Multilitteratus Incognitus

Last year when I put out the call for the  Great Big MOOC Book , one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform , which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms at the time.  Well, since there wasn't much on Coursera to keep me going (too much of the same makes for a dull MOOC), and since rhizo14 is winding down (to some extent) I decided it was time to check out this platform. I originally signed up for two topics: Teaching Adult Learners , and Becoming and Confident Trainer . The Adult Learner topic was mostly to see what others say about the topic since I've already taken courses on this topic as part of my master's coursework.  The confident trainer was a bit of a repetition, but it was also an interesting look into corporate train...

Hmmm...I was glancing over at my calendar telling me to work on DS106 the other day (an alarm that I set last spring for this summer), and I decided to head on over to DS106 and check it out...only to find out that it had started already (week 4 if I am not mistaken).  Oh well.  I missed the boat but not by much! So, this time I will take a queue from a few of my MOOC acquaintances and set goals.  I realize that I don't have enough time to partake in the full DS106 experience, so my goals for this summer, with regard to DS106, are the following: June: Every Tuesday and Thursday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog ) July:  Every Tuesday and Thursday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog) August: Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday complete a Daily Create (to be posted on my tumblr photoblog) If this goes well, in September I will undertake 2 assignments...and re-evaluate from there :) I am curious ...

The other day I was talking about digital storytelling with some colleagues and I decided to recommend Ds106 , the digital storytelling MOOC that ran last year. The material is still all out there, so people could still take it as OER and just self-pace through the material.  Last year I was in a bit of MOOC overload, with LAK11, CCK11, MobiMOOC, eduMOOC and Change that I didn't have much time to add Ds106 to the list (after all, CCK and MobiMOOC were both in Spring, at the same time as DS106). In any case, I went to the website and I saw that DS106 is running again this spring! Sure I have a few research projects on the stove, and I will be keeping a eye out on Change11, but it might be worth following along DS106. I see it as a good excuse to get my hand dirty and do some digital storytelling work that I can then learn from an incorporate into my instructional design.  The schedule for the course looks interesting and not that "heavy."   DS106 should be interesting. ...

OK, so today was the penultimate day for  "getting started" types of mobile development workshops. Today's topic, as you might surmise from the title, was Android development.  Today's development environment was Eclipse with the Android SDK.  The nice thing about Android development is that it is all XML and Java, which is pretty nice. I am familiar with XML and I did do Java as part of my computer science BA way back when.  Today the Computer Science curriculum at UMass Boston does use Eclipse as the IDE (integrated development environment), but back when I was in intro to computer science we used TELNET over a 56k modem (eeeek!) to connect to a terminal, use EMACS and compile something with javac which ran in the terminal; thus text-only, no GUI. Having seen XCode and Visual Studio 2010 in earlier "getting started" workshops, I have to say that both Xcode and Visual Studio win over Eclipse.  They both seemed snappier, compared to eclipse; they both...

OK, now some of my fellow Apple people, and some of you Android fanbois will scoff at me for going to a Windows Phone 7 development workshop, sponsored by Microsoft, but I'll tell you it was fun!  I think that as much as I like the iOS , Windows Phone 7 , with the MetroUI  seems interesting as platform and with the backing of Nokia I think we'll see it rise up and be viable competition to Android and iPhone (if apps come out that is...) In any case, the workshop was pretty interesting and it gave me an opportunity to mess around with Visual Studio, something I haven't done in three or four years, since I was a student in the MSIT program.  I have to say that  developing for WinPhone7 seems to be quite comparable to designing iPhone apps. From the top level, and from the quite limited exposure I've had to them, the IDEs ( Visual Studio and XCode) seem pretty comparable at this point. The one thing I noticed is that both Microsoft peeps (hey, I actually met Edwin...

Well, the first workshop was today and it was quite interesting.  As I suspected there were quite a few K-12 teachers there interested in getting started with iOS app development so this can trickle down into the high school computer science curriculum; there were some higher education folks there as well. Even though the workshop was all day, you can't really get that deep into app development in eight hours.  Most of the workshop consisted in getting us oriented toward the apple developer accounts and with getting around xcode.  We messed around with interface builder and xcode and learned how to connect the UI elements to the code - but there was little (almost no) coding involved.  Considering I haven't programmed in close to ten years now, this wasn't bad.  Now I just need to get started with the Stanford iTunesU podcasts on iOS development...and perhaps come up with some interesting idea for mLearning (or something m-related) to develop a sample applicat...

A month or so ago I came across this this post on Salon via OSNews . I read both the OSNews post and the Salon post and I've wanted to write about it since, but something wasn't sitting right - I just couldn't put my finger on it. Well, yesterday - reading about child development, specifically language development, it hit me! Here's an excerpt: Only there's a rub. Most of these later innovations were brought to us by programmers who first honed their abilities with line-programming languages like BASIC. Yes, they mostly use higher level languages now, stacking and organizing object-oriented services, or using other hifalutin processes that come prepackaged and ready to use, the way an artist uses pre-packaged paints. (Very few painters still grind their own pigments. Should they?) And yet the thought processes that today's best programmers learned at the line-coding level still serve these designers well. Renowned tech artist and digital-rendering wizar...