tools and/or services into the design of their LMS-based online course. This design is incorporated in such a way that it should prompt students in that course to start developing their own PLEs. Rationale: Now, I understand that not everyone will be able to incorporate this aspect into their courses, especially the students who are working in corporate training or health-care training and...

Well, it seems one more week has passed by in INSDSG619, and one more badge had been earned by some learners, and therefore revealed to everyone! Last week the Discussion Initiator was revealed, and this week, the Discussion Kinder has come out! Discussion Kindler Description: This badge is awarded to students who have made an effort to keep the discussion going by responding to peers and helping to tease out nuances in the discussion. Criteria:  For at least six weeks (half the semester), a student needs to post at least 5 responses to peer contributed posts per week. These replies to peers' posts need to meet the full rubric criteria for responses Rationale: Over the past few years, both teaching and observing online posting behaviors of students, I've noticed that there are some students that go the extra mile and post more than the minimum of required replies to their peers.  Thus, they keep the discussion going, they ask expository questions, they guide th...

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou...

Cookie cutters: detriment to creativity, or fuel to the creative fire? Last week, while I was updating something on LinkedIn, I saw one of my colleagues post a link to a post by the eLearning Brothers called The Top 10 Best eLearning Game Templates . I am generally not a fan of such list-posts, but every now and again I come across something really interesting.  I usually don't teach courses on CBT, WBT or other self-paced eLearning.  It's an interesting topic, but it really isn't my cup of tea, so I wouldn't voluntarily agree to teach an entire semester of such a course. In any case, last semester I was peer reviewing a colleague's course (and to some extent co-teaching it because I had a hand in grading and content and assignment creation), which just so happened to be in Multimedia.  The particular spin that this course took was to use multimedia to create a self-paced course. So, with this fresh in my mind, with the discussions we had last week in #rhizo14...

scavenged image I am not sure where I found this blog post (probably through an RSS feed somewhere), but I am glad it came my way.  In his initial reflections on the Hyperlinked Library MOOC , this author talk about feeling a bit patronized by earning certain   badges. It's like you can't take two steps before someone throws a badge at you and tells you that you're awesome ;-) A while back, when I was doing some research into motivation by means of awards for a paper I was working on, I did find that there wasn't (yet) that much research on badging. There was, however, a lot of psychology related research on motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and the affects that rewards and reward mechanisms had on motivation, and specifically motivation to learn.  There were some pretty cool findings (must find articles to post references at some point).  While I don't remember everything off the top of my head, I do remember that motivation is quite a complex t...

Wow, this MOOC seems to be going by pretty quickly! We are already at the midpoint! This week I feel my participation in the MOOC was a bit more muted. I did want to participate more in the in the discussions but I got side-lined with start-of-the-semester things I needed for my day-job ;-)  I did get through my stated activities (1, 2, 3, 4,  10) and I did do one of my optional ones (5); so I guess participation wasn't all that bad, but it was "solitary participation †" not really engaging a ton with others. Oh well, such is the nature of the beast, I guess ;-) In any case, I did download a number of templates this week, and added them to my design toolbox, but by far my favorite one was the card activity: Pedagogical Features Card Sort . I printed them out, cut them up, and experimented with them.  I have to say that cards, for me anyway, are much more conducive to thinking about the various aspects of the course. Having a list of items that you can pick from is a...

One more MOOC is done! A coursera xMOOC to be more precise called Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society with Karl Ulrich from UPenn. For this course I took the "auditor" approach to participating in the course. I did listen or view (or listen and view) all the lectures, and I did poke around the assignments, but never bothered to submit any of them.  I did enjoy Karl Ulrich's presentations, so for me the course was more like a series of related TED videos, and not specifically a course. The assignments, I must admit, were intriguing, but the combination of the level of my interest in the subject matter, coupled with the peer review and (lack of) accreditation accreditation made it not worth my while to go for that certificate of completion. Now, if I had more spare time, I may have cared a bit more to create some artefact based on this course, but given that I don't have a ton of time, and that the assignments are peer reviewed (and that there seems to be n...

It seems like Rebecca and I were on the same wavelength yesterday when we were composing our blog posts and reflecting on various aspects of MOOCs.  Rebecca wonders why there is only one level of participation in xMOOCs , and I have to say, having started my 3rd coursera MOOC yesterday (same one as Rebecca, the Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society on coursera), I can see that (from my limited experience) there is a limit on how participation is counted.  Granted, I've spoken out about participation in the past for cMOOCs, but I've considered participation as being active somehow (twitter, blogs, discussions, etc.).  In xMOOCs, and in particular my two experiences on Coursera for the Gamification course and  now the  Design: Creation of Artifacts  course, a participant gets a certificate of completion having done all the quizzes satisfactorily and by completing the assignments. This is one level of participation, and it's one of the valid ways to get...

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...

One of the things that participants need to do in #bonkOpen in order to receive a badge for being part in this MOOC, was to attend (or view the recording of) each weekly live session. I've said it before, and I will say it again: I am not a fan of synchronous conferences; I just don't like sitting there for an hour...or two...or three...listening to people do their thing.  I prefer my visual channel to be better engaged when listening to mostly audio information, and most synchronous conferences are just powerpoint, powerpoint, powerpoint...yawnnnn.  At least in class (face to face) you have body language, movement, people coming and going, neighbors and so on. In any case,  with the help of a piece of software called Elluminate Publish (thank you Blackboard person on Twitter!) I was able to download the recording in video format (just a bit over 130MB if I recall correctly) for the entirety of the two hours.  It was a nice presentation, nothing good, noth...

Well, actually, it's the start of two new MOOCs! I know that Change11 and DS106 are still going, but change11 seems to be on life support. It seems to me anyway that the same 4-5 people are posting, and even though there are interesting people in these final weeks, most people have moved on, which is too bad. I still read the daily digest, and those 4-5 people post some thought provoking stuff, but I just have nothing to add to the conversation, so I lurk :-) With DS106 I don't feel that creative (which is a bummer), so I've resolved that once the summer comes and I have more mental bandwidth (too many work projects taking up space now) I plan on doing two challenges every week and work through the assignments in the summer months. I've wanted to get a podcast off the ground for a while, so doing something for DS106 should kill two birds with one stone ;-) Anyone interested in doing a "MOOC Talk Weekly" with me? LOL :-) Anyway, so what are these two ne...