Multilitteratus Incognitus

My apologies, in advance, if I seem rude.  One of my teachers in high school (maybe a few of them, in fact!) said that there is no such thing as a stupid question.  Perhaps this is true in the context of a classroom where if a learner (or group of learners) don't get a concept and they wish to ask a question to disambiguate.  Sometimes the questions we pose also demonstrate our understanding of the basic component that build up our question and hence our question can shine a light on things we've misunderstood and give an opportunity for more knowledgeable others to help us correct misconceptions. However, this is not the case.  Will MOOCs replace the LMS is a really stupid question. I was reading a post over at YourTrainingEdge that was titled Will MOOCs replace the LMS . I actually came to it thinking that it was a bait-and-switch type of situation because the two aren't comparable. a MOOC is a course (and in the corporate sector I would say that the most ...

Angry Spock (Star Trek reboot) OK, OK... the title was easy pickings but this article is quite serious.  I've chosen to ignore, for the most part, the whole idiocy of the term SPOC (small private online course) .  SPOCs are really just "regular" online courses, as I've written in my one other post about SPOCs. It bothers me that there is so much revisionist history around the topic of "traditional" online education with articles such as these where organizations like Colorado State University claim to be "pioneers" in SPOCs since they've been doing online education for the past five years.  A whole five years? Our fully online Applied Linguistics MA has been around for eight years, and our overall organization, UMassOnline , has been around for about ten years doing "SPOCs." Maybe we are pioneers too, who knows, but it's really difficult to critically discuss MOOCs, traditional online education and flipped classrooms when peo...

Now that my fun (and educational) little excursion to the world of the Ancient Greek Hero is over, I am more energized to go back into the world of the reportage and punditry around MOOCs.  I am not all caught up yet, but I did go through enough articles to have some thoughts on the news that has transpired over the last couple of months in the world of the MOOC. First of all,  more Acronyms.  What's up DOCC? This was an article on Inside Higher Ed this past week. On the one hand it's great to have big universities do something other than the xMOOC format, on the other hand the lack of background research on the format you are trying to "disrupt" is disheartening when it comes from academics.  I guess this fine group of folks wanted to disrupt the disruptors by coming up with their own concept, along with a nice little acronym (DOCC: distributed open collaborative course) that they can lay claim to.  The definition of DOCC is as follows: A DOCC is differen...

OK, it's early in the morning, and I am reading my news, so I am generally going to be crankier, or more prone to have a "get off my lawn attitude," but this is just ridiculous.   The most recent facepalm moment in the world of education comes from somewhere near Cambridge, MA where a local MOOC platform is getting its start. I was reading a story on Inside Higher Education while coming to work this morning about Stanford joining edX.  I think this is pretty awesome because edX is a non-profit, and as such I can see more Openness, and willingness to be open, as part of a non-profit, rather than a venture backed system like Coursera.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think venture-backed systems are bad, I just have a feeling that they just won't be as open. As I am reading, I come across this new term: Small Private Online Course (SPOC) . Huh?  C'est quoi ça?  Well, I had to follow the link to find out! The link wasn't particularly helpful since it just...

The other day I was sitting on the train on the way home and reading some research materials I found on Google Scholar for a paper that I am thinking about on social check-ins (you know, foursquare and services like that for an academic environment). I came across a qualifying paper from about a year ago on augmented reality.  It seemed interesting so I though I would give it a quick look - after all, a qualifying paper has been vetted by a tenured or tenure-track professor who has a PhD, so it can't be that off, right? Well...it turns out that I was wrong.  This was merely a 15 page paper but I could not get past page 2 (double spaced) because of the insane amount of references to the digital native  and descriptions of this "generation" of learners as having been born with a keyboard in-hand and a lot of other inaccurate cliches. I guess it was sort of like a gag reflex on my part when I kept reading about the digital native and hoping that it got better (i.e. that th...

I was just about to give up on eduMOOC when this thread was started (or rather evolved from a previous thread) about what is an isn't a MOOC.  A Similar discussion came up on the Wikieducator list for eduMOOC.  A MOOC is a M assive O nline O pen C ourse, or so says the acronym. The concept of a MOOC was articulated by Cormier and Siemens (2010) in Educause ( free read ). The words Massive, Online and Course seem to pose no problem in defining a MOOC, however the word open  does.  What is  open? The key points that Cormier and Siemens hit upon are Open Curriculum, Open Educators and Open Learners.  Open educators seems to be about the practice of professional reflection (in open environments) and becoming a better educator through such practice. It also seems to have elements of Freirean ( Pedagogy of the Oppressed ) philosophy in that the educator and the learner are on the same level and are working toward the same goals.  Open learners as a conce...

Recently, while clearing out my Google Starred Items, I ran across this article on the Linguist that I meant to read - but it slipped through my radar. I do have to agree with Steve on some points. If you are strictly a linguist, the teaching terminology is jargon that just doesn't make sense. This is one of the reasons I decided to do a dual master's degree in Instructional Design and Applied Linguistics. While I have learned some teaching terminology in Applied Linguistics, most of it I learned in Instructional Design. Linguistics terminology has mostly been about...well languages and linguistics. I don't know if it's me, or it's just "d'uh" knowledge, some of these terms give a name to phenomena that I have observed in the last ten years that I have been a university student. The fact that these phenomena have names mean that I can converse with others in the field about said phenomena and to be able to understand research written that utilizes thi...