Multilitteratus Incognitus

Over the few weeks and interesting discussion has been taking place over the Creative Commons Open Platform mailing list . The Creative Commons group has created, and is now offering, CC certification.  The certification consists of a 10-week online course with a traditional number of students in the cohort (around 20), and there is a cost associated with it ($500). I'll be honest, when I saw the cost I did an eyeroll (at no one in particular).  My initial reaction was that I too shared the sentiment that some people on the mailing list reacted to: I've been in the realm of CC for more than five years.  I have (or think I have) a solid understanding of CC.  Why does this thing cost $500.  The fact that Maha speaks highly of her experiences in the course did serve as a  means to get over my original reaction to it - which got me thinking...and which brought me back to another point that friends, colleagues, and I have discussed for a while:  the diff...

Closure screen on Open2Study Last night, while browsing through my Reddit subscriptions, I noticed on one of the EdTech Reddits that Open2Study is now closed, and that the site redirects to Open Universities Australia (which was the parent entity).  I was a little in disbelief, but since I had not visited O2S in a while I thought I'd check it out with my own two eyes.  Lo and behold, the site was closed (see screencap above) and it was directing people to OU Australia. On the one hand this wasn't surprising.  I had completed most of the courses that I was interested in within the first year of operation (2013?).  I did check back periodically to see if they had added anything new, but the course offerings seemed to stagnate. I don't think that the platform added any new courses past that initial batch in 2013.  With this stagnation it does seem normal that the platform would close.  However, it does seem a little weird that no announcement was m...

The last week of EL30 was on the topic of Agency.  The video chat was quite interesting to watch but the topic of agency wasn't as big as I thought it would be (maybe time to rewatch? It's been a few weeks since I watched it).  The conversation started off with some interesting examples of community agency, but it seems to have gone beyond that. I have taken some snippets of the conversation and reflected a bit on them. Just to situate this blog post, here is the information about this week from the course page: "Each of the major developments in the internet - from the client-server model to platform-based interoperability to web3-based consensus networks - has been accompanied by a shift in agency. The relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments was shifted, for better or worse." One of the things that jumped out at me was an issue with analytics, an issue brought up by the discussants of the week: the data ...

Well, the penultimate topic for EL30 is on the subject of experience.  I wasn't quite sure, when I started watching that week's recorded chat , what I would get from the week, but unsurprisngly I had a few "AHA!!!" moments. From the course page: "It is a truism that we learn from experience, and yet creating a role for experience in learning has been one of the most difficult problems in education. And so much of education continues to rely on indirect methods depending on knowledge transfer - reading, lectures, videos - rather than hands-on practice and knowledge creation." One of the first connections that came to mind was a connection to an overall curriculum.  When someone attends your school, or even your program, should there be  a requirement to go out in the field and do something?  Let's say for my department (we educate applied linguists who aim to be language teachers), should everyone be required to do a practicum as part of their d...

Continuing on with my quest to experience the remainder of el30 before work begins again, today I'll write a bit about my thoughts about the topic of Week 7 which was community. From the course page for the week: "The traditional concept of community was built on sameness, on collections of people from the same family, speaking the same language, living in the same place, believing the same things. The fundamental challenge to community is to make decisions on matters affecting everybody while leaving to individuals, companies and institutions those matters not effectively managed by consensus." The interesting thing for me with this topic is that I sort of had an "AHAAAA!" moment (didn't quite scream it though...the all-caps was more for effect 😜).  My aha moment revolved around my dissertation proposal and the concept of collaboration in MOOCs and what came to mind is that there needs to be a certain amount or type of community to exist in orde...

Time-vortex initiated... loading Week 5 of EL30 ;-) eL30's topic in Week 5 was all about resources, and specifically OER.  This is a fun topic to return to from time to time to discuss, especially now given that my state seems to have taken it a step further by having a Massachusetts Open Education initiative which my university is promoting. There were a few things that came up as interesting in the interview, some newer to me, and some things that have come up in previous posts about OER. One interesting comment that came from the discussion is when Stephen mentioned during the chat that he is more reluctant to share a resource if it goes through a vetting/accrediting/QA process; not because he doesn't like quality, but because someone can just say "this resource doesn't deserve to be shared". I found this quite interesting. It's not that I disagree with Stephen, I too would be reluctant to share in an official capacity any work of mine if it meant t...

A week or so ago...well...maybe two weeks by now♣, the topic of eLearning 3.0 was identity , and the video guest of the week was Maha Bali .  I finally managed to view all of it, even though it was in 10 minute increments. My Pocket's save-for-later is getting rather lengthy now that I am saving articles on the daily to read at some other future time. This time of the semester is rather busy, so I guess that's my disclaimer for this post: I am only commenting on the video and points that were brought up. In looking at the notes I took during the vConnecting session during week 4 (mid-way through the MOOC!) there are a few organizing factors that sort of came to me, so I've organized the post in this manner. What's in a name? At the beginning of the conversation Stephen had a bit of a hard time getting the native pronunciation of Maha's name. It's interesting to kick off a discussion about identity in such a mundane way, but I think that the concept of a n...

Attempt at witty title probably failed :-) I guess I am a little rusty  with creating meaningful blog titles since I have not been blogging frequently recently.  Oh well. I will get back into the swing of things once I finish my EdD...or not... ;-) In any case, I am catching up with #el30, more specifically last week's guest Ben Werdmuller ( see recording here ). Interesting fun fact - Ben is the creator of Elgg, which is the platform that Athabasca University's " Landing " runs on. There were quite a few interesting things that came out of the conversation but there were two that really stuck out to me.  The first is that there was a strand of the conversation that dealt with taking back control of your online identity from the various platform providers, such as facebook, google, yahoo/verizon, twitter, and so on.  A lot of what we do, this blog inclusive, rests no someone else's platform.  If the platform decides to cease operation you lose not just...

Greetings fellow three-point-oh'ers (or is it just fellow eLearners?) This past week in eLearning 3.0 (Week 2, aka 'the cloud'). This week's guest was Tony Hirsch, and what was discussed was the cloud, and specifically Docker.  Before I get into my (riveting) thoughts on the cloud, let me go back  to Week 0 (two weeks ago) and reflect a little on the thoughts I jotted down on my retrieved post-it note. So, in the live session a couple of weeks ago (it's recorded if you want to go back and see it), Siemens said something along the lines of "what information abundance consumes is attention". This really struck me as both a big "aha!" as well as a "well, d'uh! why hadn't it occurred to me already? D'oh!". There has been a lot said over the past few years about how people don't read anymore (they skim), and how bad that is.  This ties into "what learners want" (a phrase I've heard countless times on-cam...

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...