A long time ago (in technology terms), in an academia very close to us, there were stories of professors who suspended their MOOCs, or decided rant in the class forums and ultimately to walk away because the MOOC wasn't what they expected, and we all (probably) rolled our collective eyes.OK, maybe we didn't all roll our collective eyes, but I remember thinking that the "participate or get the heck

Moving along in NRC01PL, here are some reflections of what was presented in week 3 of the Personal Learning MOOC.  It's been rather busy at work, and at Athabasca as I am wrapping up my semester, so I haven't really gelled with anyone else in this cMOOC.  I think that the topic would be interesting to discuss in connectivist fashion, but I have not yet (satisfactorily) done any wayfinding.

CCK11 Tweet visualizationAlright, after a few days of being sidelined with a seasonal cold, I'm back on #dalmooc.  Still catching up, but I have a feeling I am getting closer to being at the same pace as the rest of the MOOC ;-)  In any case, this is a reflection on week 3 where we started messing around with social network analysis (SNA).  This is cool because it's something that I

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things. One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14) is this

It's Open Teaching time on #ioe12!Having been involved with MOOCs for close to a couple of years now (in the fringes early on, and on the main stage since January 2011), I thought I knew quite a lot about open teaching, but Wiley video presentation surprised me and I learned something new!  I had run across Wiley's syllabi on Open Content a while back, (before this course) but I wasn't aware

It's Open Content week on Introduction to Open Education with David Wiley (well, it was Open Content week a while back, but I just got to it!) This week, at least compared to the previous two weeks, there was little reading and materials (perhaps this is a good week to work on the Research Badge, eh? ;-)  ) and, at least for me, I think I have come across these materials before in Change11 and

It's week 2 in FSLT, and the topic of this week is group participation. One of the things mentioned this week by the facilitators are the roles that people take in group work, which was quite interesting, as I could see people in my past group work experience taking on those roles consciously or subconsciously. In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last

I had come across Jupidu's post on Sensemaking in a MOOC a while back, but I haven't had much time to respond to it just yet (until now I guess ;-)  ).  I was actually thinking of my participation in MOOCs in general; as well as the two MOOCs I am now participating in - those being Change11 and DS106.  I was actually thinking of points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in specifically and I thought I would

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs.  Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated, and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging.Tony writes (and this is not the

OK, so it's week two of ChangeMOOC and I am looking at  the Course Outline which points me to a Google Spreadsheet. I see that the topic this week is Mobile Learning (über-cool!) and I am asked to go to another page where supposedly I will have access to some content, activities, and other things that one would expect in a learning module.  Now there are two problems here:(1)

Another MOOC is almost in the can (to borrow terminology from TWiT).  I have to say that even though I was really interested in this MOOC, eduMOOC that is, I really have a hard time finding something that really made it stand out. This was my fourth MOOC this year and I can easily say that MobiMOOC and CCK11 were the two top MOOCs.  LAK11 was good, but it was way, way, too compressed for

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial; min-height: 14.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Arial; color: #123cee} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline} Note: I had originally written this for the UMassOnline blog, but since it's not posted yet, I am cross posting here :-)This past December

I just had quite an interesting realization - it's only the end of Week 2 on mobiMOOC (1/3 done with the course) and there are already a ton of resources that have been contributed by participants; a lot of these resources are scholarly resources in the form of studies and published research articles on mLearning.  This is pretty cool!  There is also a delicious mobiMOOC repository available

Another interesting post by Jaap in this week's (final week) of CCK11 made me think.Jaap writes:As a connectivist (CCK11) I do not like the words “acquisition of knowledge”, I like to that to be “connecting to information”.This made me think of the philosophy behind knowledge, how one sees knowledge and information (and ultimately wisdom?), and the semantics behind the words we use. Take for

This is it, last week of CCK11.I went through the materials, well...I mostly skimmed through them to be honest, but I really did have a blast going through them, especially Stephen's 1998 prognostications of technology and education in the future. In 1998 I graduated high school and started my undergraduate studies at the University. It's interesting that ideas, such as the PAD (or PADD if you are

We are nearing the end of CCK11, (and we're starting mobiMOOC at the same time!) and I came across this post by Jaap, asking a few question on how connectivism fits in with with established teaching methods. I've got a few thoughts on the issue...What does a teacher see of connectivism? What will change in education as a result of connectivism? What does a connectivist lesson look like?Connectivist

I've been following along last week's posts on Open Education, and the whole concept of MOOCs, open educational resources and language learning has been swirling around in my brain.  I've known people who've learned languages, online, by immersion. I think that they started off conversing using a common language (probably English) and then slowly transitioned over to the language that they wanted

Being on vacation this week, and with little access to a computer and a monitor, my CCK11 involvement is pretty mobile- reading posts and materials on my iPhone and blogging from it as well. I've been using my phone for the same things in the past (email, RSS and PDF reading) so it's not such a change from the norm - with the exception that I am using this tiny screen in a more sustained matter than

I've been mostly lurking these past couple of weeks on CCK11. I've enjoyed reading both assigned readings and reading through blog entries of participants. Most blog entries are in English, which isn't surprising considering that this MOOC is run in English, but at least once, if not, more times per week I've seen postings in Italian, French and Portuguese - I'm sure I've seen Spanish as well, but

I was reading one of the items for this week's CCK11 session, which happens to be on PLEs. The readings was an Educause "7 things you should know about..." type of document. If you don't know what a PLE (personal learning environment) is, the abstract gives a good succinct overview:The term personal learning environment (PLE) describes the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual

This past week I listened to the Neil Selwyn presentation (perhaps I am a week behind) and I have to say that I am indeed a Neil Selwyn fan or best rephrased, I am a fan of his critical point of view on technology and the bling use of technology in the classroom.I came across Neil's work a few months back as I was finding academic articles on the subject of the Net Generation (also known as Millenials,

OK, so my first MOOC is almost over...so what did I think?I have to say that as an experience LAK11 was actually quite interesting. The subject matter was interesting (even though we tended to go toward the business/finance side of the house quite often) and there were quite a few interesting personalities that were part of the course.The course started out with a bang! There were a ton of people in

OK, so I finally was able to listen to the digital scholarship podcast for CCK11 the other day (man, I cranked those speakers up quite high in some spots!) and I have to say that it was quite interesting (click here for MP3 link). I have to say that the concept of digital scholarship isn't new or alien to me, having listened to Dan, Tom and Mills on digital campus for the last few years (great podcast

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?)This week in CCK11 we've got

The other day I was reading a CCK11 blog on a way to visualize the connections on your LinkedIn network.  Since this week's topic is "the network" on CCK11, I thought it would be cool to see how my network looks. You always get a notification on your social networks indicating who a particular contact has in common with you, but you don't generally get the full picture. With a few hundred contacts

This week's readings bring back memories; memories of computer science (creating algorithms in C to traverse a network) and memories of my MBA (organizational development).  Fun stuff!Krebs' reading was short, but quite interesting nevertheless.  What stood out for me was thisCommon wisdom in personal networks is "the more connections, the better." This is not always so. What really matters

So here are some thoughts on CCK11 for this first week - I've broken it down to both format and theory.Format:I like the fact that this is a distributed blog MOOC. It gives me an opportunity to see what people are writing on their personal blogs, in addition to the CCK content that they post. It's also a nice way of filtering information for me since I don't have a waterfall of information coming down

OK, I stole (errrr....creatively borrowed) the title of this blog post, but I don't remember who posted it first (I'll rectify this in a blog post about CCK11 by Friday.  In any case, with school officially over for me, I got my MA in Applied Linguistics, just waiting for my diploma now, I thought I would mess around with the concept of a Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).There are two MOOCs