Innovation may occur where people are creatively engaged, but it cannot be dictated and it cannot be planned, it must be found from the emergent actions of people who are struggling with a task. “
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Tania Sheko
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A human OER | doublemirror - 6 views
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As we struggle with the task we follow a set of norms and learn something off-book – how to live and learn on the open web.
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This is in the background not the foreground and I think this matters when I compare it with other experiences
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power dynamics exist in the shadow of groups perhaps too often. These get played out covertly, unspoken and our options when we do not like it are limited. Stay and comply or leave.
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It creates a mantra, the chanting of which identifies you as a member. People who are ‘in’ are quite willing to surrender to this higher authority. People who are not ‘in’ are ‘out’ and are subject to various sanctions from the group, including hostility.
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A reviewer to one of my papers said ‘that the practice that many share in virtual courses is just studying online and that in less structured communities people just end up talking about their experience of studying.’
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the task is coming together online and this leads to a bias towards consent not dissent. This is problematic for diversity.
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The hashtags are created to stand for something and as with any collection of individuals who identify with something, the quality of the interaction can ‘go south’ as people find their feet and implicit norms a majority share evolve. This is what happens when a group is left to self-organise.
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People interact in dysfunctional ways if left to their own devices more often than not. Online it seems a ‘escape clause’ for making any behaviour acceptable is “it is not real, it is the internet” and “you can always move on if you don’t like it”.
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Abbott government to overhaul crowded curriculum - 1 views
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Overcrowding in the curriculum was the main issue of concern raised by principals, teachers and parents during the review conducted by education consultant Kevin Donnelly and academic Ken Wiltshire.
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The reviewers said they were not saying there was no place for inquiry-based learning but that caution should be exercised to ensure it did not become the prevailing orthodoxy.
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Mimi Ito - Weblog: Trust Falls and My Whys for Connected Courses - 1 views
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o although I am one of the hosts/facilitators I am doubly a n00b in the connected courses sense - new to cMOOCs as well as new to course design. Which means I am thoroughly enjoying taking the plunge as a learner in all of this and muddling through the why of my teaching as I go.
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best kind of trust fall exercise for someone who is used to pausing and polishing before sharing.
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I feel very much buoyed by generous ways in which the connected courses participants have responded to the inevitable glitches in facilitating this course, and my thinking aloud in public as we go.
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we are all bringing our heterogeneous whys to this experience.
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Even with different dispositions that pull in different directions, I like that connected courses is pushing us both into productive discomfort and growth.
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ach facilitator brought a different angle and expertise, and we wanted to honor that and give people space to stretch out and develop their own whys.
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ur goal is to build an inclusive and expansive network of teachers, students, and educational offerings that makes high quality, meaningful, and socially connected learning available to everyone.
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Our goal setting out was to provide a professional development opportunity for faculty who are setting out to teach a connected course
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the why that we may have set out with as instigators of the course is not the why that all participants bring to the course.
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So if I take off the organizer hat, as a co-learner my personal why is that I want to experience and learn more about the cMOOC approach
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Connected courses is my first time living through this kind of learning with my own professional community.
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So as a learner, I guess at least some of my why tracks to the explicit learning goal that we set up as organizers when we started out.
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I’m starting to geek out on engagement metrics for the course, and thinking through how we can track the cascading effects of an experience like connected courses as it influences educator practice and in turn shapes student experiences.
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How can we better tell a story through research and evidence about why these kinds of connected learning experiences are important?
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And can we mobilize our networks to tell this story in a way that supports the diverse collectives that are intersecting here?
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issues that @mdvfunes and Jenny Mackness have raised on the “tyranny of the open” and the pressures of normative expectations of participation
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it seems worthwhile to reflect on these more pervasive kinds of risks or exclusions, silencing and just feeling plain old overwhelmed
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I like this idea of “heterotopia” that Ferreday and Hodgson suggest as a way of charting a pathway through these dynamics.
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I may be idealistic about this, but I do think it is possible avoid the tyranny of the majority and support and value multiple forms of participation and the varied whys that each co-learner brings to this network.
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Chicken/egg reflections on intercultural maturity, criticality, & open-connectednessRef... - 1 views
blog.mahabali.me/...criticality-open-connectedness
via:packrati.us ccourses chicken egg reflections intercultural maturity maha bali #ccourses
shared by swatson217 on 07 Oct 14
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Then again, it might just be because I now know them enough to understand their humor
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our ability to share humor might be a function of how well we know each other
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Then this got me thinking about the difficulty of sharing humor not only across cultures, but online
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It’s interesting to study the effect of this on how well creative brainstorming works…
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how I never got the refs to Greek mythology
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Me too, and at Uni I studied literature, and was too busy to catch up on all the reading I needed to get the references. So when my first son proved to be a big reader, I made sure he read a lot of the mythologies - Greek, Roman, Norse, etc. I'm sure that kind of roundedness helps with self confidence. There's so much referencing - how much of our culture is referenced from history!
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In my PhD research, I ask a chicken-and-egg question about intercultural maturity and critical thinking.
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is likely to be open-minded, curious, willing to question one’s own views, interested in understanding different world views – all of which mean this person is likely to behave positively in an intercultural learning experience
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If you’re closed minded and not curious, you’re unlikely to seek intercultural exchange
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But if you have never been with people different from yourself, how do you learn to behave in these situations in such a way that helps you learn from it?
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and so you keep finding yourself in situations and you take advantages of opportunities to connect openly, and then you reap the benefits of that, which fuels you further?
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This is such an important question, and one I've been thinking about over the years. Do I give up with certain people and just focus on convincing those who are open? My job as a teacher librarian depends on convincing teachers that it's worth collaborating with me. Otherwise I can't work with students apart from traditional resourcing.
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how do you develop critical thinking needed to develop intercultural maturity without being in an intercultural experience;
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That question plagues me with reference to whether we can actually draw people into open/connected learning
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Someone said her students were shocked when a book author (Howard Rheingold) replied to their tweets. As in, they had not before really thought of him as a real person. Funny.
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Yes, my students are confused and very surprised that a 'real author' would even consider connecting to them online. Once an author was involved in my students' blog comments, and one student said he would rather not know him as a real person because he wouldn't be able to live up to his 'imagined' persona (my words).
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is it possible for someone to get interested in open and connected learning, to become a connected educator, without first experiencing the beauty, the potential of that, if they are not originally of open/connecting attitude? Or not digitally literate, even.
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How do you draw them in to try? If you give a workshop on it, hands-on, will they come? Will it sound like gibberish and feel overwhelming?
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about how joining an academic conversation midway feels? It’s the same for joining an open online community or finding oneself in a new culture
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It takes time to figure out where to start, whom to talk to, how to talk, how to engage in culturally acceptable ways, etc.
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BBC News - Photography and open education - 0 views
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Yet there is another way - open learning, where the majority of the students interact online with the face-to-face course being taught in a more traditional manner. With this comes a chance to share in the knowledge being offered by a wide range of tutors, photographers and others in the industry.
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"I'd had to rethink what my product was as a photographer - I'd grown up thinking it was my images, but digital cameras meant everyone was a potential image maker. So I had to think why it was that I'd been successful in the past and I found a number of strands which proved very fruitful. That's the stuff we talk about in class."
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He uses Creative Commons licenses (CC) for his classes. "I'd always been an avid All Rights Reserved user but it just stopped making sense. The open classes can only work with a CC license, which was a big deal for the university because it turns out education establishment are avid All Rights Reserved users too. Much like me thinking I was just an image maker, the uni thought its product was 'knowledge' and their old business model relied on keeping a tight grip on that.
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Worth's classes live on blogs and on Twitter (hashtag #phonar), and are proving a popular resource amongst photography enthusiasts and professionals alike.
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Through my work with #phonar I have learnt the world is filled with lots of different people and we all think and learn differently. Coventry University has shown me it doesn't matter what disability you have, anything is possible.
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Why Read This, Why Read That?Reflecting Allowed | Reflecting Allowed - 1 views
blog.mahabali.me/...why-read-this-why-read-that
mimi ito maha bali connecting #ccourses blog post learning reflection
shared by Tania Sheko on 27 Sep 14
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that she found reading books (quickly, i assume?) easier than wading through tweets and blogs; whereas I clearly did the tweets/blogs things quite comfortably but found reading books “too much”
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Anyway, it made me reflect on why I, someone who LOVES reading by all accounts, have a strong preference for reading blogs/tweets over books/academic articles in MOOCs. There are many reasons,
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Mimi’s point that a connected learning experience “welcomes people with different dispositions and orientations to learning”,
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My first PhD supervisor was big on encouraging me to read diverse articles not single-authored books
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My second supervisor (who replaced the first) was big on me reading original works by e.g. Marx, Foucault, etc.
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I also find reading translated works really difficult and find it a better investment of my time to first read more contemporary (or at least, more education-focused) interpretations of the “greats” works, before reading the original. It helps me read it better
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This is particularly funny because I keep not finding time to read the”attention literacies” part in Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart, as I get ‘distracted’ into reading different parts of it (i’ve probably read half the book already, just not in order).
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And that’s why I voice these things in MOOCs, because I am pretty sure that courses about connection want ppl to feel they can participate.
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Taking steps: Conceding Having said all this… I went into unit 2 of #ccourses today and did the following
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So basically, I hope to engage with these readings “my way” (so not deeply with each entire book, unless it draws me in, but with parts of it)
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hope that blogposts by other people & the hangout will fill me in second-hand (you see what I am doing here, don’t you?)
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P.S. some ppl may say that w blog posts u have no guarantee of quality vs a book recommended by the facilitators. However, there are many ways to gauge a blog’s quality, incl knowing the person, seeing it retweeted often or with many comments – and it takes v little time to skim it to decide to read deeply;
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colliding through a loosely orchestrated cross-network remix, immersive theater where participants are all experiencing a different narrative.
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hybrid network, more like a constellation that looks different based on where one stands and who one is.
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Connected learning is predicated on bringing together three spheres of learning that are most commonly disconnected in our lives:
OU Digital Tools: Connecting with Students via Creative Writing - 0 views
oudigitools.blogspot.com.au/...ith-students-via-creative.html
tools connecting students creative writing writing laura gibbs
shared by Tania Sheko on 26 Sep 14
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Settings for Trust in Connected Learning: an interview with danah boyd | HASTAC - 0 views
www.hastac.org/...-learning-interview-danah-boyd
settings connected learning interview boyd trust danah
shared by Tania Sheko on 26 Sep 14
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The public projects a lot onto technology. It is seen as both the savior of our current economy and the destroyer of our cultural fabric
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organizations that are building or employing new technologies are rarely local or connected deeply to the communities that use them.
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When we talk about connected learning, we're implicating a whole host of different actors to enable learning - educators, parents, students, librarians, administrators, government agencies, technologists, learning companies, etc.
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4. Do you know of any tools, procedures, apps, and/or systems enabling or disabling trust? How are they doing this? What do these tools, procedures, and/or systems change how learning can happen in connected learning environments?
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But trust starts from collectively recognizing that we're all working towards a desirable goal of empowering learners and realizing that getting there will be imperfect and require iteration.
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The other core issue is that people's failure to understand technology's strengths and weaknesses mean that the public often has unreasonable expectations regarding technology and its application.
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understand, respect, and trust one another. And then we need them to help bake trust into the systems that they build - technological, social, and governmental.
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So a huge part of the process of building and sustaining trust is to plan for what happens when things go wrong. We do this all the time in education - think about fire drills - but we don't realize how important this is when we think about technology.
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. What are some of the literacies you think are required for learners to have a digital “trust literacy”?
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think that people need to understand how data is collected, aggregated, sold, and used in the process of enabling all sorts of everyday services.