Multilitteratus Incognitus

#wilty A few weeks ago I decided to ask ChatGPT to tell me a little bit about myself. Part of it was curiosity, while part of it was because I needed to write a short bio and I just felt uninspired.  The first time the query ran, ChatGPT told me that it didn't know who I was.  That's fine, I thought to myself, because it would be weird to be known like that. After all, I don't really consider myself to be anything big in academia. This past week I decided to try again just to see if anything had changed in the world of ChatGPT. And lo and behold it had! Now ChatGPT seems to know who I am...sort of... Prompt: Who is Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos? Response: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who has worked in various fields related to technology and education. He is currently an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the founder of several EdTech companies . Koutropoulos has published ...

...or wait... will it? It's been a while since I wrote something on here†, and in all honesty, I thought about taking a sabbatical  from blogging to focus on dissertation-related matters.  However, I really hate the current practice of threading on twitter where someone writes 10, 20, 30, or 40 tweets in a thread.  We've even invented an app to make these threads more readable .  I can't roll my eyes hard enough at this because it's a solution for a problem we shouldn't have.  We have long-form means of communicating - they are called blogs.  But anyway - I'll cease my "get off my lawn"-ness and move on to the point.  Now, where was I?  Oh yeah... I wanted to respond to something I saw on twitter, but I didn't was to just create a stupidly long thread. So, in case you have not been paying attention, there is a bit of a global health scare going on, namely COVID-19 (or Coronavirus as the media calls it). It's gotten to the point where c...

From the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute at University of Mary Washington this week :-)

A long time ago (in technology terms), in an academia very close to us, there were stories of professors who suspended their MOOCs, or decided rant in the class forums and ultimately to walk away because the MOOC wasn't what they expected, and we all (probably) rolled our collective eyes. OK, maybe we didn't all roll our collective eyes, but I remember thinking that the "participate or get the heck out" and "read the fine  textbook" were really incompatible with the MOOC framework. Initially I was somewhat anti-lurker.  I'm not saying I am pro-lurker now, it's just that I don't think that lurkers pose tragedy of the commons issues, so just let them be.  They don't detract from people who want to learn and experiment.  To me, at the time, it seemed like an instructor who wanted to do what many have done in the past. Take a face to face class, and translate it, almost one for one, to online without really thinking about the affordances. ...

A recent hangout I was on talking about online pedagogy with some really cool people :-) Note to self: Ouroboros as a pedagogical symbol...

...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

"Fractured Spock" - by me and Net Art Generator, for #clmooc Over the past couple of years, since the silly acronym "SPOC" was invented to denote a course that was the antithesis to the MOOC, a Small Private Online Course , I've had issues with the acronym, and took exception to this new discovery  on the part of schools that newly invented  this form of education, considering that there are schools that have been doing it since the early aughts. In any case, I was finally going through my Pocket account today, trying to read as many things as I've saved for later reading since Rhizo15 when I came across a couple of articles that really made me roll my eyes a bit and made me want to facepalm... The first article is a featured article in Harvard Magazine, July/August issue, titled Is Small Beautiful? This was a fairly quick read, but I couldn't help but think that this was mostly a PR piece on the part of Harvard and Harvardx. There is a lot ...

What do you get when you mix connected courses, thinking about academia, and cold medicine?  The answer is a blog post (which I hope makes sense) :-) As I was jotting down my initial thoughts on co-learning in the previous post I completely forgot to address some of the initial thinking questions for this module.  Here are some initial thoughts on co-learning and how I would address these questions: What is co-learning and why employ it? For me co-learning is when two or more people are working together to solve a problem and learn something new.  As I wrote in my previous post, the individuals in this community do not all need to start from the same point. There can, and will, be learners that are more advanced in certain areas as compared to others.  This is perfectly fine, and it's realistic to expect this.  This can be a community of practice, it can be a broad network of learning, or a loosely connected network of learning that centers around a hashta...

Back in September Maha Bali's post on Critical Pedagogy: Intentions and Realities hit the interwebs on the Hybrid Pedagogy site. It's something I've been thinking about writing an Online Edition from my own experiences teaching in an online environment.  It seems to be a bit slow on Connected Courses this week (at least as compared to last week, measured in blog posts), so this seems like a good opportunity to write a little about the topic. I should say that I haven't overtly thought about applying critical pedagogy to the classroom†. It is quite odd, if you really think about it because of where my academic foundations lay.  I am a graduate of the Applied Linguistics department at UMass Boston.  A department created and shepherded by Dr. Donaldo Macedo (those who know of Freire's work, also know Macedo). But we don't just have Donaldo in our department, we also have other scholars who move in the same circles as people like Henry Giroux, so to not have ove...

A while back, when #EDCMOOC was getting setup for the first time, a fellow colleague, co-author, and member of the MobiMOOC research team , recommended the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC offered by the University of Edinburgh. I think the school was his alma matter and he had good words to say about the organizers. This is always a plus. Well, first time around I was too busy - I think I was actually too involved with other MOOCs to have the mental bandwidth to participate in #edcmooc. The second time I don't even remember what was happening (was I in summer mode?), so let's scratch that one off.  The third time is upon us! What the heck, I thought to myself, might as well sign up.  The Game Based Learning MOOC  is almost over, and I think I have the bandwidth for #edcmooc now. Since this is the first week, I went in and had a peek to see how they've set it up. I have to say that this MOOC is, at first glance, doing well on a number of counts; something to rea...

The other day, through some source I came across this " 4 downsides of MOOCs " from LearnDash. I should have known better than to read a vendor's blog, but then again sometimes they surprise me.  Anyway, the blog post seemed like link-bait because the downsides of MOOCs do not really seem that thought out. They are more reactionary than a deep pondering if the medium. So, here are my 2c on the issues brought forth: 1. Way to big The main thesis of this brief argument (and it is brief) is that because there are too many  people enrolled in the course it's hard to have intimate learning moments, access to the professor is limited, and there is too much of a chance of homogeneity of thought, so you don't learn to expand your worldview. That said, just because MOOCs have many participants in them it does not mean that you can't find a working group, a smaller cadre of students who would like to meet more regularly, in person or through something like a hangout...

For a while now I've been thinking of having a Weekend Column on here, something to give my blogging a little more regularity now that I am MOOCless (until the fall anyway) and not reflecting as much on the learning experiences in various MOOC setups.  I was going to have a "ID Stuff: Tin Foil Hat edition" (or "Cynic's Corner") column after I read this article ( Who is driving the online locomotive ) on the Chronicle the other day, but that seemed a juvenile. I don't know if there are many tin-foil-hat types in academia (someone please enlighten me), but this article seemed particularly bad, so I thought I would respond to it. The article is written by a community college professor who is wondering who is behind this push for online. What really struck me about this article is that it's written as if it's not written in 2013, but rather it sounds like concerns someone would have in 2003. I say this because our own university system started offe...

This post is going to be badly formatted because I have yet to find an Android client for blogger that it as nice as BlogPress on my iPhone. <br> While on vacation, and on a train, I was able to catch up on the news in academia. One thing that came up, among the oodles on MOOC news is the question of whether MOOCs are just online courses (see here: http://www.thegoodmooc.com/2013/06/are-moocs-becoming-just-online-courses.html?m=1 ). <br> It's an interesting question and the answer, at least for me, is: "it depends". One off the big questions is how many people are active in the course, or in other words "how maybe is massive?" The design of a course will differ based on how many people actually participate. You could have a MOOC that resembles a traditional online course, you could have a MOOC that resembles a self-paced course and you could have a MOOC that resembles any one of the many existing field of instruction. <br> The underlying ...

We are almost there!  The course A boriginal Worldview and Education is almost over! It's one of the few xMOOCs that survived the great course purge of late 2012 (courses that I decided to drop before they started because of my time commitment issues in March). When I signed up for the course I thought that the course was about Australia and New Zealand since I had only heard of Aboriginals in that context before.  Even the course description didn't point to the fact that this was about Canadian Aboriginals. Intended for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal learners, this course will explore indigenous ways of knowing and how they can benefit all students. Topics include historical, social, and political issues in Aboriginal education; terminology; cultural, spiritual and philosophical themes in Aboriginal worldviews; and how Aboriginal worldviews can inform professional programs and practices, including but not limited to the field of education. The course and the instruc...

Seems to me, that even though I dropped the Logic Course on coursera (loved those two professors by the way!), Logic is back to haunt me ;-) I came across  a blog post the other day through my RSS reader, which stated the following: As massive open online courses (MOOCS) have exploded in popularity educators are coming under increasing pressure to make an effective use of the new technology. To help instructors realize the potential of the new content delivery platforms Georgia Tech is unveiling a MOOC about creating a MOOC. To be honest, the first thing that came to mind was the following question: What does Georgia Tech know about MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy? I didn't recall anyone off the top of my head that was from Georgia Tech that has been involved with MOOCs a lot over the past couple of years.  In any case, I followed the link and the link of this quick news blurb links to the " Fundamentals of Online Education ".  The course isn't about MOOCs but, it seems...

It's the final week of CHFE12 (edfuture.net) and the topic is something that we've beat to death in the past in MOOCs like #ioe12 (which I completed a bit late this September) and #change11 ; in which we discussed the topic of Open Research about a year ago. I may have also seen this topic crop up in eduMOOC in 2011 and a MOOC on Open Education (not #ioe12) also running this fall. In any case, I feel like I am really past the point of talking about Open Research, and I am more in the "doing" phase of things.  I know that academia has a problem with collaboration and co-research and co-publishing.  We are masters of saying one thing (we want collaboration!) but then we are also great at reprimanding people who do collaborate. In hiring committees and tenure decision making, we aren't as comfortable with candidates that don't have as many publications under their name, and their name alone.  A few months ago, I heard some colleagues from another on the elevat...

This week on #cfhe12 I read a couple of posts of interest from my fellow participants (apologies, I am currently on the train with no connectivity, ore lease I would search for those post and link to them :-) ) and there were two key points that I wanted to reiterate, combine, and expand upon. The first point is that mass (well, "massiveness") is relative. I am sure I learned in physics that Mass is indeed relative there, too, but I'd have to take a MOOC to brush up on my high school physics ;-)In any case, 100,000 MOOC participants in course X does not mean that it is equivalent to 100,000 participants in course Y. If you have a course (MOOC) that Iran introductory level course (introduction to German for example), you will most certainly get to sign up (and probably retain) a whole lot more people than a more niche course (let's say "Seminal Works of Bertold Brecht" which is taught and discussed, and written about in German). The introductory course will...

Well, another 6 week MOOC started this week, CFHE12 (which I keep wanting to spell a CHFE12 for some reason) with George Siemens and company.  This seems quite interesting, and it gives me an opportunity to check out the D2L environment in action, considering that  our campus could have been a D2L campus, but we went with Blackboard instead. In any case, one of the first things for this week is to introduce yourself in the forum. I didn't do this because in my experience in massive environments you get a boatload of "hello"s or "introduction"s or "Hello from____" threads which are hard to distinguish who is coming in from where at the end of the day.  This might work in smaller group settings (this type of intro activity using course fora) but, for me at least, it fails massively in a MOOC. OK, I am poo-poo-ing this approach, but I don't have something to take it's place right away, just file this under: "things to work out in MOOC pedag...