Vanessa Vaile's List: onlinelearning

• MOOCs give us a new way to understand learning, and hence, a new way to understand certain types of learning
• when I talk about a MOOC, I am talking about a different kind of learning. Most of you will be familiar with the traditional online course, which is based on the presentation of content and information, and based on a clear curriculum which is to be learned.
• And the MOOCs you may have read about in the newspaper, the online courses offered though American universities such as Harvard and Stanford and MIT, these MOOCs are also examples of traditional online learning, with content and curriculum.
• My understanding of the term ‘MOOC’ is a bit different; it is derived from a theory of learning based on engagement and interaction within a community of practitioners, without predetermined outcomes, and without a body of knowledge that we can simply ‘transfer’ to the learner.

   
• My own theory of education is minimal. It is so minimal it hardly qualifies as a theory, and is almost certainly not my own: “to teach is to model and to demonstrate; to learn is to practice and reflect.”
• minimally, we need an environment that supports all four of these on a massive scale.
• system designed so that bottlenecks are not created in any of the four attributes: modeling, demonstration, practice, and reflection.
• in order for a course to be massive, performance and reflection must be designed in such a way that does not require that certain people view all performances.
• nd this is quite true, if we think of ‘massive’ in the sense of ‘mass media’ or ‘mass lectures’. These become ineffective precisely because they become impersonal.
• if we depend on individual tutoring to propagate and promote any sort of culture, whether it be the culture of physicists or the culture of francophones, we will find progress in promoting that culture slow and expensive.
• massive scale in a MOOC is not the delivery of instruction or the management of learning resources. We are trying to emulate, on a massive scale, these small-scale and personal one-to-one interactions.
• There are different senses of the word ‘open’ in education.
• open access to educational resources
• open access to curriculum, including course content and learning design
• open access to criteria for success, or rubrics
• open assessments
• open credentials
• by the term ‘open’ we very clearly intended both the aspects of access and sharing to be included; what this meant in practice was that we expected course participants not only to use course resources, curriculum, etc., but also to be involved in the design of these.
• Why make our courses open? Think of a course as like a language. If a language is closed, it dies. If people are not allowed to speak it, it dies. To enable people to genuinely participate in the culture of a discipline, whether it be physics or chemistry or political science, the content and the materials of the discipline must be open.
• George, for example, had staged a very successful online conference on Connectivism the year before. I had, meanwhile, been running my newsletter service for the educational technology community since 2001. Each of these was in its own way massive, open and online, but they were not courses.
• overlap between ‘course’ and ‘conference’ and ‘community
• overlap between the concept of the ‘course’ and the ‘course package
• a course is an event. A community is not
• 
  

   

   •             a course is bounded by a start date and an end date

   

   
  

   

   •             a course is cohered by some common theme or domain of discourse

   

   
  

   

   •             a course is a progression of ordered events related to that domain

   
• creation of temporary and bounded events allows for engagement between communities that would not normally associate with each other
• The way we set up a MOOC is to define a six or twelve (or even thirty) week course of readings, each on a different topic, progressing through a domain of enquiry. We also hosted online seminars, many of which featured guest experts from outside the course.
• We do not require that people study the readings; these are optional. Rather, what we are saying through this structure is that we, the course authors, will be studying these materials. And people are welcome to come along for the ride.
• the content isn't the important thing. It serves merely as a catalyst, a mechanism for getting our projects, discussions and interactions off the ground. It may be useful to some people, but it isn't the end product
• The course is composed not only of recommended readings but also articles, videos and recordings made by course facilitators, blog posts, images, videos and other recordings made by course participants, collected tweets from Twitter, bookmarks from Delicious, discussion posts, and whatever else we can think of.
• there is no central content to the course
• Create a blog
• Create an account with del.icio.us
• Take part in an online discussion
• Tweet about the item
• Anything else: you can use any other service on the internet
• The choice is completely yours
• Learning is not simply a process of reception and filtering. It is important to create something, to actively participate in the discipline
• Repurposing is often a process of translating
• Feeding Forward - We want participants to share their work with other people in the course, and with the world at large
• Sharing is and will always be their choice.
• even more importantly, it helps others see the learning process, and not just the polished final result.
• The Purpose of a MOOC
• Coursera, for example, may want to support learning, but it is also a company that wants to make money at the same time
• Organizations offer MOOCs in order to serve other objectives.
• MOOCs serve numerous purposes, both to those who offer MOOCs, those who provide services, and those who register for or in some way ‘take’ a MOOC.
• The original MOOC offered by George Siemens and myself had a very simple purpose at first: to explain ourselves.
• there are different senses of learning
• creating an open online course designed in such a way as to support a large (or even massive) learning community.
• The MOOC as Community
• Although we learn what we learn from personal experience, we usually learn what we learn from other people.

   

   
  

   

   Consequently, learning is a social activity, whether we immerse ourselves into what Etienne Wenger called a community of practice (Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity, 1999), learn what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1962), and be able to complete, as Thomas Kuhn famously summarized, the problems at the end of the chapter. (Kuhn, 1962)
• So online communities form around offline activities
• With today’s focus on MOOCs and social networking sites (such as Facebook and Google+) the discussion of community per se has faded to the background.
• Online educators will find themselves building interest based communities whether they intend to do this or not
• Learning in the community of practice takes the form of what might be called ‘peer-to-peer professional development activities’
• The MOOC is for us a device created in order to connect these distributed voices together, not to create community, not to create culture, but to create a place where community and culture can flourish,
• The peer community by contrast almost by definition cannot be formed over the internet
• created through proximity
• online communities depend on a topic or area of interest
• Community Access Points
• This was a project that did more than merely provide internet access, it created a common location for people interesting in technology and computers (and blogs and Facebook)
• The MOOCs George Siemens and I have designed and developed were explicitly designed to support participation from a mosaic of cultures.
• It is worth noting that theorists of both professional and social networks speak of one’s interactions within the community as a process of building, or creating, one’s own identity.

   
• danah boyd, studying the social community, writes, “The dynamics of identity production play out visibly on MySpace. Profiles are digital bodies, public displays of identity where people can explore impression management.
• ecause imagery can be staged, it is often difficult to tell if photos are a representation of behaviors or a re-presentation of them
• In both of these we are seeing aspects of the same phenomenon. To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
• We have defined three domains of learning: the individual learner, the online community, and the peer community.

   
• Recent discussions of MOOCs have focused almost exclusively on the online community, with almost no discussion of the individual learner, and no discussion peer community. But to my mind over time all three elements will be seen to be equally important.
• three key roles in online learning: the student, the instructor, and the facilitator. The ‘instructor’ is the person responsible for the online community, while the ‘facilitator’ is the person responsible for the peer community.
• recent MOOCs offered by companies like Coursera and Udacity have commercialized course brokering
• a model that the K-12 community has employed for any number of years
• where is the French-language community itself?

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• The MOOC phenomenon has happened very quickly
• is also a shift in discourse
• the word itself was a niche term that most people in higher education would not hear about
• whether MOOCs are disrupting education through innovation—as Clay Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation in business would have it—or simply representing the disruption of education as it is embedded in the market, the phenomenon under discussion has changed quite dramatically as it has mgrated from Canada to Silicon Valley
• this apparent lack of a need for a definition is exactly why we need to slow things down and figure out what the heck we’re talking about. For one thing, when we start the story in 2011, we forget about the 2008 MOOCs
• another way to tell the story would be that Thrun was a Google executive
• and that he had already resigned his tenure at Stanford in April 2011, before he even offered that Artifical Intelligence class. Ending his affiliation with Stanford could be described as completing his transition to Silicon Valley proper.
• It’s important to tell the story this way, too, because the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need
• it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley
• Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality,
• to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC,
• MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much, if you’re in too much of a hurry to go deeply into the subject
• two different ways
• the logic of the MOOC is a function of shallow thinking, of arguments that go no deeper than a David Brooks or Thomas Friedman column. But they also valorize and reward that level of depth
• an observation about what the form anticipates (and therefore rewards and reproduces) as a normal teenager’s attention span
• the argument in favor of MOOC’s can’t handle all that much complexity either
• two kinds of time here
• belated temporality where we’re already always behind the times, which is necessary to make the MOOC seem like the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy it has become
• Framed by this temporality, the MOOC becomes a kind of fetish object
• its claims only work if you don’t interrogate their foundational premises too much
• ead the people that were creating MOOCs in 2008, by contrast
• thinking that’s kind of out there, as far as how we conceptualize what education is for, and what it does
• But the innovations in pedagogy that produced the first MOOC in 2008, at the University of Manitoba, had to be forgotten and erased from the historical timeline if the MOOCs that we’re talking about were to become the standard bearer for “cutting edge.”
• if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education
• the 2012 MOOC seems to me like a speculative bubble,
• The irony is that when the term was first coined in 2008, this was all quite well understood; the MOOC came into existence as something that, by its very nature, could never be used to replace a normal college class. The point of it was that it was something fundamentally different than a college class.
• part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education, the idea that we learn best when we learn collaboratively, in networks
• more about building the social and neural connections that will allow knowledge to circulate, be used, evolve, and to grow
• those of us who first heard of MOOCs in 2012, reading a document like “The MOOC Model for Digital Practice” from 2010, is a strange experience; the things they said about MOOCs in 2010 are hard to square with what people have been saying about them since “the MOOC moment” happened, and it went mainstream.
• MOOC of 2012 looks very different, starting with the central narrative of “disruption” and “un-bundling”: instead of building social information networks
• breaking apart actually-existing academic communities
• might be the diametric opposite of what Siemens, Downes, and Cormier said they were trying to create
• This is why, instead of de-institutionalizing education or making learning less hierarchical, we see some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world treating the MOOC as a lifeline in troubled economic waters, leveraging the figure of the “super-professor”
• new way of maintaining the status quo, of re-institutionalizing higher education
• morphed into a process driven from the top down,
• two things by that title. On the one hand, MOOCs are more like an end of something than a beginning
• make them solidify hierarchy by placing a pantheon of academic superstars at the center of pedagogical practice, reifying knowledge into a commodity
• It also represents the end of reform at the macro level.
• California’s public university system is, in many ways, the biggest and best expression of a moment in time when futurity was incredibly important and possible
• The 1960 Donahoe Act, better known as the Master Plan for Higher Education
• a blanket commitment from the state to educate all the California students who wanted an education

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• This is the script and the slideshow for a presentation I gave at the American Federation of Teachers higher education meeting on March 9, 2013 in San Diego.  

  
  

  --Steven D. Krause | Professor, Department of English Language and Literature | Eastern Michigan University | Ypsilanti, Michigan

  stevendkrause.com | skrause@emich.edu
• So, perhaps MOOCs will continue to be useful not for transferable credit per se but for access overseas, MOOCs bundled with other learning experiences like AP high school classes, and also for the current audience of people interested in learning for learning’s sake.  In that sense, the open education goals of cMOOCs might ultimately win the day.  Perhaps MOOCs might also have some role in credits based on “competency” or even “life-learning” experiences. 

• “curation” and “discovery.” Both of these are words that are familiar to librarians, a part of our professional toolkit, but they are being used increasingly in non-library settings. 
• He was a curator; he just never called it that,
• “human-filtered, journalist-vetted, intellectually-related material.” 
• When I curate, it’s not to build an audience or collect clicks. My curation is for myself (things I want to squirrel away for various projects) or for my academic community
•  “discoverability and availability are being decoupled,”
• more results for a search doesn’t help them figure out which will actually be valuable. We need to help them learn how to curate for themselves
• in our rush to emulate Google and Amazon we forget that people are key to discovery - people who are interested and curious and discerning, people who are not trying to sell you anything but are willing to help you find the good stuff.

   

     

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• uestion of tagging
• Tagging used to be a mystery to me too. It was such a mystery, along with RSS and emerging social networks
• Dieu, Barbara, & Stevens, Vance. (2007, June). Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the web.TESL-EJ, 11(1), 1-15. Available: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html
• the section on tagging in the article above explains how tagging is a folksonomic system as opposed to a taxonomic one
• Tag Games where I produced a chart showing some differences of taxonomies and folksonomies at a glance, and also giving ideas about how you can use tags practically in your classrooms and across social networks, here: http://braz2010vance.pbworks.com/w/page/27944056/TagGames
• Unlike a taxonomy, where the categories used are predetermined, all the tags that people dream up to describe an item or give it a word that will help them recall it later, become attached to the items as metadata
• Tags are extremely powerful. Search on any user, say http://www.diigo.com/user/vances, and see all the tags that that user uses to organize their online life.
• A taxonomy defines a tree with branches.  A folksonomy works at the level of the leaves.
• In one of Weinberger's many memorable analogies, the Internet is the tree in autumn whose leaves are scattered everywhere, all over the ground, and blowing in swirling gusts of wind.  This is beyond the power of a taxonomy to address.
• Through folksonomy, apparent chaos is brought to order, and that order was applied over time by the small additions of value left by users who used the power of tagging to help themselves and others remember where they left things wherever they happened to be wherever they found them on the Internet.
• Google applies a tag approach to its products
• Tags in Gmail are a wonderful departure from the limitations of taxonomic filing.  When our mail came on paper, you could only put that piece of paper in one place
• Twitter is a site that lets you #tag tweets (pronounced 'hash tag').  When you apply a #tag twitter will track all tweets that use that tag and feed them back to you on demand

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• : What is the story that leads up to humanity 2.0 and is it co-extensive with the history of science? ‘
• transhumanism: a term that he’s careful to distinguish from posthumanism. Posthumanism, he explains, takes a Darwinian standpoint on life; it’s a ‘species egalitarian view’ in which there is a definite respect for life, but no respect for the qualities of human beings that distinguish us from other life-forms. ‘There is no humanity 2.0 in this picture, there’s just post-humanity,’
• Darwin was very reluctant to support movements in the late 19th-century that we would now associate with transhumanist thinking, such as eugenics and vivisection
• process in human evolution, and that we could potentially take control of it, emerged in the 1930s with figures like Sir Julian Huxley.
• one organism that can understand the whole thing - and then take control of it. That was the promise of transhumanism
• The next phase of transhumanism is the converging technologies agenda: ‘The particular technologies we’re talking about are based on nanotechnology, biotechnology, information science and the cognitive sciences.
• r for the purpose of enhancing human beings,
• push-back in the idea that humans can raise themselves to this higher level and governments have always been worried about these advance forms of technology and knowledge actually getting into the hands of people who can use them for their own purpose
• no overarching, normative sense of humanity
• Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, he is best known for his work in the field of ‘social epistemology’, which is concerned with the normative foundations of organized inquiry.

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• 5 (Connected Learning, Digital Storytelling, Digital Literacy, and Digital Citizenship) thatwe will be exploring further in #etmooc
• Open Movemen
• Larry’s blog
• Ted Talks
• Where do ideas begin and end? Can ideas be ever completely “owned” as we do we property? Does it all come down to control of resources as a means to be powerful
• Maybe ideas are like DNA, that can change and evolve, mutate and be of someone but never completely “theirs”. Maybe ideas, as DNA evolve in spite of us, rather that because of us.
• This reminded me of  Kirby Ferguson’s Embracing the Remix

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