Multilitteratus Incognitus

... No seriously! I swear! This will be the last thing I read and then I will start to write my literature review ;-) I am back up for some air.  When I originally made my plans last May to have the fall semester be the semester that I focused on the literature review part of my dissertation proposal I sort of envisioned a lot of reading.  Reading on the train. Reading on the weekends.  Reading while walking (through text to speech), reading while driving (also through TTS).  My goal was to put pen to paper (figuratively speaking) on November 30th.  Well, that date has come and gone and I still haven't put pen to paper yet.  And, I am still reading.  A couple of times I've actually come close to being done reading - having my "to read" folder on dropbox empty and all things read, skimmed, or otherwise evaluated for usefulness for my proposal.   When I've come down to 10 items somehow the folder magically populates again.  Well......

Now that school is over, and grading is almost over for the course I am teaching this semester, I finally have an opportunity to go through and continue my quest to read existing MOOC literature.  I had started this past September reading a collection of articles in an IGI publication titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses which I got electronically for a limited time in order to do a book review.  Needless to say that between work, school, and personal priorities this book review (and reading of articles) went in the back, back, back burner.  I also noticed that colleagues Markus Deimann and Sebastien Vogt published a special issue on MOOCs in Europe on IRRODL recently .  It would not be an understatement to say that I could probably take a year off from my EdD program just to read all the MOOC related research that has been published (and retrieved) in the past two years.  I'd say it's been gathering dust, but it's all in t...

I read this study on the Journal of Online Teaching and Learning recently and it brought back memories of my two online classes last summer, and of the courses that friends of mine had to take online at other colleges and universities. Based on this input, I know what my preferences are for online learning: 1. The class needs to be asynchronous. If I have to be in Wimba (or other teleconferencing tool) every Monday from 8 to 10pm, then I would prefer to be in class. Even though our tools are better, regular synchronous classes are not for me. Having an asynchronous class allows me to look at discussion boards during my lunch hour, or while waiting for the train (on my N800 internet tablet). You just can't emulate the classroom experience in Wimba and I find that I would prefer to be in a physical location if I have to do this anyway. 2. Podcasts all the way! Instructors will often write an introduction to a topic before they let you do the readings and respond to the discussion ...