Multilitteratus Incognitus

We are nearing the end of CCK11, (and we're starting mobiMOOC at the same time!) and I came across this post by Jaap , asking a few question on how connectivism fits in with with established teaching methods. I've got a few thoughts on the issue... What does a teacher see of connectivism? What will change in education as a result of connectivism? What does a connectivist lesson look like? Connectivist principles, I think, do exist in schools, it just depends on what type of schools you look at. I think Jean Anyon 's commentary, albeit 30 years old at this point, show that there isn't just one type of pedagogy in our schools.  What does a connectivist lesson look like?  I'd say probably something like what is done in Montessori schools . Would this work in public schools? Of course! If we want to throw resources at our schools to pursue this type of teaching and learning. What are the implications of connectivism for the school? If New Brunswick wants to chan...

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted to learn.  I am not sure how face-to-face immersion works, but I assume that online immersion probably works around the same lines.  I'd have to do some more research and looking information up to be sure. In any case, thinking ahead to a PhD, I am wondering if anyone has researched open education, or MOOCs, or both in the field of Applied Linguistics and language learning. This might be something that I would be interested in doing and I am wondering if there are people out there in CCK11 that have learned a language just by interacting with others online (and supplement...

Being on vacation this week, and with little access to a computer and a monitor, my CCK11 involvement is pretty mobile- reading posts and materials on my iPhone and blogging from it as well. I've been using my phone for the same things in the past (email, RSS and PDF reading) so it's not such a change from the norm - with the exception that I am using this tiny screen in a more sustained matter than simply consuming small bites of info at a time. The last couple of CCK11 topics, Power and Openness have been pretty interesting; Power was covered quite a few times in my Applied Linguistics curriculum (in one of the readings Freire mentioned one of my professors: Dr. Donaldo Macedo - pretty cool) so the readings were a nice adjunct to things I had already read. More on Power in a future post, this one is devoted to open educational resources and on one of my efforts. Last semester, my last as a master's level student, I formed a small study group of applied linguistics studen...

I've been mostly lurking these past couple of weeks on CCK11. I've enjoyed reading both assigned readings and reading through blog entries of participants. Most blog entries are in English, which isn't surprising considering that this MOOC is run in English, but at least once, if not, more times per week I've seen postings in Italian , French and Portuguese - I'm sure I've seen Spanish as well, but I really don't remember. I definitely saw some Spanish in LAK11. While I do enjoy reading ( good ) content in English, it's always a breath of fresh air to read it in other languages! I minored in Italian and German as an undergraduate, I self-studied Spanish (in isolation, so my communicative competence isn't that great...but reading is OK) and I took 4 years of French in high school and I spent a year or so in French chat rooms in college (the early days of Yahoo! Chat). For me reading in a second language isn't that difficult - it's ch...

I've posted a new blog post over at the UMassOnline blog with some thoughts about the net gen and teachers knowing their learners. Check it out: click here

I was reading one of the items for this week's CCK11 session, which happens to be on PLEs. The readings was an Educause "7 things you should know about..." type of document. If you don't know what a PLE ( personal learning environment ) is, the abstract gives a good succinct overview: The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms that learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. PLEs represent a shift away from the model in which students consume information through independent channels such as the library, a textbook, or an LMS, moving instead to a model where students draw connections from a growing matrix of resources that they select and organize.  OK, I agree, but reading the actual document created some cognitive dissonance (you ought to read this document, it's only two pages long). The scenario in this 7things document describes...

This past week I listened to the Neil Selwyn presentation (perhaps I am a week behind) and I have to say that I am indeed a Neil Selwyn fan or best rephrased, I am a fan of his critical point of view on technology and the bling use of technology in the classroom. I came across Neil's work a few months back as I was finding academic articles on the subject of the Net Generation (also known as Millenials , Digital Natives , Generation Google, Generation C, etc. etc. etc.) - I was looking for emperical studies that tested the hypotheses that people like Prensky put forth about this generation, and I did find quite a few. An article is in the works based on all this research, but to make a long story short the empirical evidence does not support one unified monolithic generation where everyone is a computer-wiz which requires instructors to use technology (...or else!) A couple of Selwyn's articles brought a critical element into an otherwise uncritical view of these Net Gen ...

The other day I made an observation on LinkedIn that 8 people had recently left the employment of UMass (LinkedIn told me so). The number seemed rather high, so I wanted, out of curiosity, to know who had left, was it someone I knew? It turns out that most of the people who "left" were teaching assistants, graduate assistants, or like me had added "student" to their profile under job. Back in the day LinkedIn didn't have a way to get recommendations for your student achievements which is why I added a Student "job" under employment, now of course they do so it's not that important. In any case, I remembered that I too had a "job position" as Graduate Student, and since I recently graduated I thought it would be time to update my profile and say that I no longer have that "job". I have to say that while I knew that I was a perpetual student, it really surprised me that I had been a Master's Level student for 7 years! I...

OK, so my first MOOC is almost over...so what did I think? I have to say that as an experience LAK11 was actually quite interesting. The subject matter was interesting (even though we tended to go toward the business/finance side of the house quite often) and there were quite a few interesting personalities that were part of the course. The course started out with a bang! There were a ton of people in both the introduction round and in week 1...but then it fizzled! I am not sure why it did, but as the weeks went on, there seemed to be fewer and fewer people participating. Compared to CCK11 (now in its 5th week I think), the participation in LAK11 was mostly distributed at the beginning, while CCK11 seems to have more spread-out participation. I guess one reminds me of a sprint, and the other of a marathon. I think that learning and learner analytics is quite a fascinating topic. I wonder if (and how) a MOOC on this topic (LAK12?) could improve - What can you do to sustain parti...

OK, so I finally was able to listen to the digital scholarship podcast for CCK11 the other day (man, I cranked those speakers up quite high in some spots!) and I have to say that it was quite interesting ( click here for MP3 link ). I have to say that the concept of digital scholarship isn't new or alien to me, having listened to Dan, Tom and Mills on digital campus for the last few years (great podcast by the way, you should subscribe to if if you don't already). In any case, what really struck me about the blog posts of fellow CCK participants was the question of "who is a scholar?" I think Weller (the presenter in the elluminate session/MP3 recording) had mentioned that blogging was one of the tools that digital scholars could be used. This seemed to me to bring about the question of who counts as a scholar and who does not. Is Paris Hilton a scholar? Is Sarah Palin a scholar? Well, of course not! Those people aren't scholars, but the important question is n...