Multilitteratus Incognitus

Alright, so here it is, week 6 of NRC01PL. Even though I am technically  in the same week as everyone I guess I am still marching to the beat of my own drummer.  I wanted to join the live session on Tuesday, but other things intervened.  Oh well. The topic of this week is the personal learning assistant.  Hence my little callout to the four major virtual assistants (Siri for Apple, Alexa for Amazon, Cortana for Windows, and Google...for Google). I actually did try asking Cortana to "show me something to learn" but  I guess the bing search engine didn't know what the heck to do with my query. Google wasn't that much help either.  We haven't reached the point yet where they know enough about me in order to recommend something.  It's a little odd given how much data google probably "knows" about me. So, what is a Personal Learning Assistant (not to be confused with Personal Assistant for Learning)?  According to Stephen the PLA is a platfo...

It seems that Inside Higher Education is playing a game of 7 questions . I thought that it would be interesting to respond to these when I has little more brain space to write some more in-depth answer instead of "agree or disagree" which was the original prompt.  These might very well fit into my Educational Leadership course now that I think of it.  So the questions are in italics , and my responses are in regular text. 1) A higher education program where students graduate with a credential, but without substantial career development, is a failed experience. It depends! I don't necessarily see higher education as being concurrent  with career development.  Sometimes, in some programs, and certainly depending on the degree, the benefits of higher education are seen in the long term, not just in the short term after graduation (i.e. gaining a new job or obtaining a promotion).  Some programs require  apprenticeships or practica.  In such cases I ...

My apologies, in advance, if I seem rude.  One of my teachers in high school (maybe a few of them, in fact!) said that there is no such thing as a stupid question.  Perhaps this is true in the context of a classroom where if a learner (or group of learners) don't get a concept and they wish to ask a question to disambiguate.  Sometimes the questions we pose also demonstrate our understanding of the basic component that build up our question and hence our question can shine a light on things we've misunderstood and give an opportunity for more knowledgeable others to help us correct misconceptions. However, this is not the case.  Will MOOCs replace the LMS is a really stupid question. I was reading a post over at YourTrainingEdge that was titled Will MOOCs replace the LMS . I actually came to it thinking that it was a bait-and-switch type of situation because the two aren't comparable. a MOOC is a course (and in the corporate sector I would say that the most ...

With the semester over, and the brain working on momentum, I've decided to capitalize on the spare brain-power, and time, to finally read a book that I agreed to write a review for back in the summer (yeah, I know - a tad bit late...). The book is a collection of articles titled  Macro-Level Learning through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Strategies and Predictions for the Future (an IGI global title).  I'll come back to the topic of the book as a whole after I am done with this process.  I think that going through chapter-by-chapters, picking and reacting to some things that piqued (and poked at) my interests is a little more interesting that trying to condense 15 chapters into one book review. This is sort of what I did with the #rhizoANT review. Chapter 1 is titled  Mining a MOOC: What Our MOOC Taught Us about Professional Learning, Teaching, and Assessment .  The abstract gives us a sense of the article: In July 2014, a massive open online...

The other day Rebecca posted on her blog and asked how we (I think she meant other RhizoANT collaborators) view email .  How is email different from other technologies that we use to communicate with one another for various projects.  In a previous RhizoANT post I wrote about (what seemed to be) our main vehicle for communication, the Google Doc.  Of course, as Rebecca points out we also used email to discuss some topics off the record, sort of like the sidebar that lawyers have with the judge in a court case. Just to kick off I'll start from the stance that I don't hate email.  I do my best to be at inbox-zero.  It never really happens for me, but I do my best.  At any given time I have anywhere from 5-10 email messages that need my attention.  As I respond to them, I archive them (no need for filing, just hit archive in gmail!)  While I have access to Google Inbox I have opted to not use it.  I prefer the look, feel, and functionality of ...

Did someone say "swarm"? Alright. I've completed the first half of Latour's book on Actor-Network Theory titled Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory . In a couple of blog posts (really soon) I will be continuing my exploration of ANT through this dialogue I've developed with Latour. I also, at the recommendation of Maha (I think) read Cressman's brief overview of ANT ( PDF here ). So now, inspired by Maha's post , I turn my attention to utilizing ANT (whatever my rudimentary understandig of it is) toward an analysis of the #RhizoResearchGroup's use of collaborative technologies.  Specifically I am dealing with Google Docs (or at least some elements of Google Docs given that ANT can lead you down a rabbit hole). Briefly I would describe ANT as being a philosophy, or frame of mind, that attempts to account for both human and non-human elements in various interactions. Non-human elements can be technology, such as the ke...

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou...

Vice Admiral Tolya Kotrolya Well, here we are! The final(ish) week of #edcmooc.  As I wrote in my tweet earlier this week, I think #edcmooc, like #ds106, is probably more of a way of life for some than an actual course.  Sure, there won't be additional prescribed readings or viewings after this week, so the course is technically over, however the hallmark of any good course, as far as I am concerned, is one where the learners keep thinking about the material long after the course is done.  They keep engaging with the provided materials and with any new material that they encounter in critical ways.  In other words, once the course is done we don't shelve and compartmentalize the knowledge gained and leave it to gather dust like an old book on the shelf. In any case, like previous weeks, here are some thoughts on the hangout, readings, and viewings from this week. To be honest, I don't particularly care about a certificate of completion, but I am interested in d...

So, we are at the end of Week 2 of #edcmooc and we are wrapping up the unit on Utopias and Dystopias, and everything in between (because thing is really that black and white). As with the week before there were some videos to watch and think about. I think that the no-lecture-videos format works well.  I like to see what people do with certain conversation starters and where they go with them. As I said last week, even though this course is run through coursera it's very much a cMOOC format to me. One of the videos presented was the video bellow on bridging the future.  Honestly this video seemed really cool, and a nice proof of concept of what could potentially be done with technology. Students, in this case, seem to be using junior  versions of tools, like CAD, that professionals use to do their work. This seems both useful to learn concepts, but useful to also begin learning the tools that are used in real life for these types of tasks.  The one concerning thi...

Seems to me, that even though I dropped the Logic Course on coursera (loved those two professors by the way!), Logic is back to haunt me ;-) I came across  a blog post the other day through my RSS reader, which stated the following: As massive open online courses (MOOCS) have exploded in popularity educators are coming under increasing pressure to make an effective use of the new technology. To help instructors realize the potential of the new content delivery platforms Georgia Tech is unveiling a MOOC about creating a MOOC. To be honest, the first thing that came to mind was the following question: What does Georgia Tech know about MOOCs and MOOC pedagogy? I didn't recall anyone off the top of my head that was from Georgia Tech that has been involved with MOOCs a lot over the past couple of years.  In any case, I followed the link and the link of this quick news blurb links to the " Fundamentals of Online Education ".  The course isn't about MOOCs but, it seems...

Well, one more campus technology conference and expo is done! The Campus Technology annual summer conference is the nation’s premier higher education technology conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning using the latest in applications, social software and immersive platforms. Initially I was thinking about writing a blog post per day (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday), but I had way too many interesting conversations with presenters, participants, and vendors to be able to do this (brain stops working after a certain point, you see).  So I thought I would pick 3 of my top sessions, and my top vendor of the show and talk a bit about these. KEYNOTES First of all, the keynotes by Mark Milliron (Chancellor of Western Governor's University) on "Deeper Learning Conversations ...

Here's a quick recap of yesterday's NMC12 breakout sessions. I decided to skip the morning plenary- 2 hours of 15 minute presentations is a little too much for me, and I can get those on iTunesU anyway ;-). Yesterday's breakout sessions were mostly interesting (and I had quite a few interesting side conversations!)   Exploring a Tablet Application for the seminar Classroom With Eric Gordon from: Emerson College And Drew Harry from: MIT   This was the first session the day (and if I am not mistaken I had seen something like his last January at the NERCOMP mobile session). We've seen tablet (or laptop) applications that tap into the backchannel in large lectures to capture the pulse of the classroom, but the idea behind this particular application was to tap into the "backchannel" in small lecture group (15 or fewer, based on the design of the application) and the idea is to be able to propose topics for discussion and to track discussion topic time. There wa...

Recently I read an article on the Chronicle of higer education on Program vs Technology . It was interesting, I'll give it that. It's just that recently (last couple of years) geeks both the blogosphere and the twittersphere seem to be longing for a time when computer science was taught in all of our schools (high school and specifically in this article University), and we've moved away from a "computer science for all" approach, or we've severely dumbed it down, by introducing those silly office applications. In a previous blog post I also had commented on a similar story lamenting the fact that schools weren't teaching kids programming language in school and the author had taken so much away from learning a programming language (BASIC I think) that it's inconceivable that kids aren't taught programming (now if only I could easily find that blog post). In any case, some of these commentators and bloggers are clamoring for a time that didn't ...

This is my first semester teaching (yay!) and since we're eventually migrating to Blackboard Lean 9 on my campus I've decided to be part of a pre-pilot using Coursesites (fantastic and free service, by the way, if you are looking for a free LMS). One of the perks of coursesites, that briefly was taken away from us last year but is now back, is access to Blackboard Mobile on iOS, Android and Blackberry (hopefully a windows phone version soon?).  In any case, since I don't have a computer at home that I regularly have access to, I tend to use my iPad and Blackboard Mobile to keep on top of things.  While Bb Mobile is a great app, it does have a few shortcomings that I hope Blackboard addresses in the near future.  Some of it is (or should be) easy to implement, while other things might need a little more work on the back end to make feasible.  So here is my laundry list: What's New and Due This is a great feature of Bb Learn - it essentially gives you (student and...

This week in Change11 our host is Jon Dron (rhymes with Tron ;-) )and to topic is Soft technologies, hard technologies and everything in between . While reading the seed post I got a distinct mental image of Steve Job's voice reading Jon's initial post - it had a jobsian feel to it. The article is an interesting epistemological view of technology; technology being very broad by definition since pedagogy is also taken to be a technology. I honestly don't know what to make of this week, just yet anyway. It was an interesting read, it did engage me mentally, but where to go from here?  I suppose the activity itself might be a good starting point... So Jon asks us to ... Provide at least one possible educational use for an unenhanced standard email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook Express that requires nothing more than that email client and its usual supporting infrastructure (network connection, operating system etc are fine, but no other distinct applications lik...