Group items tagged

And I have some metaphors up here to help people grasp how they should understand this. Football. Following football. There must be some football fans here; I've heard it's popular. And there are teams all over the world. How many of you follow the South American leagues? What, nobody? Some of you may follow the European leagues, Manchester United, yeah? How many of you follow Australian football; have you been following what Brisbane's been doing lately? No! Well how can you be a football fan if you're not following all of these? Aren't you tearing out your hair? You just can't keep up? Of course not. You are a football fan by choosing those football games, those teams, those associations that are interesting to you. And you know that there are ten-year olds playing football in the back yard, but you don't feel compelled to go out and watch just because it's football. You learn to let it go.

And he contrasted that with the social kind of course that we see in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or the MOOCs that George, Dave and I have put on, where the action of the course is predominately interaction with each other.

Dave Cormier, who might also be in the room - he's in the back doing his hallelujah wave - has done a number of really nice videos about what a MOOC is and how to be successful, and again, it's like I said before, success in a MOOC isn't just remembering content. Success is very much what you define success to be, and that sounds a little anti-intuitive. How can you get a job if success is what you define it to be? Then again, that comes back to the purpose of this in the first place. What is success in a MOOC? Dave defines five steps: - orient (figure out where stuff is), - declare (and what that means is, setting up a place for yourself, setting up an identity for yourself, even, a little but, using course tags to identify that part of your material that you're contributing as part of the course), - and then network (because once you set up your space and write some posts nothing happens; it's when you begin to connect with other people), - and as you network you begin to find people you have affinity with (not necessarily people who are the same as you, but people who you can talk to, people who have an interest in a subject that corresponds with your interests), - and then finally and most interestingly, find a purpose for the work that you are doing (why are you in this educational experience, where are you going to apply it).

But I want to suggest that the argument in favor of MOOC’s can’t handle all that much complexity either;

The first thing I want to do, then, is slow us down a bit, and go through the last year with a bit more care than we’re usually able to do, to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC, as it were.

But it’s also an argument that only works at the depth (or non-depth) of a David Brooks column, maybe a 6 minute reading time, because its claims only work if you don’t interrogate their foundational premises too much.

Based on MOOCs equally massive dropout rates having teaching and learning success on a massive scale will require pedagogical innovation. It’s this innovation, more than massive enrollments or free that I think make MOOC’s important.

Should we be spruiking MOOCs? Spooked by MOOCs? Or hoping the hype will fade and the fad will pass?

Digital content and highly scalable courseware. Student learning supported by virtual cohorts, learner analytics, embedded assessments and digital certificates.

maker? Why make? Why now?

What happens when makers converge around shared interests and purposes? What opportunities might we seize?

How do we find and build diverse and inspiring networks of people, resources, and places that support our making and learning?