MOOCing About

Attempting to do some rapid catch up this morning on #cfhe12 -...

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:23:00 -0400

Attempting to do some rapid catch up this morning on #cfhe12 - Current/Future State of Education, hosted in Desire2Learn. Hitting some significant drag at lift off. Took log in weirdness in stride (system showed me as logged in but when I clicked link from Course Content, system showed me as guest. There was a note from admin that they were having log in issues—reset password as instructed. I tried a few more rounds, didn’t manage to get out of guest mode when in the Course Content, and moved on to view the presentations that have happened. Screen shot here is the result of attempt to view Jeff Selingo presentation archive in GoToMeeting (I tried Safari, Chrome and Firefox—same message for each). I don’t have time to jump into Twitter to find what’s up with this. I imagine it will get solved. Moved on to watch Siva Vaidhyanathan’s presentation which was offered up as a .mov. Yay for success but by now, enthusiasm seriously dampened.

I expect a little drag. More than a little, as I experienced today, is rough.

Reducing drag is one of the main concerns of aeronautical engineers when designing aircraft. Drag can stress different parts of an aircraft which can lead to structural failure during certain maneuvers. Further, reduction of drag has a “domino” effect on other important aspects of flight. The less drag an aircraft has, the faster an aircraft can go, or the less power is needed from the engine. Less powerful engines are generally lighter (that is, have less weight) and need less fuel (that is, cost less to fly). A lighter aircraft means that less lift is needed to fly and the airplane can be more maneuverable. If less lift is needed, a smaller wing is required which decreases weight and drag. All of this, taken together, reduces the cost of building and flying the airplane.

MOOC Survival Strategies 101 - Hootsuite Dashboard for MOOC...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 16:31:25 -0400

MOOC Survival Strategies 101 - Hootsuite Dashboard for MOOC hashtags. And yes, 403x (#stanfordedf), as previously posted, is (not a) MOOC.

Screenshot of a Screencast introduction by George Siemens (I...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:47:00 -0400

Screenshot of a Screencast introduction by George Siemens (I think—he didn’t introduce himself) for #CFHE12 - Current/Future State of Higher Education cMOOC (c for Connectivism). Starting today. As you can see, Gates Foundation is a sponsor along with Athabasca University, basecamp for two of the course catalysts, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Here is George’s welcome. And here’s an animated overview and invitation to join the six-week course by the third facilitator, Dave Cormier. Register here.

These days a person could spend every waking hour MOOC-ing. I...

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:52:58 -0400

These days a person could spend every waking hour MOOC-ing. I have one friend who almost is…participation in several MOOCs simultaneously requires a lot of video viewing, at a minimum.

Recently, I advised a young friend transitioning into a Masters Program after a year off focusing on work—she was seeking strategies for keeping up with the volumes of reading she needs to do every week, and of course, comprehension which is always useful ;D

Videos present a unique challenge. While exploring what professors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are up to with Marginal Revolution University, I discovered one possible approach in a post by Alex—Speed Video. Wow.

WiredAcademic interviewed the pair of blogger/professors from George Mason University. Keyword in the pair’s vision: #participatory. +1

Day 1 of Stanford School of Ed’s (not a MOOC)...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 15:37:00 -0400

Day 1 of Stanford School of Ed’s (not a MOOC) 403x

That’s Roy Pea on the set of 403x. Stanford is certainly one of the hotspots of MOOC experimentation and evolution - with the runaway success of Thrun and Norvig’s AI class, Thrun’s exodus (“Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again…I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”) and launch of Udacity, and Coursera’s innovations like tapping the long tail and “callibrated peer-review.”

As Stanford makes clear in the 403x overview, THIS IS NOT A MOOC. But it’s certainly related. 403x - open to the public for participation and no credit - looks at the digital future of education and asks some big questions.

I especially enjoyed reading this statement (‘bout time someone noticed):

…the boundary between high school and college is becoming ever more fluid, to the point where it is largely symbolic and a potential impediment to positive innovation.

Course readings are here. Course session summaries will be found in the right-hand sidebar,—here’s Day 1.

Why I love #DS106 and CogDogBlog: Playfulness extremely alive...

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 14:59:00 -0400

Why I love #DS106 and CogDogBlog: Playfulness extremely alive and well. Discovery—now I know about iTimeLapse = Delight.

CogDog (alias Alan Levine) is celebrating ds106 day. +1

Start of Coursera Model Thinking course with Scott E Page, U of...

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:56:00 -0400

Start of Coursera Model Thinking course with Scott E Page, U of Michigan. This screen shot from the Where are you from? thread in the General discussion forum sums up in a single image something quite unique about the mooc-ing of education. It’s really quite an extraordinary thing to witness as a participant. (I’m not getting into the nuances of MOOCs here….I’ll leave that to @audreywatters.)

Reading Yong Zhao. Anyone else? Would love to be reading with a...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:45:41 -0400

Reading Yong Zhao. Anyone else? Would love to be reading with a few others. Good incentive to finish it. Certainly relevant to #edstartup.

Beginning EdStartUp 101. Caught the tail end of the facilitators...

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:52:22 -0400

Beginning EdStartUp 101. Caught the tail end of the facilitators hangout this morning and then watched the beginning archived on the site. I watched a few of the intro videos that are appearing on the site. Hello to my fellow EdStartup participants.

Openness in Education MOOC begins Sept. 10. Looking forward to...

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:57:26 -0400

Openness in Education MOOC begins Sept. 10. Looking forward to the journey.

I really appreciate Nancy White’s recap of her week...

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:16:00 -0500

I really appreciate Nancy White’s recap of her week hosting #change11 conversation on Social Artistry. I like having a new role available for myself….social artist. And a new skill to wield more consciously through awareness. Nancy borrowed the term from Etienne Wagner. Here’s a quote from Etienne she pulled from David Wilcox’s blog…I want to capture it here in my own #change11 trail notes (my bolds):

“The key success factor we’ve found is learning citizenship where learning citizenship is a personal commitment to seeing how we are as citizens in this world. Let me give you an example: I know an oncological surgeon in Ontario, Canada who asks himself how to provide the social infrastructure for patients to learn about cancer. An act of learning citizenship is to be able to use who you are to open this space for learning. I’ve come to call these people social artists, people who can create a space where people can find their own sense of learning citizenship.

“I love social artists. In fact I worship them. First because social artists know how to do what I only know how to talk about; and second because I care about the learning of this planet. I think we are in a race between learning and survival. We live in a knowledge economy where any expertise is too complex for any one person. One person can’t be an expert so anyone who can give voice to that need to work together is a social artist.

“I do a lot of consultancy work for training community leaders, but in my heart of hearts I know the real secret of those social artists is not something I can teach. The real secret of those people is knowing how to use who you are as a vehicle for opening spaces for learning. I don’t really have the words – but I just know when I see it. It is a way of tapping into who you are and of making that a gift to the world … it’s about being able to use who I am to take my community to a new level of learning and performance.

“I want to leave you with three questions…

How can you act as a learning citizen in this world?
How can we as a group help , sustain, celebrate that capability among ourselves? If EQUAL has done a bit of that – how do we capture it, nurture it cherish it?
For those of you who are movers and shakers – how can you build an institutional structure that enables people to find their voice in the interests of the people they want to serve? Social artists need to fight … How can we enable a structure that enables those people to do the work that they do?

“These are urgent questions. Social innovation is a matter of the heart, not just projects. We need you to do that for the world, not just Europe”.

Want the whole thing in context? Here is Etienne’s keynote from ShareFair in Rome, September, 2011.

Nancy asks the question, Can social artistry be learned, or it is something some of us just carry with us? My answer, heartily, is YES, social artistry can be learned. Just a few of my dozens of social artistry mentors: Heinz Von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, Laurie Thomas and Sheila Harrie-Augstein, Marshall Rosenberg, Salvador Roquet, Carol and Tom French Corbett, John Holt, Parker Palmer.

(Image: graphic facilitation by Nancy White)

The last two mornings I had 12 people add me to circles in...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:54:00 -0500

The last two mornings I had 12 people add me to circles in Google+ - all from #change11. What a great way to start my day…stepping through each of their pages, reading their Abouts, glimpsing their photos and recent posts, and then adding them to my #change11 circle and occasionally a second circle. I realized that #change11 is a powerful filter for kindred spirits, like Second Life was in 2005 for early adopter changemaking edge-ucators. And I’m really thrilled to be meeting some of the many #change11 participants. I don’t take this opportunity to connect for granted. Such an event is still far too rare. So I am making the time to participate (no small feat) and inventing my own ways of participating that are relatively easy to do (like my visual screen captures).

This is by far the largest online gathering of people deeply engaging the future of learning that I’ve participated in to date (and I’ve participated in many excellent online learning events). I knew it would be quite a party, that’s why I joined the cohort, but living it is even better than I’d imagined. Next post will be about finding a similar, enthusiastic but smaller cohort back in 1999….and collaboratively writing a book online about Creating Learning Communities. This experience of #change11 has reminded me of that time.

Back from a brief hiatus. I hosted the #connectedpd First Friday...

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 20:16:00 -0400

Back from a brief hiatus. I hosted the #connectedpd First Friday live Twitter Chat on Friday, 11.4. Spotted this reflection on the experience by fellow #change11 MOOCer, Mark McGuire. Thanks, Mark, for sharing where you find value in live Twitter chats. You’ll find the chat archive here shortly, along with previous First Friday #connectedpd chats.

Screen grab from a David Wiley video from his intro for the...

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 22:45:00 -0400

Screen grab from a David Wiley video from his intro for the week. I appreciate the questions/activities he posed to #change11 participants:

I would like to invite students to reflect on the practical impact on people they would like to their educational technology / educational research work to have. What kind of change do they want to see in the world? What will they have to do, personally, to create that change? Do they need to start a university, a high school, or an after school program? Do they need to run for public office, or find another way to influence public policy? What kinds of resources or cooperation would be required, and from whom would these come? I would challenge students to create a concept map relating the specific change they want to see in the world and the related activities and resources they will have to engage in or influence in order to bring the change about. An explanatory video talking us through the map would be a great addition.

Spotted on G+ today - #change11 MOOC Motto proposed: We suggest,...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:44:00 -0400

Spotted on G+ today - #change11 MOOC Motto proposed: We suggest, you decide. Ah, so this is why I’m enjoying MOOCing about so much….Stephen Downes expands.

Discovered Power of Open (downloadable pdf) in today’s...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:56:00 -0400

Discovered Power of Open (downloadable pdf) in today’s @change11 newsletter - thanks to MOOCer Mark McGuire. Power of Open is a collection of stories about people using the Creative Commons licensing for their projects. It is edited by Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons and Joi Ito, Chair of Creative Commons. Led me to Jamendo, a CC-licensed music site.

And here’s a #change11 screen shot of Paulo Simões’...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:52:00 -0400

And here’s a #change11 screen shot of Paulo Simões’ Scoop.it Change11. For later reference. Thanks, Paulo. Hadn’t consciously expected to find support for deepening curation skills. What a pleasant surprise. But of course I would. :D #change11 MOOC = filter for Curator Posse

Since I play the role of curator a lot, I’m naturally...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:43:00 -0400

Since I play the role of curator a lot, I’m naturally attracted to Scoop It - and have followed Robin Good’s Real-time News Curation Scoop It, DML Competition’s Badges for Lifelong Learning, and OLnet OER Research curated by the OLnet Team. So a few curation topics caught my eye today in the #change11 newsletter. Like this tutorial on Scoop.it created by Russell Stannard and shared by Paulo Simões…Posting it here for later viewing.

Had abandoned Flickr for FB some time ago. So I dove back in to...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:52:00 -0400

Had abandoned Flickr for FB some time ago. So I dove back in to Flickr much to my surprise, set up new PRO account (ad-free now), and created a #change11 set.

Jumped over to Jux but they don’t have subscribe by RSS or...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:47:00 -0400

Jumped over to Jux but they don’t have subscribe by RSS or email. I liked the BIG photo display though. Jumping back to tumblr. Here I go….