Really good blog on the experience of being at the center of a "MOOC" startup by a spouse who hen decides to try taking her own classes to an online venue
My blog is about the organisation of Higher Education in the Netherlands. This series of posts is about my personal experience with #edcmooc (I like it so far!) and possible implications for the way the Dutch will be organizing higher education.
Sugra Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment.
SOLE - a self-organized learning environment, based on a curriculum of questions that set curiosity free, varying forms of peer assessment and certification without examination.
A failure in e-learning? I don't think so. The noise was part of the rush of participation for me. I learned many things from it, not least how to manage the deluge of interactions amongst the participants. It's a similar feeling when you let go of your FOMO and realise you can't read every tweet.
I seem to have come across this post in my travels. I can understand how some just couldn't handle the multitude of platforms and available discussion forums. Teaching course participants to filter and choose or just realizing that you can't access everything is a good starting point. It's a shame that this person couldn't see the forest for the trees..because e-learning and digital cultures was a fabulous experience for me. I made so many wonderful connections, I learned so much from each of them. My learning and experiences in my first MOOC far outweigh any "noise" that may have accompanied that first week. I put a lot into the course, but the learning gained far exceeded my expectations.
Hi Chris!
You voiced exactly my same feelings on edcmooc. Unlike you, I finished the course and even submitted my digital artifact and got my certificate. The only reason I didn't quit was because about midway on week 2, I decided to turn off the Google+ alerts, forgot about Facebook, and only rarely tweeted my impressions. I wrote three posts on my blog, only to remind myself of what I had seen or read.
I totally agree with you that the noise was too intense for me. It got to a point where I just went to the Coursera site to check the assignments and that was it. I didn't exchange great ideas with anyone and was totally disheartened by the many platforms where we were supposed to interact. I also think that maybe I didn't totally understand what the course offered. I think I was expecting something a little bit more "practical" and was surprised by how much theory and philosophy was involved. Of course, I am not a teacher in the strict definition of the word, I've taught interpretation and translation but in a different context.
I now am on week 3 of Internet History with Dr Chuck Severance and enjoying myself very much. People in the course are helpful, not overpowering and I guess the structure of the course itself is more suited to my learning style.
Anyway, it was great to "meet" you! I always looked up to you because of the many things you created for the course, such as the Facebook group, the virtual classroom et al. Thank you!
"We are interested in experimenting with the MOOC format to design a course that engages people with the intersection of popular culture and education."
"apps utilizing your GPS location can provide information about the historical landmark you are viewing. With AR technology, that landmark or statue could essentially come to life on your screen and tell you its story first hand."
vendor bias has now got a firm grip on much of the public discourse about information and communications technology
be sceptical about assertions of the value of technology coming either from those who want to sell it to you or from their surrogates in political life
the suppression of research reports or evaluative studies that undermine the thesis that technology improves everything.
Technology can make one feel very dissatisfied with life. When you know something better is out there, do you pine away for it feeling like it will make your life oh, so much easier?
bullshit
When we see a concept everywhere it is easy to suspend our critical faculties and assume it must be right
breadth
think broadly about technology in teaching and learning.
Technology always involves people and their social systems
Remember that there are many technologies: books, blackboard, film, radio, television, programmed learning and so on. The Internet has not made them obsolete
starts with teaching and attempts to use technology to expand the range and impact of the teacher
the remote classroom approach
the rest of the world had a different tradition
started on the other side of the coin, with learning, and used technology to create a good learning environment for the student wherever and whenever the student wanted to study.
We must strive for balance on a number of dimensions.
When we use technology are we using it to enhance learning or to enhance teaching?
Dimension number two means seeking balance in answer to the question: teaching and learning for what?
Open University students have an extensive range of online facilities available. Which ones do they use?
they like using the web for informational and administrative transactions.
communication between students
Online technologies can, of course, be useful for learning
two key virtues.
support active learning experiences
devising good active learning experiences is expensive because it requires lots of work by the teachers
notably by destroying old jobs and creating new ones.
Please tell me something new. This is an idea that has perpetuated itself for centuries!The cotton gin destroyed the need to hand pick and clean cotton, It created the opportunity for the enslaved to have yet, another job.
I hope you are being "cheeky" when you so easily type the words: "enslaved," "job," and "opportunity" in the same sentence.
This clip and the full documentary may shed some light on the topic:
http://video.pbs.org/video/2192491729
The best way to reach learners is to use technology that the learner already has.
Okay, I'd agree with this one. Start where you are and move on. Too many institutions moan over the lack of "technology." If you have a computer, you have so many social media resources at your disposal IF you know how to access, use and apply them!
technology more for activities associated with their studies
rather than for the mainline work of studying course content. T
Why should we want to use technology? How should we use technology for learning and teaching? What are the basic principles? Who can benefit most from educational technology? Where should we apply it? Which technologies are best? More generally, how do you make judgements about the many claims that are made for technology?
illiteracy
In both cases technology is changing society, notably by destroying old jobs and creating new ones.
The most effective softwares are the once licensed under Creative Commons and are open source. This gives great power and independence to institutions and individuals. It truly IS the way to avoid the pervasive pitfalls that software tycoons throw education in (costly updates, upgrade caps etc. ).
Connected learning is using today's technology to, "fuse young people's interests, friendships, and academic achievement through experiences laced with hands on production, shared purpose, and open networks"
I originally saw this referenced in Angela Vierling-Claassen's blog http://liberationmath.org/2013/01/22/moocs-as-a-liberatory-project/
But the larger the MOOC, I propose, the more it destabilizes the centrality of the teacher's role within the course. This may appear counter-intuitive: the larger the group of learners, the more the facilitator may stand out at first as the only identifiable figure in a sea of unknown names or faces. However
If enough people try MOOCs, and begin to see themselves as learners with agency to contribute knowledge and determine what they take from a course experience, this may effect a gradual sociocultural shift towards participatory, communicative concepts of learning.
The new literacies ethos "celebrates inclusion (everyone in), mass participation, distributed expertise, valid and rewardable roles for all who pitch in" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 18).
premise is that it may be productive to consider their potential as large, immersive – and largely unintentional – environments for acculturating people to new digital literacies
This paper argues that networked learning opportunities at the scale MOOCs are beginning to reach have the potential to expose large numbers of people to participatory literacies and learning perspectives, even if and where facilitation and testing are highly instrumental in approach.
Trojan horse for the sociocultural development of participatory perspectives and literacies.
there is potential for peers to connect with peers and develop autonomous channels of information flow that bypass the traditional top-down model of teacher-centered learning
My premise is that this possibility of open, networked participation may become more powerful at a massive scale than in a conventionally sized online course, due to a version of the network effect, whereby "the more people use a service then the more useful those users find it, thus recommending it and adding more users"
emphasizing networked practices, knowledge generation, and distributed, many-to-many channels of communication rather than the conventional teacher-centric focus of traditional courses.
To be digitally literate is to be able to engage the connections and communications possibilities of digital technologies, in their capacity to generate, remix, repurpose, and share new knowledge as well as simply deliver existing information
The conclusions of the project were that MOOCs, as we understood them at the time, embody the participatory ethos of digital practices in their reputational, relational, and networked operations.
The decentralized, distributed nature of this type of communication of one's learning builds on the particular capacities of digital technologies: replicability enables remix and repurposing, searchability enables navigation of decentralized environments, and scalable sharing may lead to unintended audiences. cMOOCs enable and encourage open, participatory work among learners, where the audience is not solely or even primarily the instructor, but rather peers:
The model, in effect, frames learners as scholars: as identities with their own ideas to contribute and disseminate, rather than as conventional students.
While open scholarship focuses on the networked practices of formal academics rather than the motley collection of teachers, faculty, laypeople, and conventional students who have tended to gravitate to cMOOCs' education-focused topics, the open knowledge generation that has emerged from cMOOCs has resulted in formal academic papers as well as a broad, ongoing body of blog posts and shared ideas that might be thought of as what Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012) frame as "networked participatory scholarship" (p. 766).
Ironically, most appear designed to pose little overt threat to the conventions and exclusivity of academic knowledge management, appearing instead to "exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model" (Burton, 2009, para. 4). But the very fact that they have been touted in media as a revolution may position them to reach a wide enough audience to begin to effect a sociocultural shift in participatory, networked literacies. It is the scale of MOOCs – both in the sense of their individual large classes and their status as a rapidly emerging cultural phenomenon – that makes them an inadvertent Trojan horse for the introduction of peer-to-peer concepts and literacies about learning.
And in this paper, I posit that institutions placing their proverbial eggs in the basket of this type of educational future may well be undermining their own positions as purveyors of closed, expert knowledge.
Many xMOOCs may be designed and intended to maintain the expertise model and the market share of elite universities over the specter of knowledge abundance and participatory culture. However, so long as the courses as platforms continue to enable participatory networking and engagement among students, they effectively begin to sow the very seeds of new literacies that challenge and undermine that instrumentalist perspective on education and expertise
This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.
I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism.
but TED's version has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable.
The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, and to make them serve good futures, design as "innovation" just isn't a strong enough idea by itself. We need to talk more about design as "immunisation," actively preventing certain potential "innovations" that we do not want from happening.
f we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.
At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don't work, and don't invest in things that don't make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.