• Formative: formative assessments are done throughout the duration of the course
• Summative: summative assessments are done at the conclusion of the course (think: final exam)

Every time I want to write something about the topic of "what is a MOOC," another interesting post comes up! To date I've read posts by Jenny (including the 3-4 posts that she references in here post), Stephen, John and Osvaldo. Most of these retweeted since they were quite interesting.

I don't think, personally, that there is much poi t to debating what is a MOOC. Taking a page out of Stephen's talk, I think that the MOOC is fundamentally about education, self-directed education. Sometimes there will be content, and lots of it (AI) and other times there won't be top down content (PLENK), but somewhere, somehow there will be some interaction. Even in Connectivist MOOCs we don't always see interaction from a lot of people, given how many lurkers there are. So, in the end, it's not a black and white scale for content and interaction, but rather it's one large swath of gray!

Osvaldo had mentioned that maybe we need another name for MOOCs, or at least the original idea of a Connectivist course, given that the term MOOC has become en vogue and has been co-opted by commercial interests. Perhaps this is true, but the cynic in me believes that no matter what new name is chosen, if commercial interests see money or fame in it, they will co-opt those new terms as well and then we will be looking for yet another term to differentiate ourselves (and in that wake we will have a ton of confused MOOCers).

I tend to see MOOCs as the massive online open equivalent to on-campus courses. Just like campus courses MOOCs could potentially take on many characteristics. In on-campus, in person courses, you could be bored or inspired when sitting in a large auditorium lecture where you have a one-way broadcast of information and you are chastised for talking or chatting or passing notes to your neighbors.

At the same time, in the same university you may have a seminar course where the students are in charge of leading discussions. Sometime those seminars have specific topics and specific readings to be covered by the student presenters who often bring their own lived experiences and thoughts into the presentation, another's times the seminar has a broad topic, and the students are in charge of presenting (and assigning to their fellow students) the reading material. The role of the instructor is purely a guiding one in this context.

These, of course, aren't the only two ways of conducting a course on campus, there are many more permutations between these two extremes. The same, I think, is true with massive online courses. Some will be instructivist in nature, others will not, and others will be a mix of pedagogies. Just as there is need to specifically state the pedagogy type in an on campus class, so, I believe, it's not necessary to state the pedagogy in a massive online course. Would itbe helpful? Yes it would, for some Learners anyway.

In the end, renaming Connectivist MOOCs to have more specific names places too much emphasis on the delivery, and not enough on learning. If I've learned one thing as a linguist, it's that language changes, and the term MOOC, despite it being quite young, it has already changed from its original meaning. Now we should focus on learning :-)

Finally catching up on some Change11 stuff! This past week I've been thinking about a post by bioram on cognitive dissonance on liberal arts education. It seems like the topic has been quite popular in the past couple of weeks because another blog post came out from a student who decided not to go to college (because he wasn't sufficiently challenged), a blog post on the Chronicle on whether someone should pursue a B.A., and finally an episode on a television lawyer show (Harry's Law) regarding a student who moved out from his parents home because they were forcing him to go to high school when he was making more than $70,000 making "some twitter app."

I think that if people don't want to go to college, it's perfectly fine. If you are one of those few well positioned and talented individuals that can make over $70,000 on the web be my guest. In this case, however, I see college of a sort of insurance. If your startup goes belly up, or decides to sell the company for a ton of money and the new owners lay off half the employees, you may be out of luck! Sure, there is always a possibility that someone may snatch you up, but if you are sending out resumes, without a high school diploma (or GED) or college diploma, your chances are considerably less as far as HR departments are concerned.

Now for the rest of us who didn't (or won't) be making $70,000 on some internet startup, college, and a liberal arts education are important - however the benefits are never clearly articulated. This is both a problem with academia, and the job market. From the job market perspective (at least in the last 20 years, maybe more) there's been an expectation that people go to college and for them to get trained (not educated) to work in a specific sector. Usually these are the professional degrees: lawyers, doctors, accountants and so on. This expectation has also trickled down to other degrees as well, but not all degrees are professional degrees. Not all degrees have a one-to-one correspondence with a profession - and this is where we get into trouble. This is also where people get snarky and say "get used to saying 'would you like fries with that' if you get a [INSERT DEGREE] degree." This is not healthy for anyone involved.

Some undergraduate programs (like Northeastern University, if I am mistaken) do require all of their undergraduate to undertake a mandatory one year internship before they are eligible to graduate, it's part of their coursework. This way, regardless of your major, you have working knowledge of the working world and can figure out how the stuff you learned fits in with what you want to do. I think that this is a model to emulate. Sure, this will add another year of study, and most of the schools are reluctant to do this (since the climate in the US happens to be of the "be done sooner" variety) but I think it would be immensely beneficial.

Now, academia (and K-12 education) also has a role to play in this, and they are culpable as well. When I was an undergraduate I had to take a whole lot of general education requirements. Some in the arts, some in the sciences, some in the social sciences. I was told that "it would come in handy when I was at a dinner party and I needed to be able to talk intelligently about XYZ." Now, this was making a few assumptions:

1. that I would want to attend or host dinner parties
2. that their variety of liberal arts education was the only way to do things
3. that I wouldn't be able to talk intelligently about things if I didn't take those courses.

For what it's worth, I did enjoy some of my "rounded education" courses as a undergraduate. Art History does come in handy, so does English (despite the typos I make, I think my thoughts are coherent enough on these blog posts). Philosophy was interesting, but I remember no specifics - at the same time, I think that learning how to argue a point was a better skill.

Academia's issue is how they articulate the importance of a liberal arts education. It is important, but they frame it in terms that they understand - not in terms that are relevant to us. Sure, as we grow up we do attend dinner parties, and we do want to get the respect of our peers and not sound like fools. At the same time, when kids go to college the don't care about dinner parties or corporate events. What they want is a degree to get a job. If you frame liberal arts education as getting a leg up when applying for jobs, and making it relevant to their finding-a-job frame of mind, the rest will follow (or so goes my theory).

This is my final AAAL wrap up post, this time focusing on Computer Assisted Langauge Learning (CALL). There were a few interesting presentations (I guess for more CALL stuff I need to go to the CALICO conference) at AAAL on computer assisted language learning.

One presentation (from a colleague at UMass Amherst if I am not mistaken) focused on using WIMBA to teach Japanese completely online. David Malinowski from UC Berkely spoke about a collaboration between UC Berkely and Universite de Lyon II where undergraduate students from UC Berkeley were paired up with Masters students in France learning to become teachers of French (French as a Second Language), using Skype (and later on a homebrew system) to tutor students. Another presenter was presenting on the use of Blogs as ethnographic and reflective journals for students who were learning Spanish (in Spain) during a semester abroad program. The last presentation I went to that dealt with technology was one where (in a Japanese class) students were asked to create a digital story (1 per semester).

There were quite a few interesting things about all these, check out my live blogs on storify for more, but there is one thing that really stood out about the digital storytelling exercise. The student who was showcased created a video-game aesthetic story. She herself wasn't a gamer, but her roomate was, so she decided to pick up techniques from games to present her story (introduction of a somewhat obscure anime character to american fans of anime, in Japanese). This was quite interesting to see students pushing into different (linguistic) registers and learning on their own in order to create a better story - so in the end they don't just practice and learn the language from the book, but they extend and expand their various literacies. This was a nice project.

Another thing that stood out from the (again another Japanese class) were the off-screen activities of students. Students using WIMBA for tutoring were not visible to the instructor (they were just using the VoIP and whiteboard functions). Students however admitted that they sought help from more knowledgeable others when they were doing their exercises, and thus learning from others. This was quite interesting because, at least in my generation, the passing of notes in class, or wispering some help to your neighbor was a no-no. This sort of in-class (and out of class) peer scaffolding has been shown to be beneficial.

As an aside, I was really surprised that many of my fello attendants (linguists and language teachers) were so overwhelmed with technology. They were amazed at tools like edmodo (which have been out for a while) and I kept hearing comments like "where do you find these things?" or "How do you know what works?" Well, you find things by subscribing to educational technology newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds and participating on twitter. You also find these things by talking to your friendly instructional designer and/or instructional technologist. It amazed me that people didn't think of us (instructional designers) when thinking about their classes. We could be such a great asset. I wonder where the problem lies - is it bad communication on our part? or is it blinder on theirs?