What you get when Research and Community come together
[toc] Why on earth am I writing about MOOCs again? I'm not sure why I have this instinct to defend MOOCs. I am generally the last person to be instinctively bullish on purely technological innovations in education even if I tend to be one of the first people to try them out. Confusing MOOC shortcomings…
Read more →Note: This is an expanded version of a comment on this post on EdSurge . Other people have also commented here , here and here . [toc] Note 2: When I first started thinking about this post, I had this title in my head but decided it wasn't quite appropriate "You'd have to be an…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="214"] Title page to Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Warning: This post ended up being a lot more "negative" and critical than it started out as. I am still quite enjoying the EdStartUp course. Entrepreneurship and #EdStartup 101 A new MOOC is going on at the moment aimed at…
Read more →education online (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee) Note on the title: I was pretty miffed when I started writing this post. And the title was the first thing that came to my mind. But as I was writing, much of the initial anger dissipated but I still like the title. So I…
Read more →This is my introduction to the other participants on the #EdStartUp MOOC . My main interest in taking the course is to explore ways of squaring up the demands of a sustainable business or other funding model with openness. My key question is how can we run open courses with open educational resources and using…
Read more →Mind map Inspired by a Tweet and related to my post on What is and what is not a MOOC , I decided to make a little concept map to put a few things in context of each other. Download and remix policy: Do it! You can download the map file from the XMind site…
Read more →This is a long post. What can I say? The MOOC made me do it! When 90% drop-out rate is less than a 10% drop-out rate English: A diagram of the geological time scale (Photo credit: Wikipedia) One of the foundations of the, I think largely unfounded, criticisms of the MOOC…
Read more →This post is part of the MOOC MOOC course of work. It outlines my journey (now lasting over a year) towards adopting elements of a MOOC in the Inclusive Technologies for Reading (#ITR12) course pilot starting this September. This not a description of the process, more a reflection towards the end of it. [toc] Update…
Read more →The crazy argument for Zero pedagogy [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Pedagogy does not matter. It has always been a discipline aimed at making people learn something they don't particularly want to learn. If we can truly provide open access to all the resources necessary for learning, then it…
Read more →My contribution on the subject of Space to the 2012 MOOC MOOC .
Read more →[toc] Introduction Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs for short, have been getting a lot of attention recently. There have been several high profile posts (see here for a summary ) complaining about the lack of clarity about what constitutes a MOOC (and I think this resulted in a more generalized MOOC backlash ). This…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="200"] Advertisement for Hermods (distance learning school) in Sweden (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Recently, one of my favorite titles of a blog post has been " Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads " - I like when righteous indignation is given a full-throated expression. And that is despite the fact that, at least up…
Read more →Educational theorist and provocateur Stephen Downes made really persuasive video on the difference between a Virtual Learning Environment and a Personal Learning Environment . This got me thinking about how this difference is relevant to the area of federated, open research. And I think the analogy is pretty much on the money. Researchers, of course…
Read more →What it is I've written a lot on this site about the idea of using crowdsourced funding to support research efforts. Here's the first example of that sort of thing that I've come across. What Works in Development: 10 Meta-Analyses of Aid Programs is a funding call for $10,000 to support research dissemination. Namely printing…
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