No. 1 is over or did it just start? #CMC11 MOOC

Is play just for kids? What happens to the kid when we grow up?

Why are our minds locked or why do we lock them?

What hinders us to taste something different and enjoy it?

Can we see what is behind the walls we build?

Is away too far? How can we bring it closer and why would we want to?

Do we need to embrace more? Why? How?

I think it is just the start, it has to be just the start!

Let’s the fun begin! #coresep11

on the way... just a few more hours

This is it. Our Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice starts tomorrow. We are ready for our next cohort. And it is induction day ;o)

The fun begins in less than a day, well tomorrow morning at 9.30am. Just a few hours of sleep…

For me the fun has began a while ago when I started preparing for the big day. I have gone through the day loads of times already. What will happen, how it will happen, the re-actions etc. etc. What can go wrong? What might not work… But nobody knows so I am very excited.

For days now, I have been thinking and re-thinking and un-thinking activities and props. Oh, yes props. How to use them and most importantly why! Not everybody likes them but I do and I feel that they can make such a difference and transform abstract concepts into something that is actually understandable.

So, yes, if you are wondering, I am going to experiment with some new stuff. We can’t just keep doing the same things. That would be so boring. Taking risks is part of what we do. But why? To hopefully provide stimulating learning experiences for all, and I include myself here and make us all think. I can’t, and I wouldn’t like to, feed anybody information. And knowledge is something that needs to be digested! Remember, learning requires work and I hope you are all here to work and play hard ;o)

Let’s the fun begin.

See you all very soon.

This ‘thing’ called passion #cmc11 MOOC

an invitation to think and (re-)act

… a question without a question mark triggered during and after week 2 #CMC11 webinar with Stephen Downes and after watching one more time Ken Robinson’s TED clip ‘Bring on the learning revolution’ included in #CMC11 week 3 resources

Maybe we could discuss

• what we understand by passion
• how we feel about people who are passionate
• how we actually know that they are passionate
• what effect passionate individuals/groups(?) have on others
• what are the implications of passion for the passionate individual/group(?) and for others

if anybody is interested ;o)

Please note: the above doodles were made before actually seeing the doodle stuff presented over the weekend on #CMC11. When I saw them after this posting… I couldn’t believe my eyes… just a coincidence?

some things to think about… #CMC11 MOOC

Is this a bad thing? Always?

Do we all thrive in such environments?

Who decides?

I am not a sheep, but I can be one, if I want to. What about you?

If I see value in a connection, I will go for it... will I?

I want to learn. What about you?

Walls are in our minds, sometimes they are real. Sometimes?

connections, connectivity

interaction, interactivity

For, or as learning? How?

knowledge and information - interchangeable?

... some things to think about ;o)

Connecting to be connected? #CMC11 MOOC

Started writing this post a few days ago. Today, I came back and deleted what I had written. It didn’t reflect anymore my thinking. I therefore decided to capture my reflections using photovoices. My thoughts wander to some of my week 2 readings but also to a conference I attended today at the University of Wolverhampton (check out their Learning to Teach Inclusively OER).

connecting, reaching out, creating relationships... younger and...

... older

... any colour and all colours

any shape and all shapes

we all want to connect. we need each other

we are all different, in fact unique

but we are all part of the puzzle of life, discovery and learning

together we are stronger

we hold the world in our hands, what are we going to do with it?

I am wondering, is connecting to be connected the/an answer?

webinaring with fellow MOOCers and disconnected throughts to connect #cmc11

Will I make it?

Rushed home to login and participate in this first webinar. I couldn’t believe it when I had difficulties loggin into Blackboard Collaborate… I thought I would miss it! In the end I didn’t…

I have to admit, I expected… the masses when I arrived. I thought finally, I will understand why a MOOC is called a MOOC and what this is all about.

Yes, I am still wondering why these open courses have been baptised MOOCs. If anybody is reading this and can explain this to me that would be fantastic. So, no masses tonight. I was actually thinking that more people would engage in a synchronous way than asynchronously since this would be a one-off per week but then of course asynchronous communication and collaboration might be more convenient because it can happen anytime, anyhow, anywhere if you have the technology in your pocket or bag. But is it effective for everything? I have heard and experienced many times how slow it can be (too slow? Too slow for what?) How could we use effectively synchronous communication and collaboration? Think about lectures and how these are usually delivered. Tutor and learners are there but who speaks most and why? If tutors are there for the learners, why don’t we let them lead us? And if this is possible and we should be doing this, how would this look like in a webinar? The asynchronous form to communicate and collaborate online has indeed moved away from being a tutor driven activity. Self-directed learners experience this as a paradise. How can non-self-directed learner learn how to thrive in such environments?

Is it just a problem with all the different timezones? Are people signing up without participating? How many are just lurking? How many are just accessing the resources and participate elsewhere, perhaps within existing online communities? And what would make them participate (more)? How do you form online communities? How do we form online communities? How can disconnected blog entries become conversations among individuals and enable them to get together. Do we spend more time searching for such opportunities? Or is it too early yet and I want it to happen now? Am I impatient? If we want to be part of a community we can’t expect that others will find us and come to us, I think. What role do we play, or could we play in the formation of such communities?

I am still clouded about all this and have many questions in my head (loads more than I have included here). However, I have started making some connections and I no longer feel on my own. Some meaningful exchange is happening and I am thinking about this course frequenty during the day. Maybe this is because we just started developing our own open course. I wouldn’t call ours a MOOC at this stage but I guess since it will be open access, we should prepare ourselves that it might become a MOOC. But how would we prepare ourselves?

Let’s focus a bit on the webinar itself. The orientation today was very useful and it is definitely something we will also offer in our own little open course. We might use additional features of Blackboard Collaborate doing this such as

• the video and photographs of the tutors/facilitators
• design activities during which learners can participate on the whiteboard and polls
• if the group is small, introductions and why everybody is there, would help to give a more group feel
• demo site features by using the desktop sharing or weblink to make it more dynamic, live and responsive
• integrate questions into the session throughout which would enable participants to respond
• encourage individuals to take the microphone (this might be problematic if not a community)
• also less is more on slides, we would keep more empty room in the slides to enable adding of thoughts and ideas expressed during the webinar (this could be done by a moderators)
• Using emoticons can also add to the webinar experience and enable participation and responding in different ways.

Then again we are also keen to explore the use of the BigBlueButton since it is an open access web-conferencing tool.  At the moment we are discussing options and try to identify the best way forward. But it would be great to use an open source tool for an open course… If you are reading this and have any ideas and would like to help us, please get in touch.

Am I focusing too much on the process than on the content of this course? Is this normal at this stage? Was this the point of the orientation tour? Just checking.

Beyond what I have already included, I have two terms zooming around in my head since they first appeared on one of the pages this evening. Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, as an ex-translator and a non-native English speaker, I try to understand the differences between these terms so that I can distinguish between them, add them first to my passive vocabulary but also my active one, if or when needed. After a brief visit to wikipedia, this is how I think I understood it and I am going to share my thinking visually in a very simplistic way. I would really like some thoughts on this, if you are reading this so that it can help me understand better.

multiculturalism: loving and celebrating variety

interculturalism: loving mixing ingredients

Will stop here for now and think a bit more about what I externalised and captured here. I am sure some of the questions will die and new questions will be born.

calling fellow #CMC11 MOOCers

Where are you all?

Big day has arrived and I have to admit I feel a bit lost. Where to look, how to connect and with whom? Started looking for people I know. I have information that some of them signed-up. Haven’t found anybody yet in any of the platforms and am now wondering where they are… feeling a bit on my own in this MOOC but have started participating, well asking a few questions and responding to posts published by others and have started making some links.

Looked today around the programme site (it seems to make sense) and focused on week 1 for now. Didn’t have much time to spend on the readings but identified 1 or 2 resources, I think they were two, which I would like to study in more detail. In a way, I used this evening to filter out, what I am going to read in the next few days. Things that already made me think and I want to find out more about them, such as this business with creativity in a multicultural context. As mentioned in one of the discussions, I have always been a foreigner in a foreign country, all my life. This is probably not so unique anymore, but I am wondering if this reality had influenced the way I practise creativity and the creative habits I have developed because I had to, because I wanted to find ways to communicate and connect with others and language on its own became a barrier at times? Just wondering…

My initial plan is to do the following on a daily basis (if I have the time and energy – it will be hard not to have the energy since it is something I love doing and I get immersed but, I do have a family as well and I need to balance my activities wisely… )

• Ok, I guess, I will start by checking the weekly resources which will provide some kind of focus.
• I will then explore how these or some of them could be useful for my own professional context and the projects I am involved. That would be my filtering done.
• Then a will probably start thinking and reflecting and studying and probably blog some of my thoughts to get them out of my system but also hoping that somebody will read and connect so that we can start exchanging experiences and stories. Working on the blog post, will probably take a day or two, depending on what I would like to share, how deep I want to investigate things but also how much time I have available. I wish the day had more hours!!!
• Even after the filtering stage, I would start looking for opportunities to engage in conversations with others who say things that interests me and challenge my own thinking. I think it will be especially valuable to connect with others who have opposite views because that will make me think deeper about my own.

Just watched this intro video on MOOCs again. I think this is a clip that you can watch again and again and remind yourself why you are participating and what you could get out of it. Also, I have found George Siemens post “How to participate in an open online coure” really useful. And while I am not a number person, I am still looking for a definition of a MOOC linked to numbers (and I noticed that other MOOCers are also asking) since we are talking about MASSIVE open online courses.

How is massive defined in the context of a MOOC? Is it massive because it has the potential to be massive (due to its openess) or because it actually is massive (number of participants)? And if massive is 100 or 200 when we deliver modules to the same amount of people, could we therefore call them massive modules? On a non-open course you know how many learners you have? How will you ever know (guess? use statistics?) how many learners are participating, engaging, on- or off-line one way or the other in a MOOC?