Multilitteratus Incognitus

With my dissertation proposal in the hands of my committee and off for review, I thought I'd participate in a MOOC while I wait to hear back.  Yes, I do have some articles that have piled up (which may be of use to my dissertation), but I thought I'd be a little more social (lurk a little, post a little).  The funny thing is that as soon as I lamented the lack of cMOOCs...there it was, eLearning 3.0 popped up on my twitter feed...and a few Greek colleagues invited me to one in a Moodle. I guess the universe provided for me. Anyway - I had listened to both the intro video (week 0?) as well at the Downes & Siemens chat (Week 1 & 2) and I had jotted down a few things that piqued my interest...but of course I left them in the office. I guess I'll be blogging about those next week.  The freshest thing in my mind is the chat about xAPI and the LRS (Learning Records Store). In all honesty this went a little over my head. I think I need to read a little more about...

Alright, so here it is, week 6 of NRC01PL. Even though I am technically  in the same week as everyone I guess I am still marching to the beat of my own drummer.  I wanted to join the live session on Tuesday, but other things intervened.  Oh well. The topic of this week is the personal learning assistant.  Hence my little callout to the four major virtual assistants (Siri for Apple, Alexa for Amazon, Cortana for Windows, and Google...for Google). I actually did try asking Cortana to "show me something to learn" but  I guess the bing search engine didn't know what the heck to do with my query. Google wasn't that much help either.  We haven't reached the point yet where they know enough about me in order to recommend something.  It's a little odd given how much data google probably "knows" about me. So, what is a Personal Learning Assistant (not to be confused with Personal Assistant for Learning)?  According to Stephen the PLA is a platfo...