In What ways ...

have you responded to my question of a few blogs ago:

"What makes a mooc open? merely that it is open to anyone for participation? or that it is open learning to be networked, mixed, remixed and redistributed?  that the content is purely creative commons material free to be reused in any manner that is not commercial? or, that it is free for any and everyone who wish to participate? or is it open for any interpretation one desires? If one has to sign an agreement not to distribute any personal learning materials or, the educational facility claims to "own" everything produced by learners or faculty ... is that open?"

Yup, I provided no answers, only bigger questions, hoping some would take the challenge and respond.  Alas, it was not to be, and so ...

Once again, I have dipped into my participant role in the concurrent cMOOC, # etmooc, to bring you news.  I am happy to share, with a caveat ... please spend some time wandering in this resource; then, go back to Creativity and Multicultural Communication, the website, and review some of the weekly materials to get a sense of how and where they fit in the scheme of "open".  Then, review the 2008 Stephen Downes slideshare included in the resources listed under the open education section.  Give some thought to what open might mean to creative thinking, connectivist learning and your PLN.

What do you think open means to you now?  Please contribute to our collective learning via any means you wish ... a recording, a written blog, a video, starting a discussion with your thoughts ...
be creative and throw caution to the winds so we can build upon your ideas and reshape the meaning of learning to learning in an open environment.  What does this mean for you? for teachers? for schools? for education as we have known it? for the future? and how will this relate to jobs, careers and life goals?

OK, here is the resource:
 https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/24836480/Home

and you are now on the clock to come up with something(s) in the next 3 days. Have some fun with this!  :)

Digging Diigo ...

for bookmarking and discussion ~ we have a group site @ CDL_CMC11 for Diigo and one can use it as a bookmarking service (offline, in a cloud to save precious hard drive space) as well as a discussion space. In the most recent time period a long term MOOC participant and myself are the only ones using it.  What a shame as it really is a great option for learning and then going back to see what has transpired most recently on the site.

I admit I have not been the best at tagging, or annotating (usually do not), and I am woefully absent in commenting for discussion rejoinders.  My bad!  I am trying to remember to use this to its best advantage ... especially since my mental retrieval system tends to be rather faulty ... who am I kidding ... it is really very faulty.  Diigo can be my memory assistant :)

Note recently posted example included below.  If you are a credit seeking participant, the Learning Contract outlines the expectation of at least10 resources posted ... maybe some astute tagging, a wee bit of annotating and some replies from others will occur.  Hope springs eternal :)

Here a MOOC, there a MOOC, everywhere a MOOC ...

and much has been written and said about the MOOC ... massive open online course.  Thanks to Cormier, Downes and Siemens, the word MOOC is now in our education lexicon and has disrupted the face of education delivery as we have know it.

Now I know that the open online course has been around for a long time.  In fact, the UK has had the Open University for decades and MIT has offer Edx courses for quite some time now.  So what is different about this time?  Well, the "notables", the traditional and elite HE arena has promoted the MOOC as the next best thing since sliced bread ... or at least since the traditional lecture hall maxed out at several hundred students.  Once the commercial enterprises of coursera and udacity promulgated MOOCs as the answer to further HE success; or touted the benefits of a disruption of traditional learning modes, the bandwagon has taken on as much baggage as possible ... as many HE institutions that they can garner.  And that brings us to the question: what, exactly, is a MOOC?

Lisa M Lane has posited in a blog post, that there are 3 basic types of MOOCs: the networked connectivist, or cMOOC; the content driven, or xMOOC; and the task driven MOOC, much like ds106 offered by Mary Washington College in Virginia. But, what is a MOOC?

What makes a mooc massive? more than several hundred? more than several thousand?

What makes a mooc open? merely that it is open to anyone for participation? or that it is open learning to be networked, mixed, remixed and redistributed?  that the content is purely creative commons material free to be reused in any manner that is not commercial? or, that it is free for any and everyone who wish to participate? or is it open for any interpretation one desires? If one has to sign an agreement not to distribute any personal learning materials or, the educational facility claims to "own" everything produced by learners or faculty ... is that open?

As for the online aspect ... it would seem somewhat obvious that the internet is what is meant by online.  or is it? Does it require access to a computer or will a smart phone work as well? hw about a tablet or a watch? what does online mean now? can social networks drive learning or must we try to couch everything in the traditional educational model where scaling, assessment, outcomes and analytics drive the learning over fast, slow or blocked internet venues?  If you do not have broadband access, some forms of communication for learning do nor exist for you.  Waiting 7 hours for an instructors video to upload is mind numbing; stultifying learning progress.  Some countries block access to many of the networking and learning sites used: Google, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and Blackboard Collaborate.  This tends to remove the ability to collaborate, connect or communicate outside of the vaccuum.

How do we define course?  Who controls the learning? the learners? the methods of learning?  Who is in charge?  The faculty, the facilitators or the learners?

And my last question, for this post ... why is the mooc disruptive? Why must learning be controlled, assessed, quantified, qualified and stamped for approval? Learning should be fun, free and a lifelong pleasure.  Why do so many of us think it ends with a degree? Why do so many think a degree is terminal ... as in end of the line in learning?

We all have personal answers to many of these questions, no answers to others and hope for answers that will make learning more interesting, more engaging and more meaningful.  In what ways could MOOCs be beneficial in discovering answers to these questions? How can creative approaches to learning benefit each of us, benefit our communities, benefit society on a larger scale?

What are your thoughts? Why not select one, or more, of these questions and write your thoughts, suggestions or disagreement with any aspect of how we learn? how we might change the ways we learn?  How you learn?

Answers tend to offer us bigger and better questions and this is a good thing.  What are some of your questions?

#cmc11

Shiny objects and where they take us ...

I mentioned, in an announcement for cmc11, that I had been distracted by a bunch of shiny things and was late for an important date a few days ago.  I have gone back to those shiny objects and want to share the source so you can take a spin for yourself.

Before I post the url, I want to point out that it is good to watch the video straight through first, and then go back and watch the "augmented" version with pop ups.  If you do not have a wide bandwidth, especially those on dial up, please lobby your local internet provider, or the Bill Gates Foundation, to make your access more accessible for the swiftly moving growth of connectivist/digital technologies ... and when I have more time, I will post some of the links for you to investigate for fun.

http://amysmooc.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/digital-life-an-augmented-music-video-parody-edcmooc-final-artifact/

Straddling the worlds of cMOOCs is a time warping experience ... this is one of oh, so, many really interesting and mind expanding  artifacts gleaned from my lurking in etmooc.  Enjoy one of my mini curation results ...

It would be great to read participant blog posts on the experiences you encounter as you follow the shiny objects ... it has been a lovely trip down memory lane coupled with an eerie extension into the future all in the same sensory time span.

Change and Survival of the Fastest

Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps ... nine years ago these were not on the scope of most of our personal horizons.  We looked to the future with hope for a better life, a better world after a terrorist attack on the US.  The perpetrators were relative mysteries to all of us and we looked to our security denizens to protect us and deliver us from unknown enemies.  Many among us now look at the mobile, electronic mediums and applications as unknown enemies.  We long for the days of a slower, simpler life and harbor the illusion that all of the advances are merely a fad that will fade as soon as "others" go back to the more personal, face-to-face forms of exchange and communication.

I have often mentioned a thought from A Toffler, author of Future Shock. In the late 1970's, when life was slower and simpler, he posited that the illiterate of the 21st century would not be those who could not read and write, it would be those who could not learn, unlearn and relearn.  Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century ...  and here we are.  For those that think of the 70's as a radical time in our lives,  how can you adapt to an even more radical shift of your world view?  Many of you were not even a future thought; not yet born.  So many of us are locked in 20th century thinking and waiting for a return to the "good old days".  History has demonstrated time and again, that while we have roots in the past, the future is upon us and we had best prepare for constant change; for change to happen at an increasingly faster pace.  It seems that we too often forget those lessons from the past ... the biggest one is that change happens, no matter how hard we wish to ignore or fight change.

The past few years have seen monumental changes in so many global arenas and coming to grips with what those changes mean is often mind numbing.  Twitter, Facebook, Skype and camera phones fueled a revolution felt on a global level.  Most of us were only peripherally aware of the seismic proportions of the speed in which hundreds, even thousands of years of cultural mores were being irrevocably changed.  What do you know of today's Egypt, Mali, Syria, India, China, Brazil?  What changes there have impacted us here?  What have the changes here (on this side of the globe) meant for places in other parts of our globe?

Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps
 ... how literate are you with these daily modes of communication; with the connectedness and resulting change that is happening so fast that it seems overwhelming, impossible to keep up, much less move forward.  The traditional world of education,  developed at least 100 years ago, no longer prepares us for the present or the future in a realistic manner.  We can find the information we previously needed to memorize.  We can use digital and robotic entities to perform the tasks we used to labor over.  We need to retool ourselves and our learning in order to survive and advance in our more closely connected world. And, we need to do this much faster than most of us realize.  That brings us to  ...
Massive, Open, Online, Courses ... MOOCs.
That brings us to Creativity and Multicultural Communication ... CMC11.  We are swimming in a sea of constant change of information; in increasingly faster connection modes and we need to learn how to use, master and move on to even faster, more ubiquitous, yet to be realized methods of learning and communicating .... Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps  ... and beyond to the current swift change in the world of education ....to the swift changes in the world.