Multilitteratus Incognitus

Χτες το απόγευμα, κατά το απογευματινό ταξιδάκι προς το σπίτι, διάβαζα τα δημοσιεύματα του Jon , της Jenny , του Matthias  και του John (αν θέλετε να τα διαβάσετε, διαβάστε τα σε αυτή την σειρά). Το γενικό θέμα σε όλα αυτά τα δημοσιεύματα είναι το πως (και πόσοι) συμμετέχουν σε ένα MOOC. Αν παρατηρήσει κανείς τον ημερήσιο εγκύκλιο του MOOC θα δεις πως σε γενικές γραμμές τα ίδια δέκα άτομα συμμετέχουν συχνά, και που και που θα δεις κανένα καινούργιο πρόσωπο. Αυτό δεν σημαίνει πως δεν υπάρχουν άλλοι στο MOOC που διαβάζουν και επεξεργάζονται καθημερινά τα δημοσιεύματα άλλων· απλός δεν γνωρίζουμε πόσα άτομα υπάρχουν που παρακολουθούν και πόσα ήρθαν την πρώτη εβδομάδα φερ' ειπείν, είδαν κάτι και έφυγαν. Η αλήθεια είναι το κάθε MOOC είναι διαφορετικό (όπως και το κάθε μάθημα που δεν είναι MOOC) και το πως μετριέται αυτός που είναι παρόν θα αλλάζει αναλόγως με το μάθημα και την θεματολογία. Για παράδειγμα, ένα άλλο MOOC, το ds106 (ψηφιακή διήγηση), ο κάθε συμμετέχων έπρεπε να παρα...

Over the holiday, at some point I came across this blog post asking how much longer will (college) degrees mean something . It was a short, but interesting post, and something that I've thought about in the past; not in reference to how much longer will college degrees have a monopoly on accreditation of individuals, but rather I've been pondering  what  does a college degree mean. The impetus for this post seem's to be Stanford's AI MOOC , which apparently will give out certificates of completion to those who participate and do the work.  Jeff, the author of the other blog posses the following questions which I wanted to tackle a bit: When do we start hiring for the knowledge you have rather than the degree you hold? We used to do that, and we ought  to be doing that now. One of my concentrations while an MBA student was Human Resources Management, and as a student one of the key things is that the piece of paper doesn't matter, but rather it's ...

This paper seems to have made the rounds while I was away from blogging last week, but I thought it would be worthwhile  posting it on my blog just the same :-) The second paper of the MRT (mobiMOOC research team) is now available through the  International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning (IRRODL) and is titled " Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and complexity in education ."  Here's the abstract: In this paper, we look at how the massive open online course (MOOC) format developed by connectivist researchers and enthusiasts can help analyze the complexity, emergence, and chaos at work in the field of education today. We do this through the prism of a MobiMOOC, a six-week course focusing on mLearning that ran from April to May 2011. MobiMOOC embraced the core MOOC components of self-organization, connectedness, openness, complexity, and the resulting chaos, and, as such, serves as an interesting paradigm for new educational ...

The MobiMOOC research team has been working on our third paper, further analyzing aspects of MOOCs, and MobiMOOC in specific.  Our forthcoming paper tackles the topic of emotive language usage in MOOC discussions as a predictor of continued, or future, participation in the course. We are currently in the process of going over and refining the paper, but I don't want to give away the punchline before it's done in its totality :-) In any case, I've taken the lead on this project to see which journal we can publish our findings in.and I have found a journal whose theme is online learning and asynchronous networks, which fits in with MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy (although, to be honest I don't know how much MOOC pedagogy there is out there...perhaps something to put our heads together about). Anyway, I was looking over the author submission guidelines to see what sort of format they wish to have us submit our paper in terms of citations, footnotes* and text formatting; and ...

I tried making that rhyme, to come up with a catchy title, but it didn't really work out... Oh well, maybe next time ;-) In any case, in the Research_MOOC Mailing list Alan Selig had an interesting question which I thought I would poke at for a while until I came to an answer (or at least something to add to the discussion) Alan Selig One final "wonderment" from my limited understanding of Connectivist Learning theory:  If the reflecting and remixing never leaves the head of the lurker, except perhaps in their own behavior, is it still learning? If the wider community never receives a benefit does that disqualify the experience as being learning? Well...I think that there are different levels of looking at this. First of all, is it learning if it never leaves the brain/mind of the lurker? Strictly speaking, if the "learning" never manifests itself outside of the mind, I don't think it's learning. This manifestation doesn't have to involve o...

This week in Change11 our host is Jon Dron (rhymes with Tron ;-) )and to topic is Soft technologies, hard technologies and everything in between . While reading the seed post I got a distinct mental image of Steve Job's voice reading Jon's initial post - it had a jobsian feel to it. The article is an interesting epistemological view of technology; technology being very broad by definition since pedagogy is also taken to be a technology. I honestly don't know what to make of this week, just yet anyway. It was an interesting read, it did engage me mentally, but where to go from here?  I suppose the activity itself might be a good starting point... So Jon asks us to ... Provide at least one possible educational use for an unenhanced standard email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express that requires nothing more than that email client and its usual supporting infrastructure (network connection, operating system etc are fine, but no other distinct applications lik...

The other day I posted some thoughts based on Leahgrrl's original post on adjuncts and technology . Tony Bates also posted thoughts on the issue around the topic of accreditation . Between these blog posts, and comments to all three of them, the mental gears started to slowly turn and think of additional thoughts around the issue.  The first one being accreditation. Tony writes that through his experiences being part of an accreditation agency, adjunct labor is something that they pay attention to when new  programs apply to become accredited, but then there is no follow up.  I know our campus had a recent AQUAD review* for all programs on our campus, and  both internal and external reviewers viewed departmental submissions of the resumes of these departments (history of department, course offerings, student information, course reviews, faculty reviews, student evaluations of courses and instructors,  etc.), in short everything an accreditor would ...

I was reading the blog posts that were posted yesterday on Change MOOC on the topic of Learning in times of Abundance and it suddenly hit me*, this learning in times of abundance reminds me a lot of the research I did on digital natives (article forthcoming). Yes technology (seems to be) ubiquitous, and so is information, but as   Eric Duval admitted in his intro post: Really big caveat: of course, all of this abundance talk is only relevant to us who are the privileged few, who do not need to worry about where we will sleep this evening, or how we will feed our children… I thought of a few more caveats, one of which I mentioned before, that of literacy. Abundance is almost useless without the literacy to use it...sort of like the old saying: so much sea and yet I am thirsty (OK, I paraphrased a bit right there). The other thing that I was reminded of is actual usage of this abundance.  In a lot of the good digital native research† that I came across looked at f...

This week's topic, as I mentioned in my initial post, is learning in times of abundance. Eric Duval, in his definition of abundance, goes for the digital element, but I wanted to focus on something  a little more mundane - the "disconnected" world of the library.  The fact of the matter is that our abundance of information is no new thing. Some may go back as far back as the invention of the printing press, but I won't since buying books still costs money to the individual and thus, while there is an abundance in materials, it's not abundant to you because you've got limited money.  Instead I want to focus on something quaint - the library. The library has provided us with a lot of abundant information, for both learning and pleasure.  Through various consortia, if your own town library (or libraries) don't carry the item you want, they can get it for you, usually for no extra charge, so you can have access to whatever material you need. I...

I was reading a post by Leahgrrl the other day titled Adjunct Technology, or why I can't figure out Blackboard . It was quite an interesting post, and not something completely foreign to me - I've read my fair share of adjunct posts on the Chronicle of Higher Ed , and Inside Higher Ed , as well as having known many adjuncts personally. This past week, while attending the Sloan-C annual conference (virtually) I saw a session on developing faculty, and one of the institutions (the name escapes me now) had faculty take an 8 week long training seminar which focused on pedagogy, but the final "product" of the course was a full course on Blackboard (or whatever LMS the institution used). The faculty were not paid for the workshop, but they were paid a stipend for creating the course on Blackboard (so I guess they were sort of reimbursed for the time they spend on this project in some fashion). What should be pointed out was that not all institutions do this - I think only...