Multilitteratus Incognitus

Το περασμένο σαββατοκύριακο είδα πως είχαμε μια νέα μονάδα στο Change11, με θέμα την ριζωματική γνώση. Ήθελα να γράψω κάτι περί αυτού (γιατί πάνω κάτω συμφωνώ με αυτή την επιστημολογία αλλά δεν μου ερχόταν να γράψω κάτι, λίγο δύσκολο να γράψεις για κάτι που ήδη συμφωνείς…και φυσικά δεν ήθελα να γράψω μια περίληψη αυτών που διάβασα. Αυτό με έκανε να αρχίσω να σκέφτομαι το πως τρέφονται και μεγαλώνουν αυτές οι ρίζες. Γιατί μεγαλώνουν προς μία κατεύθυνση και όχι άλλη, ή πως (με τι ακατέργαστα υλικά) αρχίζουν τα τρέφονται γενικός. Μετά σκέφτηκα την παρομοίωση της ανάπτυξης της γνώσης ως γυμναστήριο. Μπορεί να πηγαίνεις και να γυμνάζεσαι, αλλά αν δεν έχεις κάποιο μεγαλύτερο σκοπό (π.χ. να πάρεις χρυσό στην άρση βαρών) τότε γυμνάζεις το κορμί σου (πάνω κάτω) ίσια. Αν έχεις κάποιο σκοπό στο νου, τότε κάποια σημεία του σώματός σου είναι πιο γυμνασμένα από άλλα. Τώρα που πάω με αυτή την παρομοίωση δεν ξέρω - το σκέφτηκα και το καταγράφω. Απλός μου έκανε αυτή η σκέψη - πως τρέφεται και μεγ...

I have to say that this is, hands down, the most cool thing that I've seen a participant do in any MOOC I've ever been!  Kudos to Guilia Forsythe ! Here is Guilia's Challege: So, I’m issuing a remix challenge. Record some audio for my doodle: using your PC, Mac, mobile, soundcloud, YouTube, etc. (your tool of choice, etc.), while watching the video and post it here for me. Or download the video using MPEG StreamClip and do whatever you like to it! (Update: I’ve made a version without audio for easier remixing) Maybe me and some fellow Greeks in education can come up with some hip-hop lyrics for this ;-)

This post is only peripherally related to Rhizomatic Knowledge (so you can skip it if you want ;-)   ) Yesterday evening I was looking over my twitter stream and I saw a post re-tweeted by George Siemens on what to say when someone asks you "should I do a PhD? " This post got me thinking (again) about the differences between a US (or perhaps a North American) PhD program and a UK PhD program.  In the US (and I assume Canada?) PhD programs (that I've looked at anyway) seem to be like a Masters++.  Most programs (again the ones that I have explored) are around 60 credits (which is about the equivalent of 2 Masters Degrees), which include required coursework, elective courses, research methodology courses and a dissertation.  If you enter the PhD program with a Masters degree in the field you can get some coursework waived (but how much is waived is really up to institutional policies). By contrast a UK PhD, at least my understanding of it from when I was loo...

This week's topic in ChangeMOOC is brought to us by Dave Cormier and the topic is Rhizomatic knowledge , rhizome coming from the Greek word for "root." (OK, that's my last "big fat Greek wedding" moment for this blog post :-)  ) Dave tells us that the idea comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book "a thousand plateaus" and the idea, at least according to Deleuze and Guattari is that in a rhizome "ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-replicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process." It's quite an interesting epistemological view of knowledge and I can see how ideas are off-shoots of others thoughts and idea. We see this every day in sayings like "going off on a tangent or the infamous "six degrees to..." game. Everything is connected (which goes nicely with my previous blog post). Looking at Rhizomatic knowledge from a literal perspective, there may be no end (sinc...

This week's Change topic was a nice break for me, allowed me to take a moment, catch up with other people's blogs, and the weekly session (which I made an attempt to visit while it was live, but I somehow missed it) was loose enough to allow for this break. In any case, the topic of this week was "Triangulating, weaving and connecting our learning." I've written before about disconnected knowledge (although I forget if it was a blog post here, somewhere else, or a comment on someone else's blog...) and disconnected knowledge is an issue when teaching and learning. One can't learn facts and figures in isolation, they are meaningless and we end up forgetting them anyway. If we can put them to use, that is one form of making these facts meaningful to us and thus providing for a mechanism to remember them. This week's topic reminded me of a mentor that I had in one of my master's programs. When I was a first-semester graduate student in the instru...

'Tis the season to be thinking about which courses you will be registering for spring courses; unless you're graduating this December, in which case let me be the first to congratulate you! :-)  The spring course list is now out, check it out on our discussion board.  When I was a student I always liked to have a syllabus for the courses I was thinking about registering for so that I could get an idea of what the course entailed and therefore figure out what the best combination of courses was for me for that specific semester.  To that end, I wanted to write a little about INSDSG697: Research Methods for Instructional Designers which I will be teaching this coming spring. This is also an opportunity to get the reading materials ahead of time so you could prepare before the start of the semester (if you want to do that sort of thing - did when I was a student, but it's not everyone's cup-o-tea :-)  ) Why research methods? Our program has a balance of theory and pr...

I viewed this week's live session yesterday afternoon (I really wish there were an export to MP3 function, I know WIMBA, one of the products going into Blackboard Collaborate allows this...but anyway - this isn't the MOOC facilitator's fault). In any case, I don't have much to say this week about the topic, so I will be catching up with things that other people write. I was brainstorming the other day and posted this on twitter Idea for longer MOOCs like #change11, factor in one "break" or "catch-up" week for every 4 weeks of content and it seems like a few people liked this idea.  If you look at the Change MOOC schedule  you will see that it is a year-long MOOC, formatted around traditional Western university semesters (fall and spring) with a traditional Western Christian 2-week "break" around Christmas and New Year.   It seems like the scheduling design of MOOCs can be examined through the lens of Change. Many people like the dip-...

Since Week 8 of Change11 has yet to start (materials seem no where to be found) I thought it would be worth going back and commenting on my previous post on MOOC summative evaluations . The question posed by Alan Selig was how to get summative evaluations from MOOC participants when you have dip-in-jump-out  model for most MOOCs; I say most  because at least the language MOOC I will be designing won't be so much of a dip-in-jump-out -people could, but if you are a true n00b in the language   you might have problems if you skip a week since language is cumulative. In any case, my first step would be to ask do we need an assessment and why?   Now, just to be clear, I am not saying that we don't need assessments in MOOCs, but rather we need to rethink the assessment (as both Mark and Jane commented on in my previous post).  What do we aim to accomplish with an assessment? Is it for us (organizers) or for the them (the participants)? What form ...

Una o due settimana fa h o causato un po' di ansia per i lettori di questo blog quando ho scritto sul tema della partecipazione in in MOOC. Veramente non volevo causare di ansia, ma voluto fornire alcune spunti per riflessione. Credo che molti, non sola la mia amica Serena, quando hanno letto la mia idea per il sistema di "notificazioni" pensano a la scuola, i controlli, e le segnalazioni. Io non li colpa di essere ansiosi perché questi metodi di educazione e di docimologia sono metodi di educazione molto strutturati, senza immaginazione, e molte volte la docimologia è punitiva. Nello stesso tempo, quando qualcuno parla della partecipazione, molti pensano a la discussione, o forse un blog post, o qualche cosa visibile a molti come qualcosa scritta a twitter. È vero che questi sono topi di partecipazione ma io credo che la partecipazione ad un corso MOOC deve essere ripensata perché un MOOC non è come altri corsi, allora la docimologia, e allora che voglio dire "...

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs.  Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated , and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging . Tony writes (and this is not the only thing he writes so read his entire post): There could be all kinds of reasons for the shortage of comments on this week’s topic, but I was more struck by the form in which they occurred. Participants did not comment directly to my post for this week, but within their own blogs. I call this the syndrome of the selfish blogger. We all do this. If we have something interesting to say, we’d rather say it on our own web site than someone else’s (it would be nice though if the post was also copied to the site that originated the topic). I had to go and cull all the comments from the #Ch...