Check, check. Is this thing on? Linguistics isn't generally considered a topic, like one of those sexy STEM courses, that everyone talks about when they talk about degrees and fields to study for job related purposes. For this reason we haven't seen a lot of linguistics related MOOCs.  Last year we had the Virtual Linguistics Campus offer three MOOCs using their own approach to teaching MOOCs

So, we've entered the half-way point of #rhizo14.  The original  topic title had something to do with Declaring your Learning. This of course brought on memories of jokes of airports and questions like "anything to declare?" and smart-alec responses to this question.  Declaring is also Stage 3 of a success in a MOOC, so I guess it made sense in a way that this was during week 3.  That

Well, this week has been particularly crazy, with a couple of days of snow making things pile up at  work, and with a presentation this past Friday on international education at NERCOMP, it means that I've been behind a bit (compared to where  I thought I would be) on blogging for #rhizo14.  I have been keeping track of the facebook discussions, so I think this week I'm consolidating

Cookie cutters: detriment to creativity, or fuel to the creative fire? Last week, while I was updating something on LinkedIn, I saw one of my colleagues post a link to a post by the eLearning Brothers called The Top 10 Best eLearning Game Templates. I am generally not a fan of such list-posts, but every now and again I come across something really interesting.  I usually don't teach courses

The cone of silence ;-) In most cMOOCs I attempt to go back and respond to fellow participant's posts after something has provoked some thoughts.  If I am less busy, I tend to blog more, if I am more busy, I tend to leave more comments.  I guess this semester I am sort of in-between ;-) In any case, from week 1 of the #rhizo14 MOOC here are some things that have piqued my interest: From

Alone in the Dark (DOS, Mac System 7.5) So I'm back to another cMOOC arena, yay!!! Just by chance I came across a Rhizomatic Learning  course offered by Dave Cormier (of MOOC fame), and the course is called Rhizomatic Learning - The Community is the curriculum. The course spans six weeks and this first week was simply an introduction, but as far as intros go, this has been quite a busy week! 

Back at the end of 2011 I started collecting research on MOOCs, pieces from Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle, "news items" from other popular media outlets (like wired.com and forbes) as well as blog posts from certain notable people who commented a lot on the subject of MOOCs.  The idea was to spend a year (2011 to end of 2012) and see not only what the research says, but also what the sentiment

I came across this in an article talking about the Stanford Remote Lab. Pretty nifty!  I wonder what this might mean for online education (of various sorts) ten years down the road.

Just before the spring semester starts and I start getting really busy with the day-job, teaching my class, working on a couple of conference presentations and working on the FutureLearn course on Corpus Linguistcs, and P2PU course with Dave Cormier, I thought I should really jump into a couple of Udacity course offerings to give the platform a real try out. In years past I stayed away, as a learner,

"Design Gold" badge Happy and Prosperous 2014 to anyone who is reading this :-) Since it's a new year, and the semester is starting in about a month's time, I've decided to spend the month-and-a-half between semesters thinking about the course that I teach: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses, a course for graduate level instructional design students.  I was first assigned