Multilitteratus Incognitus

  Wonder what's in this... It's been a crazy seven days.  As part of my narrative inquiry into collaborations that occurred in rhizo14 and rhizo15 (or collaborations that sprung up from the work that started there), I am writing a fictional account of a newbie rhizo-learner (sort of how I was a newbie back in rhizo14) who gets to meet rhizo-alumni from past courses and ask them about their collaborations.  This newbie is simultaneously my avatar, but also a persona that encapsulates some common features of the people I connected with to learn more about their experiences. I find the flexibility that narrative inquiry affords a bit freeing.  I can more easily change names, places, and situations, but I still can get to the main ideas that emerged from my conversations with rhizo14 alumni and collaborators.  Anyway, my fictional rhizo course that takes place in 2022 (June 2022, to be exact). I could have made up all the weekly provocation titles, and the course t...

It's been quite a while since I last shared a few thoughts.  I guess time flies even if you aren't having fun 😆. In the past few weeks I've been contemplating the direction of my dissertation proposal.  I am not changing topics (now THAT would be silly, and an unnecessary amount of work), but I am considering the framing of my argument.  The topic (just to refresh your mind) is "Why do we collaborate?" and it's an exploration of the emergent groups that formed in Rhizo14 and rhizo15 to conduct some sort of academic work in order to figure out why we did this (after all, everyone hates group work, right??? 😜) This academic work wasn't part of the original Rhizo-course plan†, so why the heck did we band together to do this type of work? The question, I should point out (again) wasn't originally mine - I just took an interest in it.  Rebecca H. had originally asked this question of our MobiMOOC team back in 2011/2012 - but we all went (sort of) ou...

The case of MOOC standards (as well as MOOC sustainability) is something that keeps coming back to me as a topic of pondering.  I read about it in other blogs.  Then, I want to respond to some of these articles, and bounce off some ideas, but I lose motivation and decide "m'eh" - this topics isn't much of interest.  Then, a little while later, my interest on the topic rekindles.  I thought it would be best to at least write something to keep this conversation on quality going (it might even motivate me to write more in depth...or collaborate with some colleagues to produce something more "academic"). In any case, the most recent thing I read about MOOC Quality, and what that might look like is from eCampus News from about a month ago (something sticking out in my Pocket to-read list). The article points to recent research published in IRRODL where the Quality Matters rubric was used to keep the quality under control in a MOOC. I haven't read the ...

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...

Huzzah!  Half-way through  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future !  This time I am reviewing chapter 6, which is titled  Learning Theories: ePedagogical Strategies for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in Higher Education .  The abstract is as follows: This chapter reviews various learning theories about e-pedagogical strategies for the effective use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in higher education. E-pedagogical strategies refer to the various teaching methods or approaches used by educators when encouraging students to engage with online learning. An up-to-date broad knowledge of learning theories is required by educators to inform and inspire their teaching approaches. Before developing lesson plans, educators should have a clear idea of the learning outcomes which they hope the learners will achieve by engaging with the lessons, be they delivered on or off line. By knowing t...

Just before my Athabasca semester starts I am trying to make headway in my Pocket 'to read' collection :-).  I had bookmarked this post by David Hopkins a while back where he asks for information about facilitation in MOOCs, and to some extent this runs into sustainability - something we briefly talked about in 2012 at UMass Boston when we hosted the MOOC sustainability symposium. In any case, the questions that David asks are interesting and important to consider, and I've been thinking about them on-and-off since I read his post, so here are some rudimentary, preliminary, working-thoughts. I should say that I am speaking more as an instructional designer and long-time MOOC follower, and not as someone who has developed and ran their own MOOCs. What are your thoughts on how we manage the course, the comments and discussion during the run, and the subsequent comments and discussion during re-runs? I think that the answer to this really depends on your philosophical s...

...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

If I think about it long enough... I would say that rubber has met the road, with week 2 of EDDE803 almost over. People have started being active in the course forums, interesting perspectives and illustrative stories are shared and discussed, and projects are in progress! This semester we are joined by two members of Cohort 6, who I think will be added to our cohort, and thus adding to the diversity of our small EdD group. Metacognition and reflection seem to be big in this course, so as inspiration strikes I think I will keep some notes and thoughts as blog posts, in addition to whatever I keep in evernote. They might come in handy at the end of the semester. 803 Ponderings and News The first assignment has us going into teams to develop a competency profile for a distance education instructor.  Once our teams develop a competency profile, we collaborate with other teams to develop one of the entire course.  This seems to be part delphi process, part a way to be m...

"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 ...

Well, it's week 6, the last week of #rhizo15 that Dave will host. The topic of this week brings us back to the original topic of this rMOOC: A practical guide for Rhizomatic Learning . It's hard to really come up with something that encompasses the meaning and approaches  to rhizomatic learning  - heck, I am only now starting to "understand" it and I've only been really thinking about it for 18 months.  Sure that was that brief exposure in Change11, but that almost doesn't exist in my mind. I started off thinking that in #rhizo15 I would finally be able to read an engage with Deleuze & Guattari and their book a thousand plateaus , but that didn't quite happen. I was deep in the thick of it with my second doctoral course (end of first year, yay!) when the #rhizo15 started, then I was working on a #rhizo14-related project with fellow "classmates" from #rhizo14 on Actor-Network Theory, so I ended up starting to read Latour, and now we...

I was going for a News show feel with that title. I don't think it came across.  The more I think about it the more I am thinking that video might satiate my dramatic tendencies - but that would take more acting talent and more time.  It's just text for now! If you have an idea for a name for a Mock News Show (like the Daily Show but for EdTech, drop a comment ;-) ) So, week 5 Rhizo15 - this means that there is only one more week left if I am not mistaken. Dave talks about the doom and gloom of community . It's such an invasive species.  It assimilates all that it touches. Oh my!  Just to set the stage here Dave asks if community is just replacing one authority - the instructor - for another, which I would guess he means the Hegemony of the Group.  Is the course becoming an echo chamber?  Does the rhizome choke the air out of everything it touches? I am pretty sure that Dave is being controversial here (surprised?) and possibly a little tongue in c...

Dave is really HAL, who is emulating Dave Busy week!  Just finished grading my current class, and finished the syllabus for my summer class.  Now the next stage in the course development is to create some instructions of the assessments, supporting materials, videos... oh my! I guess this is making me a bit late to this week's Rhizo Party on #rhizo15.  I have not read responses of other participants yet (been focusing on Latour...) but I assume I will get to those sometime this coming week (I am almost caught up on Pocket!). This week Dave asks the following : in a rhizomatic learning environment How do we get rid of the idea of Dave? Should we get rid of Dave? How do we teach rhizomatically and what is the role of the instructor? Dave wants to focus on formal learning - which is fine with me because that's what I was going to address anyway ;-)  I don't think that we could discuss all learning environments, open, traditional, undergraduate, graduate, K-1...

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...

I originally intended to do this over the weekend as part of RhizoRadio, but other "to-do" items kicked in and we're back to good-ol' text. I am hitting the rewind  button (and you can't stop me), to go back to Week 1 of Rhizo15.  The topic of Week 1 (as we are about to enter Week 4) is Learning Subjectives .  When the topic came out my head was so steeped in EDDE802 that the topic didn't even make much sense to me.  It felt like a (rhizomaticaly induced) learning hallucination. I haven't read other people's thoughts on the topic of Week 1 just yet - until I get my brain wrapped around it (don't want to just add "me too!" to the discussion). So, now that the semester is over, and I have a little more breathing room, I am back to week 1 and I get the joke (har har - learning objectives subjectives). So the basic idea is that we live in a world full of knowledge, there are many ways of going about learning something. In some cases we ...

This week in Rhizo15 we are talking about content .  RhizoDave (I think I've decided that's Dave Cormier's new nickname - or his superhero name) has asked us to stretch and pull the word "content" and see what we come up with.  The phrase "content is king" has already come up somewhere in Rhizo15 - it may have been on twitter or Facebook, but I guess that's just one of those phrases that will come up sooner or later when discussing the concept of content. [warning this post may be one big, meandering, brain-dump that goes nowhere. Proceed at own risk] It's hard to say what content is.  Content is like the matrix, it's all around us (or is it like the force ?).  You cannot escape content because content is everywhere.  Rhizo15 is content.  Our twitter interactions are content.  What we do and share on facebook is content. The drawings, and poems, and other non-textual productions of Rhizo are content. It's inescapable.  Now, the way ...

This is my mind at the moment I must admit, my attempt at a witty post title probably fell really flat.  Oh well, that's why I am not a comedian :-).  Out of the fire (EDDE 802) and into the Rhizome! This is technically week 2 (or is it week 3?) of Rhizo15.  Normally a cMOOC (or as others in the Rhizo14 gang have named Rhizo - an rMOOC),  there is a little disorientation to be expected, but between the barely controlled chaos at work, the wrap-up of my first year as a doctoral student, the ET4Online conference, and Rhizo15 starting at the same time... well... I just need to clone myself a few times to gain sanity ;-) In any case, regardless what number week it is in Rhizo15, the current topic is " learning is not a counting noun, so what do we count? " (I'll go back to Learning Subjectives in a few days when I've had some time to catch up on what's saved on Pocket on this current topic). This is a good question, and an interesting topic for K-12, acade...

Worlds have officially collided (either that, or the Rhizome has invaded my mind) ;-) This week is the beginning of Humanizing Online Instruction (or #humanMOOC) on the Canvas Network.  As is usually the case, I tend to lurk in more MOOCs than I can actually "complete†"in any given period.  Given my homework for EDDE 802, and my teaching work on INSDSG 684 (and let's not forget the day-job), I wasn't really going to follow #HumanMOOC that closely.  I still don't know how closely I am going to follow along - but heck, I'll give it the old college try. Even though I am not sure what my activity will look like, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce myself in case blogposts or tweets with #HumanMOOC started coming up with my name on them. One of the things that my brief interaction in the #HumanMOOC Forums reminded me of is the potentially Rhizomatic nature of knowledge and participation online.  For instance, I might read something on Maha's bl...