Multilitteratus Incognitus

It's been a few days since I started writing about the various reactions I had (and started noting in the margins ;)  ) to a recent article from fellow MOOCers and MOOC researchers Frances and Jenny . I cut my previous post a bit shorter than I intended because it was getting long, and I didn't want it to go on and on. So this is a follow-up blog post t o that original post with some reactions, or thoughts, about what seemed to be to be underlying assumptions about what comes as part-and-parcel for education.  The article seemed to make some assumptions about education, and MOOCs in specific, that I thought should be addressed in some fashion: It is the responsibility of the convener/instructor of the course to play cop... ... be this a traffic cop who directs the flow of the course and "re-centers" it when it gets off course, a dispute cop who gets in between parties who are arguing about a certain topic, and a jail cop for people who don't observe the ...

Check, check. Is this thing on? Linguistics isn't generally considered a topic, like one of those sexy STEM courses, that everyone talks about when they talk about degrees and fields to study for job related purposes. For this reason we haven't seen a lot of linguistics related MOOCs.  Last year we had the Virtual Linguistics Campus offer three MOOCs using their own approach to teaching MOOCs which seemed more like self-paced eLearning. I didn't complain (much) because it was, after all, courses in linguistics. This time around, the University of Lancaster is offering a course on Corpus Linguistics, which I have naturally signed up for.  There is at least one colleague from the #rhizo14 MOOC taking this course, so I am curious to see what they think of the course after all is said and done.  In the meantime, I have some initial thoughts on the course itself, as well as the mechanics of the future learn platform, as they are realized through this MOOC. The first ...

Happy Labor Day everyone! The other day I was going through my two Learning Solutions Magazine articles to see if there were any comments ( Part 1 and Part 2 here) that I might be able to address.  I think it's great when people engage with the reading material on the web in a constructive way, it helps everyone expand their knowledge a little. That said, the comments weren't that many, and they were from a while back, so I thought I would address them here. Comment 1 I'm not sure how you can say that "MOOCs first appeared in 2008." Remove the word "online" from MOOC and you have International Correspondence Schools. Response I think the underlying current of this comment is "everything old is new again." Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone is claiming that MOOCs are this whole new genesis that came from nothing and is here to change the world like nobody's business. However, one can't dismiss that this c...

The other day, through some source I came across this " 4 downsides of MOOCs " from LearnDash. I should have known better than to read a vendor's blog, but then again sometimes they surprise me.  Anyway, the blog post seemed like link-bait because the downsides of MOOCs do not really seem that thought out. They are more reactionary than a deep pondering if the medium. So, here are my 2c on the issues brought forth: 1. Way to big The main thesis of this brief argument (and it is brief) is that because there are too many  people enrolled in the course it's hard to have intimate learning moments, access to the professor is limited, and there is too much of a chance of homogeneity of thought, so you don't learn to expand your worldview. That said, just because MOOCs have many participants in them it does not mean that you can't find a working group, a smaller cadre of students who would like to meet more regularly, in person or through something like a hangout...

This is my final AAAL wrap up post, this time focusing on Computer Assisted Langauge Learning (CALL). There were a few interesting presentations (I guess for more CALL stuff I need to go to the CALICO conference) at AAAL on computer assisted language learning. One presentation (from a colleague at UMass Amherst if I am not mistaken) focused on using WIMBA to teach Japanese completely online. David Malinowski from UC Berkely spoke about a collaboration between UC Berkely and Universite de Lyon II where undergraduate students from UC Berkeley were paired up with Masters students in France learning to become teachers of French (French as a Second Language), using Skype (and later on a homebrew system) to tutor students. Another presenter was presenting on the use of Blogs as ethnographic and reflective journals for students who were learning Spanish (in Spain) during a semester abroad program. The last presentation I went to that dealt with technology was one where (in a Japanese class) ...