Multilitteratus Incognitus

An interesting documentary shared by one of my EdD classmates.

One of the things that has been keeping me busy this semester has been my inaugural semester as a Doctoral student at Athabasca University's Center for Distance Education.  The semester isn't over yet,but I am slowly working at hammering out some assignments for the course.  I've tried to be pro-active so that I can get the foundational reading done early in the semester so I can focus on reading some additional articles on MOOCs that have been on my to-read pile for a while.  I ended up getting all the readings done (the ones assigned by the faculty anyway), but I've been side-tracked reading interesting things that my classmates post :-) In any case, for the third assignment for my inaugural class I looked at MOOCs (no surprises there), and I discussed very briefly the historical overview of MOOCs (keep an eye out in December for the special issue of the CIEE journal, some good articles coming out on the topic of MOOCs), I discussed a bit some work I am doing with a...

Continuing with my exploration of DALMOOC, we've reached the end of Week 2 (only a few days late ;-)  ).  I've been playing with Tableau, which I can describe as Pivot Tables on steroids.  I briefly explored the idea of getting some IPEDS data to mess around with, however that proved to be a bit more challenging than I had anticipated. So, I ended up using the sample data of course evaluations to figure out how to work Tableau.  The following are some interesting visualizations of the data that I had: The one thing I realized, as I was playing around with the data, is that it's really important to really know what your data means.  I thought I knew what the categories meant, because I thought that institutions of higher education used similar lingo.  The more I played with the data, the more I realized that some things weren't what I was expecting them to be.  Thus, in order to know what is being described and portrayed through the visualiza...

I've had this app on my iPad, by TechSmith, for the past few years, but I've never really used it.  The App is called ScreenChomp and it allows you to have a digital whiteboard that you can use to write and narrate.  I through that a plain text description of the learning analytics cycle (still catching up on week 2 of DALMOOC) would probably be confusing, and using PowerPoint and Adobe Presenter would be too static.  So, I applied the learning analytics cycle to a course I teach, and I decided to hand-write everything. Heck I attempted to draw as well, but my lack of artistic talent shows ;-) Direct link to the screenchomp (if the embed doesn't work):  http://www.screenchomp.com/t/qE1lplho DALMOOC Week 2, Description of the Data Analytics Cycle from Apostolos K. on Vimeo . How does this cycle apply to your courses?

My Twitter Analytics, 10/2014 Another day, another #dalmooc post :)  Don't worry, I won't spam my blog with DALMOOC posts (even if you want me to), I don't have that much time.  I think over the next few days I'll be posting more than usual in order to catch up a bit.   This post reflects a bit of the week 1 (last week's) course content and prodding questions. I am still exploring ProSolo, so no news there (except that I was surprised that my twitter feed comes into ProSolo.  I hope others don't mind seeing non-DALMOOC posts on my ProSolo profile. Week 1 seemed to be all about on-boarding, of tools and definitions.  So what is learning analytics?  According to the SOLAR definition, "Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs." It's a nice, succint, definition - which I had...

Alright, I guess it's time to start really committing some braincells (and time) to DALMOOC, the Data, Analytics, and Learning MOOC that started last week on EdX.  I wasn't going to attend this MOOC, to be honest about it, but seeing that George Siemens was behind this, I knew that there was an experimental aspect to it. Learning analytics is not new to me, my first MOOC (cMOOC) in fact was LAK11 (Learning Analytics and Knowledge) which I jumped into right after I finished my Applied Linguistics studies. So, now that I have cleared my plate of a number of coursera MOOCs (decided to give myself the "audit" status and just download the videos for later viewing - maybe in January or something), and that most of my assignments are done for EDDE 801, I can devote a little more time to writing in the open web about academic stuff and ponderings about academic stuff. So, what brought me to DALMOOC? The first thing that brought me to it is this xMOOC/cMOOC structure tha...

This semester I am helping out a colleague, and current M.Ed. student on the topic of MOOCs. He is taking a few MOOCs as part of his trying to grasp what it means to take a MOOC in order to create a MOOC.  Unsurprisingly, as is the case with most people, he's having some issues with Connected Courses because cMOOCs require the knowledge, and utilization of, certain literacies that we don't necessarily teach, or practice in school, even as graduate students. So, in brainstorming with him over the past couple of weeks I've been  thinking a lot about the phrase: The Medium is the Message †.  One of the main pitfalls of instructional designers and instructional technologists, especially those who are currently going through their studies and are novices in the field, is that they tend to think of technology first, and everything else later.  This is true with MOOCs as well, especially people who've been enculturated to think that MOOCs are of the xMOOC variety, that ...

Τις περασμένες δύο εβδομάδες είχαμε ως θέμα μας, στην ενότητα του connected courses, το τον ιστό, και συγκεκριμένα τον ιστό ως πλατφόρμα, και ως κουλτούρα . Τα κείμενα που μας έδωσαν ως αρχική ύλη ήταν πολύ βασικά για εμένα.  Πριν από αυτή την ενότητα δεν το είχα σκεφτεί πως είμαι στο ίντερνετ σχεδόν είκοσι χρόνια.  Όταν επέστρεψα στην Αμερική κάποιος φίλος τις οικογενείας, βλέποντας πως είχα αφίσει όλα τα φιλαράκια στην Ελλάδα, μου πρότεινε να τους βρω στο ίντερνετ. Κάπου τότε άρχισα να μαθαίνω τι σημάνει διαδίκτυο, και τα έμαθα χωρίς βιβλίο. Έτσι την κουλτούρα του ιστού, και την τεχνογνωσία που χρειάζεται κάποιος, την έμαθα μέσα σε 20 χρόνια, γνωρίζοντας πολλούς και διάφορους ανθρώπους από όλο τον κόσμο. Τώρα το θέμα μας είναι πως μπορούμε να διδάξουμε εμείς αυτά τα πράγματα σε λιγότερο χρονικό διάστημα στους φοιτητές μας, έτσι ώστε να μπορούν να χρησιμοποιήσουν αυτές τις γνώσεις, αυτή την τεχνογνωσία, και να μπορούν άνετα να κινηθούν στον χώρο αυτής της νέας κουλτ...

Here we are, week 2 of module 3 (so week 6) and half-way through the formal run of connected courses.  I spent most of last week catching up with stuff that was piling up in my Pocket account from previous weeks. In all honesty I wasn't quite sure what to make of this module.  Pretty much all of the things that were readings failed to spark my imagination, given that I had either read similar things in the past, or I had actually lived through them.  The thing that really started to spark my a few things was Mozilla's Web Literacy white paper. Then I was having a conversation with fellow MOOCer Luis , in real life, about literacies and then it hit me.  How do people engage on the web, in a cMOOC? Luis was telling me about issues with engaging with a cMOOC and fellow participants out on the web, and how the other two xMOOCs he is following along with seem much more engaging.  I think that this is because they have a form and format that graduate students know t...

My own doctoral journey may have just started, but it's been a meandering path to even get to the start.  It's not the destination after all that matters but the journey. Eventually all doctoral journeys culminate in a dissertation.  For the longest period of time this type of writing was a bit intimidating.  After all, who's got the energy to sit down and write a document that's 100 pages long and that few people will read. I challenge you to go ahead and look at academic articles that cross your path.  How often do you see people citing someone's dissertation in their citations?  Not that often, eh? So, this gets me to this blog post.  I was reading M aha's blog post this morning on the way to work about her experience with her dissertation and her defense, and I was prompted by the #digiped questions she reposted.  This really got me thinking about my own path and what it's leading me to. about a more responsive, and perhaps more accurate, fina...