Multilitteratus Incognitus

What does that spell?  elp-ss-ss ;-) OK...well that sounded more funny in my head... Anyway! Week 5 of NRC01PL (last week! All caught up! yay!) was about Learning Performance Support Systems.  My first introduction to LPSS (a brief one at that) was in an instructional design course almost 10 years ago (if my memory works).  The funny thing is that we did talk about LPSS (without using that label) in a Knowledge Management course while I was doing my MBA.  The lesson here?  Interdisciplinarity is indeed a thing worthwhile practicing! :-) When we learned about LPSS way back when, it was within a corporate learning context. The idea of an LPSS, which in my knowledge management course tied into communities of practice, was that employees, who are also learners, have access to a system to get realtime, just-in-time, help with whatever they are doing.  An example of this might be, for example, a short video on how to print something from your computer to ...

Well, after a couple of month of not paying the Ning bill UMassID.com is dead!  Well, the domain is still fine, @cdetorres got that one for 10 years, but the Ning community that it pointed to is pretty much dead. So what is was UMassID.com? Well, back in 2008, when I started my MEd in instructional design, the outgoing class was looking for a new president for the student association (GIDA - Graduate Instructional Design Association).  This association - I later found out, started at some point in the early 90's (the program began in 1984). Since I didn't want to see the hard work of previous officers go to waste, I thought I would step up and take over the presidency.  At the time, someone's final project for a course was to look into communities of practice, and as part of it they created a Ning community , which at the time provided freemium service, so for the student the community was free. Within a few months of taking over I discovered that the network...

The other day I was reading a recent post by Jenny Mackness on questions about being open. Jenny had attended the recent ALT-C conference and was responding to a fellow ALT-C participant's questions on openness.  Specifically Viv Rofle ponders: I’m questioning not just openness by my motives behind wanting to contribute to it. What motivates academics and teachers to get involved in areas of practice that are NOT supported by their institutions?  Why invest even longer hours in supporting educational practice? My dentist doesn’t give me free root canal treatment outside of work?  Why personally finance conference attendance and travel, and what are the implications of this for the education sector?  What is in it for those willing to ‘go open’? These are good questions, and I think that the fact that I, a non-participant in ALT-C, am able to view, ponder, and engage with such questions and discussions is really the reason why you'd want to be open. E...

In my continuous quest to go to Pocket-Zero (may be a losing battle since I keep adding interesting stuff to read), I came across a post from a friend and colleague, Rebecca, who was discussing and brainstorming a bit about the ethics of research in twitter communities . As a quick synopsis, of the  hot button issue (at least from what I interpreted), was that in one instance (mature) researchers were researching a more general hashtag on twitter and this seemed to be OK, while in another instance a younger researcher (high school student) was researching a hashtag specific to breast cancer and social media, where a level of trust seemed to have been breached.  So, the question is: what is fair game in social media research? Specifically Rebecca asks What are the ethical obligations of anyone wishing to conduct research/analysis on a twitter community of care? Are the obligations different if the community is not care based? (e.g. #lrnchat) . My initial thinking is tha...

Look for traces of the "social" One of the things I like about Rhizo14, and our collaboration, is that we keep going, exploring our participation, and collaboration post Rhizo14 through a variety of lenses.  This keeps the mind active and exploring new areas.  I've been meaning to get acquainted with Actor Network Theory (ANT), but the time is rarely right. Classes, work, other projects conspire to distract me :-).  That said, with a presentation looming for some of us in the rhizo14 group, it's time to read about ANT.  The book recommended is Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory by Bruno Latour. I am currently 100 pages in (out of 300) and I am getting the sense that Latour likes to write, and likes to give a lot of examples, but doesn't really get to the point - at least quickly enough for my satisfaction.  If one thing can be said about me is that I am stubborn.  I will get through this book.  Now how to segment i...

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205135659/What-MOOCs-can-do-for-the-Traditional-Online-Classroom-Part-II Introduction 2014 is upon us! We are now a couple of years from the big MOOC “explosion” in the news, and since we’ve gone to both extremes, too much optimism and too much pessimism, about what MOOCs can and can’t do, it’s now time to have a more refined look at MOOCs and their potential to cross-pollinate with, and positively influence the direction, and practices, of traditional online courses. As with the previous article in this series, I’ll just refer to MOOCs in general.   The reason for this is that MOOCs are experimental, and we’ve seen a lot of experimenting over the lifespan of MOOCs these past six years. These include cMOOCs, xMOOC, pMOOCs, sMOOCs, and other MOOCs that have yet to be named.   It’s now time to start thinking about what can best be borrowed from MOOC practices into traditional online le...

The other day I was reading a CCK11 blog on a way to visualize the connections on your LinkedIn network .  Since this week's topic is "the network" on CCK11, I thought it would be cool to see how my network looks. You always get a notification on your social networks indicating who a particular contact has in common with you, but you don't generally get the full picture. With a few hundred contacts on my LinkedIn network my diagram does look a bit chaotic (I don't even want to know what an Open Networker's diagrams looks like!), but zooming in makes things a bit more clear. The main thing that struck me is that LinkedIn didn't ascribe any specific values to the color-labels.  When I connected with people I usually indicated that I knew them from class, from work, that we did business together or there was some sort of consultation going on. To be honest I'm not really sure how this mapping tool color-coded my contacts.  The low-hanging fruit seemed t...

This week's readings bring back memories; memories of computer science (creating algorithms in C to traverse a network) and memories of my MBA (organizational development).  Fun stuff! Krebs' reading was short, but quite interesting nevertheless.  What stood out for me was this Common wisdom in personal networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always so. What really matters is where those connections lead to -- and how they connect the otherwise unconnected! I tend to see this common wisdom with "open networkers" on LinkedIn and other social networks (my apologies if you are an open networker).  I never really got into "open networking", connecting to anyone who wanted to connect with me, simply because there was no connection there to begin with. Now on occasion I do make a request to connect with someone whose work I've read and liked, but I guess one could argue that there is a weak connection there to begin with - I...

I was reading a recent article on First Monday the other day (abstract and link bellow) that seems to point out the obvious. In my early days on the internet in the late 90s I spent a lot of time on IRC chat rooms, Yahoo chat rooms, meeting people on ICQ and other related services. It was pretty cool to meet people from other countries and get to talk to them about their daily lives. Many times we also exchanged photographs much like old-school pen pals. In some occasions people looked better online, and in other cases people looked better in a face-to-face meeting. It all depended on the photograph. While the article was interesting, I really don't get why people feel deceived by profile photos. Yes there is the stylistic element, but in our society I've noticed that we try to be picture perfect (aka photoshop perfect) and that just isn't reality. In a society where people feel pressured to look like supermodels, the photographic style will reflect that tendency. I thin...

One of the "in" things today is to try to use social networks for everything including marketing, advertising, social mobilization and yes even teaching. I came across this graphic a while back showing which social networks are prevalent in which countries. This is quite interesting, but it only gives you which networks are most popular based on goodle trends and alexa at one point in time. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice visualization, but I think that some people might use this as sure proof that they should use one network over another when the better approach, in my opinion, is diversification :-)

I was reading a blog recently ( click here for source ) where the blogger had a presentation from the Mzinga crew about objections to social learning. I went through the presentation, and it was actually quite interesting, but I had heard it all before :-) The objections to social learning (as much as I cringe when I say social learning ) are the same objections that I examined when I was learning about Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management Systems. I do love both proprietary knowledge management systems, and more open networks like twitter (although for work I would prefer Yammer), facebook and so on. The problem that I have is that people experience an all or nothing type of situation. You are either all against it, or all for it. And if you are all for it (institutionally I mean), you don't make appropriate use of your limited resources. This is an interesting presentation, and if you don't know much about knowledge management...or social learning, have a look. The...

I don't rant often...or rather I hope I don't rant often, however I think this will be a a ranting post. I was reading Jane's e-learning blog , specifically a post on how the future of e-learning is social . ALL learning is social, at least all the learning had in a school, with an instructor and other students in the room. Recently I keep hearing about Web 2.0 and social learning and it amazes me to no end that social learning is the new cool thing and that is the future of learning. Social Learning is new now just like bell-bottoms and ripped jeans are new now - i.e. they are not new people! Just because YOU did not know about it doesn't mean it did not exist prior to you thinking about it. New technology is just allowing us to expand out social reach outside of the space/time constraint of meeting in class. Now I have to say this, this is not a critique of Jane. I found her presentation quite interesting and useful. The critique is directed toward those individuals ...