February 5, 2013
Presentation
MOOC et REL
Stephen Downes, February 5, 2013,
Atelier REL , Mocnton
Presentation in French on the subject of MOOCs, their design and intent, and their relation to open educational resources (REL).
Brian Morrissey, Digiday, February 5, 2013
I have since the beginning of the web been an aggregator as much as I have been a producer of original content and ideas. It's hard to say which approach has been more successful (and really, it's a bit like meat and potatoes - you need both). So I both sympathize and don't sympathize with Brian Morrissey who in Digiday laments the economics of original content publishers as compared to aggregators. "I can't help but wonder if BI’s 'efficiency' is bought at the expense of others," he laments. Maybe. But I wonder why Digiday doesn't also aggregate. When you produce that much original content, why not round it out with the best of the web? The reason page mills succeed is that publishers won't share their space with each other.
How Knowledge Workers Learn Judgment
Nancy Dixon,
Conversation Matters,
February 5, 2013
Interesting post discussing how people who are knowledge workers learn how to make judgements "that require much more that simply following a predetermined step by step procedure." Lawyers, nurses, platoon leaders - all of these are examples of knowledge workers. The post reflects many of the principles we follow in MOOC desgn. "The corporate view... is that knowledge and skill are a matter of individual competence, which is gained by attending training, reading journals, and/or listening to lectures. The underlying assumptions of that view are that, 1) there are individuals with expertise who can provide the knowledge required to be effective, through documents or lecture, and 2) that the required knowledge is relatively stable, it changes little over time.
"[But] as more and more of the workforce is populated by knowledge workers our premise about of how people develop the judgment to be effective is changing. The newer view holds that: 1. complex knowledge and skills are distributed across the practitioners who use that skill, with no one individual knowing all that the group knows, and 2. knowledge is continually changing as the group of practitioners learn from the act of practicing their craft. Ideas are not fixed and elements of thought are formed and reformed through experience. Knowledge then is not stable, but is ever changing." Knowledge workers learn from experience, by identifying patterns, and through immersion in their community. Just like in a MOOC.
Portland State University, Santa Fe Institute, February 5, 2013
This looks like an interesting MOOC, and I've signed up: "The topics you'll learn about include dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. You’ll also get a sense of how these topics fit together to help explain how complexity arises and evolves in nature, society, and technology. There are no prerequisites."
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