Multilitteratus Incognitus

This past week the web was abuzz with new research to come out of Harvard and MIT on cheating identification in MOOCs, specifically xMOOCs hosted on the edX platform, but I suspect that any platform that collects appropriate analytics could see this used.  The title of the paper is Detecting and Preventing "Multiple-Account" Cheating in Massive Open Online Courses and it's an interesting read. I find the ways of crunching data collected by web-servers as a way of predicting human behavior fascinating.  While I am more of a qualitative researcher at heart, I do appreciate the ways in which we can use math, data, and analytics to derive patterns. That said, my main argument with the authors of the article are not the methods they use, but rather the actual utility of such an algorithm.  The authors write that CAMEO (Copying Answers using Multiple Existences Online)† is a potential threat to MOOCs because CAMEO is highly accessible. Anyone can create additional ac...

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 on CBT, WBT or other self-paced eLearning.  It's an interesting topic, but it really isn't my cup of tea, so I wouldn't voluntarily agree to teach an entire semester of such a course. In any case, last semester I was peer reviewing a colleague's course (and to some extent co-teaching it because I had a hand in grading and content and assignment creation), which just so happened to be in Multimedia.  The particular spin that this course took was to use multimedia to create a self-paced course. So, with this fresh in my mind, with the discussions we had last week in #rhizo14...

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 Jenny comes to the following quote: For me, learning isn’t so much about what we do – cheating or otherwise – but more about who we are and who we become – and as such is associated with ethical and moral dimensions. Does living in a digitally networked world, a world of rhizomatic learners change what we commonly understand to be the basic moral principles that govern behaviour between learners? This was quite interesting, and something that made the gears in my head turn. If I had to discuss learning, especially the learning that happens in MOOCs, I would say that learning is abou...

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!  It's nice to see fellow cMOOC participants from previous MOOCs like Dave, Jaap, Rebecca and Penny, but also fellow locals, from UMass Boston, Peter Taylor. This first week we are tackling the topic of cheating as a weapon for learning. We were encouraged to think about how we can use the idea of cheating as a tool to take apart the structures that we work in; and to think about what this says about learning,  power and how we (the participants) see teaching.  There have been quite a few blogs up to this point, that I have not had an opportunity to read yet, but I thought ...