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Blog post by Stephen Downes exploring what a MOOC does and does not do--it does not replicate or build on past failed educational pathways where a person--adult or child--is not motivated enough to invest time in his/her own learning path. He mentions that online gaming is the best pre-MOOC and equivalent to MOOC for young people. Makes me wonder about my addiction to WordsFree and Scrabble on my iphone and desire to beat the computer again and again. Or enrolling in a MOOC where the opportunity to connect with smart, similarly-quested learners/achievers/doers must motivate me to overcome challenges of schedule, technology, serendipitous approach to learning, self-expression, etc. The MOOC is simply a much bigger playground where my motivation and my two feet (or eyes!) rule my behavior .

#change11, blog post by Bon Stewart, May 2, 2012 And here's the rub... "The original MOOCs - the connectivist MOOCs a la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others - have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They've been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator's expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants' knowledge and experiences and ideas. They've been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They've been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn't stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they've given learners not just access to information but to networks. They've been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual. The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions."

article in Academic Matters, the Journal of Higher Education, by Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt, May 2012 issue. Excerpt: "Expertise will be earned and maintained through ongoing lifelong education, not conferred once and good for life. Open learning systems offer the possibility for the kind of continuous lifelong learning that will be necessary as the pace of technological and scientific knowledge development increases. Like athletes, learners will not just learn once, but will maintain a level of performance ability in their chosen field through ongoing study and participation in learning communities."

Facilitating life long learning should be the goal of every teacher. I think that sometimes it is so cumbersome - passing tests, etc., that the fun part of learning is lost.