The more I read chapter in Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future, the more I am starting to feel like Anton Ego from the animated movie Ratatouille ;-)  It's not that I am aiming to write harsh reviews of the stuff I read, but I kind of feel like the anticipation I have for reading some published things about MOOCs just

It's the final stretch of 2014! This makes it my fourth year in exploring MOOCs - boy does time fly!  When I started off with LAK11 I was really just looking for ways to continue learning for free.  While I do get a tuition benefit at work, this also involves standard semesters of 13 weeks, getting work-release time (since online learning isn't covered by the benefit) and retaining the motivation

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

Yesterday morning I was catching up on some #cfhe12 blog posts by Bryan Alexander (who I have not seen in a MOOC in ages), a blog post about defining MOOCs  by Rolin Moe,  and my colleague Rebecca who writes about the ease and usefulness in MOOCs†. First, let me respond to Rolin's points (since I happened to read his blog post first).There are lots of people looking at the future of academic

It's quite interesting, but the topic of MOOCs and accreditation keeps coming up :-)The post that prompted this blog post came from a post I saw on MobiMOOC today regarding information assessment and recognition of success.  In MobiMOOC 2012 one of the new things that is baked into the course is the awarding of badges, with an eye toward Mozilla's Open Badges. There are currently three types of

One of the first things to deal with when tackling any topic is quantifying what we are talking about.  Since this is MobiMOOC, one of the key terms that ought to come up in the discussion is what exactly is mobile learning?  This discussion did indeed come up yesterday (see forum here).Let me just say that mLearning definitions are probably incomplete and they are subject to an ever evolving

I just noticed on the Google group for mobimooc that my MRT colleagues (Micheal and Rebecca) have posted their guides on how they will be participating in MobiMOOC this year, so I thought that it might be a good idea to do the same since mobiMOOC just started, and it's good to set expectations ;-)I have to say that I generally don't come back for "seconds" once a MOOC is done. Once the course is done,

Here is a preview of the facilitator lineup for MobiMOOC12 (straight from the MobiMOOC group!)With the start of the course still two months away, our grand group of facilitators was completed last week and here are the guides-on-the-side for all the upcoming mobile learning topics (in completely random order). All of us cover 4 continents and 9 different mobile learning topics:Mobile

Well, the BonkOpen MOOC is almost over, I earned my badge (seen on the right) and in the process picked up some new knowledge, information, skills, and professional contacts! At the same time I was able to see Blackboard Learn in action as a host for a massive online course.I think, that by and large, the MOOC was a good one, and the organizers and coordinators were responsive to the people who attended

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

This past week in Change11 we had George Veletsianos as the facilitator.  It was a pretty nice week, I really enjoyed the three articles he posted as readings. It seems like most of the posts in the daily (the few posts) were about MIT and Harvard and EdX....yaaawwwwnnnnn....Seriously, isn't EdX just a continuation of the OpenCourseWare movement that MIT started?  Let's just call it

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

The other day I was thinking of the research methods class that I may be teaching in the spring (as of yet there are only two students signed up) and I was reading a research article for the literature review for the MobiMOOC paper that the MRT is working on.  In this article quite a few things correlated, but I they didn't necessarily cause each other. To be fair, the researchers did not claim

This paper seems to have made the rounds while I was away from blogging last week, but I thought it would be worthwhile  posting it on my blog just the same :-)The second paper of the MRT (mobiMOOC research team) is now available through the  International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning (IRRODL) and is titled "Using mLearning and MOOCs to understand chaos, emergence, and

The MobiMOOC research team has been working on our third paper, further analyzing aspects of MOOCs, and MobiMOOC in specific.  Our forthcoming paper tackles the topic of emotive language usage in MOOC discussions as a predictor of continued, or future, participation in the course. We are currently in the process of going over and refining the paper, but I don't want to give away the punchline

Since Week 8 of Change11 has yet to start (materials seem no where to be found) I thought it would be worth going back and commenting on my previous post on MOOC summative evaluations. The question posed by Alan Selig was how to get summative evaluations from MOOC participants when you have dip-in-jump-out model for most MOOCs; I say most because at least the language MOOC I will be

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

I was reading Micheal's blog the other night and I realized that the Conference Proceedings for mLearn 2011 are now up!  You can download them from the Conference website, or you can read them on Scribd (see bellow)In other news, it seems like the MobiMOOC research team is big in China :-) We were contacted yesterday by PhD students (under the direction of their advisor) to see if we would consent

Congrats to everyone in the MobiMOOC research group for getting the  Best Paper Award at the mLearn 2011 conference!  In addition to myself, the team is made up of  (alphabetical order):  Sean C. Abajian, Inge deWaard, Michael Sean Gallagher, Rebecca Hogue, Nilgün Özdamar Keskin, and Osvaldo Rodriguez .A big thank you to Rebecca, Michael and  Nilgun

Despite the fact that I am technically a digital native (BS and meaningless as this term might be) I still cling to paper - perhaps because it's cheap and (up until recently) freely available.  With a plethora of academic articles piling up, and eBooks to read (granted, most are public domain like the Divine Comedy and The Prince), I thought I would shed my reliance on paper this semester and

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

Last week a colleague of mine alerted me to some free local workshops for educators.  Initially I saw the first week's workshops and thought that they might be too basic for me, but luckily another co-worker pointed out that Week 2 had some mobile development workshops - I guess the lesson here is to never judge a set of workshops by the first week!In any case, since mobiMOOC was a recent occurrence and

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

MobiMOOC ended last week, but the list is still going, much to my surprise! Granted it's not as active as it was before when it was in session, but a bunch of us interested people do continue to contribute - as a matter of fact we're planning on co-authoring a collaborative paper on the whole thing!  I don't really know what the progress of that will be since I am not the team leader on it, but

It's been about a month since I finished reading all the books, articles, news-items and non-print media items for my research on Digital Natives. I also went through and I classified everything, took notes and in general just got prepared to write, but I have not done so. Part of it is that I can't bear to rehash the sheer amount of bullshit and "common  wisdom" that's been mindlessly reproduced

I've been a bit silent on mobiMOOC these past few days, mostly sitting back, reading and taking time to think about things. One of the ideas that has come to mind is using services like GoWalla and Foursquare to check-into locations and using this as some sort of mLearning platform.At UMass Boston the College of Management has a Management Achievement Program (MAP). In this program undergraduates,

I have a feeling that this question falls into the category of "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"... but I will ask the question anyway :-)This question came to me by reading Sheena's comment in my Different Levels of m post a few days ago. Sheena wrote that she was thinking of an SMS based mLearning project, being inspired by text4baby. Having never

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

Week 2 of mobiMOOC is underway - and there's been a ton of discussion during week 1! (much more than I expected actually).  It's amazing to me than mLearning has become synonymous (these days) with smartphones, apps on those smartphones and mobile data.  One doesn't have to go too far back in the research literature to find mLearning to be something that was based on regular phones, using

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