Multilitteratus Incognitus

With the US elections now settled, and a second Trump term being a reality, I guess many (most?) of the remaining hold outs on Twitter are finally migrating.  I decided to keep my personal account, for now, and just promote pro-union, pro-education, pro-left, and anti-war messages, while posting my regular content on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.  I am also in the process of shutting down my department's Twitter account for good. This new wave of migration has brought a few people out of the woodwork, both on Mastodon and on the Mastodon subreddit, asking why people are moving to Bluesky (or even threads) and not to Mastodon. They also get on their high horse about it, but let's talk about that later. I think that Mastodon had a major  advantage in 2022 when Musk bought Twitter.  They were really the only game in town. There was no Threads, there was no Bluesky.  There were some weird Crypto-based microblogs, like Nostr; or blasts from the past like Plurk. I'm...

Miseristhenes the Socialmediaite This is part V of my  all the things(!!!)  blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my  professional  hobbies.   In this post, I turn my attention to social media! The topic that connects us, and divides us, and has gotten the "it's complicated" label since Elon Musk bought and fucked up the Twitter sandbox. Yes, while Twitter still eXists, the busting up of Twitter, and the rendering of it useless, has created a bit of an interesting dilemma and has fostered a working reality that is just rather f*cking tiring 🙄. But first thing's first, let's take a step back and examine the current state a bit. A few colleagues and I started pulling some strings and looking at our digital identities and networks in  Lines of Flight: The Digital Fragmenting of Educational Networks . I think a lot more work can be done in this domain,...

  A lot of digital ink has been used up in the past few days with Elon's purchase of the big blue bird , both in blogs and Twitter itself, and news outlets (not that I think of it) To be fair, it is a little concerning when your social network changes hands, but then again other things are concerning in the land of social media (where "you're the product"), like most social media ownership, privacy, uptime, and what companies are doing with user data.  However, is this most recent panic enough of a cause to move over to another platform (or protocol) like Mastodon?🤔 Perhaps...or perhaps not.  Earlier this year I created an account on Scholar.social  (based on where colleagues seemed to be moving)- which took forever to verify - because their servers were kneeling under the weight of the many people who were "leaving" Twitter after the last Elon scare. I see today that Scholar.social no longer accepts new members.  Just for giggles I also created a mastodo...

It is true that, as of this writing, there is much more serious stuff happening in the world today, both in the US and abroad, but this has been percolating in my brain for a while, so I thought I'd jot down some thoughts on one of my favorite topics: the MOOC. Now that I am done with my dissertation, and I've had a little time to rest my brain and refocus on what I want to geek out on, I've wanted to do a retrospective piece on MOOCs. I was going to call it a post-mortem  because I think that the time of the MOOC has passed. Don't get me wrong, I think there is still gas in the tank of companies like Coursera, Edx, and Futurelearn, but I wouldn't call them MOOCs. The innovative pedagogical stuff I saw early on doesn't quite seem to be there these days, with a focus going to AI, massification, and Machine Learning.   In any case, my idea for a post-mortem was particularly poignant because 2022 is the 10th anniversary of the year of the MOOC  (time flies...😮). T...

I didn't quite expect this, but it seems like everywhere you turn you see "a decade in review" news stories (radio and TV), "the internet" (in general) and blog posts, twitter threads, and Instagram stories (more specifically).  I hadn't really thought about doing one of these posts, but what the hay, why not join in? 😜 . The last decade has certainly been eventful.  I kicked off the decade by completing my last 2 master's programs, changing jobs (3 departments and 4 titles in the last 10 years), starting to teach, and participating in research. I absolutely loved Audrey Watter's 100 debacles of Ed-Tech , so I decided to pick a few and structure my post around this since most of these made an impact on my work-life, and some for my leisure. I am not going to pick through every one of those items, but I'll pick a few (and maybe add some of my own). New Media Consortium (Horizon report #100) This one was a shocker for me. The way the NMC...

You don't go to Harvard for the Education. You go to Harvard for the Connections! - someone from my past (I don't remember who). The other day a long-distance friend and colleague posted an interesting blog post pondering (or positing?) that Social and Cultural capital are the main problem in online education . A very engaging twitter thread and discussion ensued (which I am having trouble locating at the moment), but I thought I'd let the dust settle a bit and collect my thoughts on the matter first.  It is a little self-serving too because I wanted to get back into the habit of writing and this seemed like a good opportunity.  As I was thinking about where to start untangling this thread the quote at the beginning of this post came to mind†. As I was thinking about this I interrogated some of my educational experiences, both undergraduate, and graduate, and free-range learning (like MOOCs).  Most of my education was residential in nature. Although I do prefer ...

Over the years I've tried out almost every social network I could get my hands on. What can I say, I love tinkering and trying new things :-).  However, on source of irritation these days are networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu.  I like listing the few things that I co-author (or author for that matter) in a variety of places because (let's face it), most people aren't going to find you just by looking at your blog or website.  That said, when you're listing your fine work on these sites there is an option to upload the file itself - to make it easier for other members of that community to access your writing. I don't mind putting up a pre-publication version of what I write but I do mind needlessly uploading PDF files of articles that are published in open access journals!   The whole point of publishing in open access journals is so that you don't have to upload copies elsewhere (and for people to be able to find them for free!). Yet, social netw...