September 13, 2011
How to Participate in the MOOC
Stephen Downes,
Half an Hour, September 13, 2011.
Post I authored today as part of 'orientation week' for the #change2011 MOOC.
Popplet Virtual Bulletin Board
Karen Ogen,
InTec InSights, September 13, 2011.
This is a great little application for creating charts and diagrams with multiple images. "Popplet is a virtual bulletin board where students can add images, text, videos, maps, and more to create a project and to show what they know. Popplet can easily help your students to create flow charts, image galleries, graphic organizers, and mind maps." The add-image feature from Flickr is fabulous. You'll need to sign up for an account to get it to work. What I would do with Popplet (or pretty much any similar application) is to use it to create my image, then save the image by grabbing a screen shot (command-shift-4 on the Mac, or Snipping Tool in Windows). You know - I've bookmarked this, I might actually use it. Or maybe Glogster. No, I saw Popplet first...
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Microsoft, Project Based Learning, Video, Visualization]
Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution
David Kirkpatrick,
Forbes, September 13, 2011.
There's change coming to the corporate (and educational) world, according to Forbes, and managers are not going to like it. "This social might is now moving toward your company. We have entered the age of empowered individuals, who use potent new technologies and harness social media to organize themselves... In this new world of business, companies and leaders will have to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith... Says consultant and author Gary Hamel: 'The idea of a hierarchy that fundamentally empowers the few and disempowers the many is more or less dead.'" I, for one, am looking forward to this new environment. See also, Social Learning doesn’t mean what you think it does, Part Two.
Ning Co-Founder Launches Mightybell: Another Educational Tool in the Making?
Audrey Watters,
Hack Education, September 13, 2011.
I've signed up for something that might be interesting, this course or "experience". G+ thread here. Steve Hargadon writes, "in Mightybell for using the web for personal and professional development." It was Mightybell that caught my eye. Created by Ning co-founder Gina Bianchini, the idea of MightyBell is that you can join courses (or, as the site names them, "experiences", in which there are activities. Mightybell displays visually how many experiences you have joined and completed, and how many activities you have undertaken. As Audrey Watters writes, "As you participate in an experience on Mightybell and move through the various steps, you can view personal analytics as well as see the progress of others — 'Fellow Travelers' who are working toward the same goal." It's an interesting experiment - but it feels very linear, and I wanted to skip steps almost immediately. And there are way too many prods to connect with my social networking buddies.
MOOCast name change > Launch of COOLCast
Jeff Lebow,
JeffLebow.net, September 13, 2011.
Jeff Lebow, who managed an underground MOOCast during the summer's eduMOOC course, has changed the name to COOLcast: "Collaborative Open Online Learning." He writes, "I think MOOC's are great, but as we discussed on the final MOOCast, I'm not a fan of the name itself. Aside from just not liking the sound of the word, I see MOOC's as part of a larger movement toward educators and learners working together and sharing resources online." All very well, and he is of course free to focus on whatever he wants, but it prompted me to point out that MOOCs are not based on a principle of collaboration. I posted, "MOOCs and the connectivist approach to learning, as I have argued elsewhere, is by contrast 'cooperative'. There is no presumption of unity, order, shared goals or coherence. There's no sense of being 'in the group' or its opposite. If teams or groups form, they are tangential to the course, and not the core or essence of it."
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Google]
School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade
Diane Ravitch,
The New York Review of Books, September 12, 2011.
This is a reasonable educational policy - perhaps the only reasonable educational policy, but it continues to elude our policy-makers. One wonders why. Here's Diane Ravitch: "If we were to focus on the needs of children, we would make sure that every pregnant woman got good medical care and nutrition, since many children born to women without them tend to have learning disabilities. We would make sure that children in poor communities have high-quality early childhood education so that they arrive in school ready to learn. We would insist that their teachers be trained to support their social, emotional, and intellectual development and to engage local communities on behalf of their children... And we would have national policies whose goal is to reduce poverty by expanding economic opportunity."
[Link] [Comment][Tags: Schools, Patents, Quality, Online Learning]
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