Jenny Mackness posted a really thought provoking post a few weeks back about MOOC principles and course design that I find myself coming back to know that I am being asked to design a small learning community for EDIT 517.

Jenny asks where the responsibilities of educators lie when attempting to replicate a MOOC on a smaller scale. Perhaps it is helpful to look at the learning principles which form the basis of a connectivist approach to learning; autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness. Jenny has placed her thoughts about course she designed using these principles on a continuum that I find really useful.

I’d like to add mine here. Massive doesn’t necessarily relate to the numbers of participants, although it might be possible to have thousands involved in a course, it might be undesirable in some instances (live sessions being one example). Smaller courses let loose over an expanse of resources could be one way of conceptualising massive. The Internet is massive, five pioneer families banding together in a caravan of wagons would have thought the prairies to be massive. Pioneering often means doing more with much much less.

Openness is important, but it needn’t be dogmatically adhered to. I like the idea that participation in a MOOC has the potential to open up your practice, simply being open to new ideas is a positive outcome. You could go even further to the radical openness espoused by David Wiley, which is truly inspiring because it is aligned with the higher purpose of educating the world. Conversely sticking with one-way of doing something because the alternative looks more centralised, or replicates a broadcast model that might be out of favour, is limiting yourself and detracting from the experience others may have of the course.

Online, we all think we know what that means, but how you see it is very different from how I do. The kinds of online experiences I wish to build for myself and those that participate in courses, events or other happenings are shaped by my very personal view of online. I’d like to see more recognition of individual learning styles in the construction of open learning environments. I want to do more of this learning mobile (i.e. moving) not just standing and sitting. I’d like to hear more of it, touch more of it, and get a spatial sense of it.

Course is a misnomer, unless it is something more like a 35 course meal. I appreciate the fact that I am able to take a plate of whatever I like and put it in to practice where I see fit. Some stuff I’m just not into, and I’m not going to get marked down if I don’t partake in it. By the same token I don’t want the content rammed down my throat just because there is a lot to get through. The overwhelming part of the course is possibly another manifestation of the need to be massive. When you want more, more presenters, more challenges, more massiveness that when it becomes a turn-off.

I’ve been watching the week five round up that DTLT posted and you can here George Siemens acknowledge the difficulties that newbies to this style of learning have. Among the criticisms of learners are that there is just too much to keep up with, and this course moves way too fast. This certainly isn’t something that you’d be able to get away with first year University students on an international campus, or an introductory course for people in nursing homes. Diversity respects these kinds of learners too.

I would echo George’s comments that a balance needs to be struck between assisting learners to develop the digital literacy to thrive while simultaneously developing the tool sets that would encourage newcomers to try their hand at a MOOC.

Looking back over the notes I have taken on the articles I’ve read relating to constructivism there is an educational idealism that attracts me to it, which is much harder to realise in practice. A closer look at the principles of connectivism is probably what I need right now.

What attracts you to connectivism as an approach to learning? Do you think an emphasis on more massiveness is missing the point of MOOC?

I’m an endurance athlete. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, I focus on my breathing and find my centre. From there I find a rhythm and regain strength.This is where I am at the moment, in the early stages of an endurance event, regulating.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been a busy with work and assignments, so I haven’t had as much time to devote to the Change 11 eBook as I would have liked. Marshalling my attention again, pushing through the with the project I am recommitting myself to produce content for the Change 11 eBook.

I volunteered to help curate the record of the Change 11 in the form of an ebook because I knew the work in synthesising disparate source would help me make sense of the MOOC. I spent the first two weeks working on template, compiling links and collating blog posts and comments from around the web into an edited group response for Zoraini Wati Abas and Martin Weller. I missed the content from Allison Littlejohn but I am keen to catch up with the conversation that has risen around the presentation by David Wiley.

There are only a few others working on the project, and their roles aren’t very well defined. I’m wondering what I could to do to enhance the interaction of group members. But then again I don’t feel it’s my place, my idea, or my responsibility (it was Dave Cormier’s idea). Therein is one of the inherent difficulties with crowd-sourced content. With a wiki, lots of small contributions make lighter work for everyone, but if one person for just a moment feels as they are doing all the work then the motivation to contribute falls away.

I need a few training partners that are in this for the long haul. I’m prepared to go the distance.

If you want participate in the #change11 ebook project Dave (@davecormier) has posted a an invitation and a quick tutorial on his blog.

- http://bit.ly/qLFkW2

I’ve been going over the feedback for my first assessment task for EDIT 517, Learning Community Defined and thinking about where I went wrong. I’m really grateful for the feedback and hope that I can make amends for the second assignment. Getting back on track is going to be easier if I incorporate the feedback directly into an analysis and restatement of those sections where I lost marks.

I was looking at my experience of Change11 as participation in an online learning community. My first mistake was not to define a learning community as an outcome of the argument developed in the first section. I had placed it in the abstract and late in the second section, but it needed to be hammered home early and often.

Essentially my definition of community is that they are an emergent property of social systems where people in trusting relationships are involved in the collaborative exchange and creation of knowledge for the purpose of learning.

The second place I lost marks was not answering the question. The assignment asked for a description of one learning approach that could be used in the learning community. I gave several along a continuum. I should have really zeroed in on the connectivist approach to learning, which is after all, what I am interested in.

So in answering that question, the proliferation of the Internet and networked theories of learning have given rise to new approaches to learning (Siemens, G. 2005). Downes (2007) draws some similarities between the principles guiding the proliferation of the web and the connectivist approach which include the fostering of networks, creation over consumption, and massive decentralisation of both content and control. He argues that learning networks and technologies that foster diversity and autonomy, enable connections and support openness are more effective in supporting learning than those that do not.

Inherent in the connectivist approach is a re-imagining of where knowledge resides, which is a question that reaches into philosophical territory. At the very least connectivism offers pedagogies which emphasise the network, and knowledge creation as the user traverses nodes in the network.

I made the mistake of moving from the specific to the general when again the assignment asked for a description of how just two tools might be used to support the connectivist approach in a MOOC. I started out by describing how gRSShopper aggregated content and blogs provided a platform for metacognition, but then loosened my grip on it by talking about conversational media in general.

I am now starting to see that I can take the connectivist approach and apply it to my professional situation. Sure a MOOC does give you a taste of what connectivism is all about, but there might be ways that connectivism can work on a smaller scale, or in different domains. Our brains themselves are complex neuronal networks which at our current level of understanding defy our attempts to replicate and model them.

Seymour Papert once said that if a learning theory is robust enough, then one should be able to use it to construct a learning machine. Perhaps that learning machine is not a silver plated robot, or a humanoid supercomputer which plays table tennis. Perhaps it is the network of social structures and institutions that surrounds us?

We need news ways of imagining these structures and institutions. Our conception of the corporation as an individual with rights similar to human beings, but with out recourse to prosecution for crimes committed in the pursuit of profit, is not serving us very well. What if the corporation was re-imagined so that it exchanged the profit motive for a knowledge motive? We would then being moving forward into the territory of radical abundance.

As one of my colleagues quipped, why would you go to work if you had a replicator at home and you could produce almost anything for free? I think that is an over simplification of the argument of course. Re-imagining labour however, is something that should be addressed immediately.

This complete online course, designed to help grad students develop an identity as a professional scholar, is offered on Connexions and is available for remixing under Creative Commons CC-BY.

If you are intent on becoming a digital scholar, there are so many quality resources out there.

The challenges chat went well tonight. It was good to catch up with everyone from EDIT517, thanks Chris. I just realise now that I had the chat transcript on my clipboard, but now its gone. I might have a chance to grab it again at 11pm when the next session starts.

In virtual teams the establishment of trust is seen a critical for collaboration to occur. Jarvenpaa and Leidner (1998) found that some social behaviours helped to establish trust more than others. They asked the question of future researchers:

What are the most effective ways of communicating social information in virtual teams?

In turning this question over to participants I asked everyone to consider their experiences of the online learning communities they were involved in.

Adrienne encouraged us to start working within people’s comfort zones and the tools they are familiar with. Joanne suggested that people might be afraid to come forward if their isn’t a clear way of communicating set out from the start. Cathie suggested that even in textual communication there is a “voice” that people need to tune into citing the work of Simpson (2006). Hearing someone’s voice through their writing allows people to evaluate trustworthiness.

Beyond protocol for establishing trust there are visual cues that come across when engaged in video-telephony. Although in some cases synchronous video link-ups might present further challenges. I asked everyone to consider how musos might collaborate when video telephony lag times are unacceptable.

Jodie suggested that it’s all about getting together and seeing what works, what fits and what doesn’t. These same concepts could be brought across into other genres of collaboration.

James and Stanton (2011) reviewed literature from various online repositories, sampling articles that contained the phrases “collaborative music” or “networked music”. They found that in many cases synchronous communication worked against novice artists, and suggested that there may be other tools to use to help novices collaborate, including the use of tools that supported metaphor.

Cathie suggested that asynchronous communication worked well for writers, as it gave them more time to think.

I showed everyone a picture of a metaphorical way of capturing social information about the “status” of team members in a group, which I have shared before here. My adaptation of it appears above. I want to know how everyone is feeling about the upcoming assessment pieces for EDIT517.

If I was to follow the suggestion above I would say that Part B - Learning Community Plan gives me the most tension. I’m Yellow on the stress meter because I’d like to replicate some successful aspects of open learning in my context, but I’m afraid that being too prescriptive about tools would limit the openness of the plan. Otherwise elsewhere the weather is fine and sunny!

How is your weather map?

References

James, D., & Stanton, J. (2011). Beyond being (t) here: the social and personal implications of making music at a distance. Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (pp. 686–687).

Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Leidner, D. E. (1998). Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 3(4), 0-0. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00080.x

Simpson, K. P. (2006). Collaboration and Critical Thinking in Online English Courses. Teaching English in the Two-Year College, 33(4), 9.

Jorges Aranda debunks the marketing myth of the hype cycle and counters with his own “Aranda Ignominy curve”. Honestly if anyone tells you they can predict the future, give them a crystal ball and tent at the local fair, you’ll make a mint from gullible fools.

Last week during Orientation for Change 11 I posted about defining success and getting what I want out of this MOOC. I also posted what I am doing to orient myself on this network so that I can be more effective in my learning.

I hope this is a timely reminder for people getting involved in Change 11 that it is really up to you how you define your success, and become involved in the creation of knowledge that ultimately means something to you. The nature of the course is highly decentralised, networked and participatory. I had thought about responding to various frustrations about how barriers to entry were high for people that couldn’t come to terms with the fragmented nature of the MOOC, but I have done this elsewhere.

I wanted instead to focus on what you could do to make sense of the abundance of information that emanates from the course. Which brings me to Step Two to Success in a MOOC - Declare.

Declare

Dave Cormier describes this process as finding “a place for your thoughts and reflections to live”. It might be a blog or a forum related to the course, but essentially it needs to be your home base and not simply a social media outpost like Twitter, Google+ or Facebook. You will be actively creating knowledge, so it helps if you are not just simply amplifying the messages of others or adding to the echo chamber.

This tumblelog inlearning is where my contributions, reflections and other scraps live. This is where I make the critical transition from information consumer to information producer. You’ve got to be able to do this otherwise you will simply be consumed by information, unable to respond. By declaring what my interests are, and what I hope to gain from Change 11 I am naturally making decisions about the information I respond to.

Because this is my home base, you can comment here, reblog or link to my posts and you will become part of the conversation I am having. This conversation revolves around the material I am responding to. When you mention one of my posts on social media someone else might pick up on it and become part of that conversation. In keeping with my goal of building a personal learning network this aspect of declaration is crucial.

Where is you home base? How are you responding to the information that gushes forth from the course? Are you struggling with consumption, or focussing on creation? In my next post in the series I’ll be looking at the network more detail.

After some initial technical hurdles the first Change 11 live session with Zoraini Wati Abas got under way on Fuze at about 3am my time.There is a raw recording at EdTechTalk if you want to catch up with the content.

Questions from the chat box mirrored some of those in the comments on Zoraini’s post Mobile Learning at Open University Malaysia from earlier this week on http://change.mooc.ca

I have copied some of the questions from the chat and how I interpreted the responses from Zoraini and others in the room.

Cris2B to Everyone:
You used Twitter to archive SMSes.  Is Twitter not a good option for communicating with a class?

Although if you opt in, you can get SMS from specific users with Twitter. It’s just an extra hurdle for students, that you may not wish them to jump. There is no cost to broadcasting via twitter, but you may get lower uptake due to user preferences and technology.

Cris2B to Everyone:
Any comparison with grades?  Just wondering…

None, also no comparison with a control group, or evaluation against learning outcomes for the course. I also asked about learning outcomes and got a description of the course and the types of learners. I would like to see an emphasis on this in planning and evaluating similar projects.

vhaustudent to Everyone:
If you have to keep sending SMS reminders of exams, assignment due dates, etc, are you not creating an atmosphere of learned helplessness?
Brett Fyfield to Everyone:
Aren’t you afraid of spoonfeeding students? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more autonomy?
Barry Dahl to Everyone:
Too much hand holding? - when you let go of their hand they drop out. Just sayin’

For distance learners the reminder that they needed to study was really helpful, as reported in the formative study. Most in the chat agreed that motivation was the key factor. It is also important to remember the subject in which this was piloted was an introductory Learning Skills module that focussed ICT tech, understanding learning styles and digital literacies which are particularly important for distance learners.

It was interesting to hear from Zoraini that she found from the outset defining mobile learning, being clear about what you want from the project and adjusting as you go along key factors in the success of the project.

The project is still running at OUM.

I’m glad that the live session all worked out in the end. I’m not too fussed that the presentation followed the slides, because I got quite a bit out of the chat.

I’m really looking forward to Martin Weller’s session next week.Here is the intro he posted on YouTube a few hours ago.

As an aside, I need to know more about this comment from

brainysmurf to Everyone:
this fits well with Jane Bozarth’s work on SoMe for trainers - using questions of the day or similar to prompt thinking.

One of the questions a colleague asked me about the possibilities of mobile learning with SMS was what msgs would you send? And how could you encourage reflective thinking in the students?

I’m starting to see how this all fits together for projects I need to get going at work.

Dr. David Wiley says that Education is on the edge of its own reformation, and asks the question, do we take this technology that we have been blessed with and use it to become more generous and open or do we use it to preserve the status quo?

I’m really looking forward to hearing David in a few weeks time on Change 11 MOOC.

There is an interesting conversation developing about the differences between cooperation and collaboration in open online learning on Frances Bell’s blog. Stephen raises the question whether collaboration is even a desirable thing, by his definition cooperation implies greater individual freedom. Perhaps on a network where you are charting your own course through the material greater personal freedom is desirable.

An implicit goal of open education is de-institutionalisation, so it might be important to look at what cooperation means to the institution versus the individual operating in a network. Clay Shirky discusses this in a TEDtalk from 2008, Institutions vs. Collaboration. As the Internet pushes the costs of open participation in the creation of value down towards zero, institutions become an obstacle to cooperation.

Not that institutions are necessarily a bad thing, but the way in which they are structured (usually around a profit motive) is antithetical to the free exchange of information over networks. So whether you are talking about file sharing, photo sharing or learning the Internet is fertile ground for a post-institutional view of cooperation.

In a world of radical abundance we are moving towards a way of creating value in education that isn’t tied to the institution. The problem with making definitions of collaboration and cooperation in the context of online learning is that the terms become value-laden. So while I agree with Stephen that a MOOC, or for that matter the connectivist learning approach, is not collaborative. I disagree that it is not something to work towards if you are intent on creating something to share with others.

What I sacrifice in personal freedom by contributing to a collaborative effort in producing the Change 11 eBook is balanced by the expectation that I will be creating something lasting. The digital artefact is an outcome of collaboration in a small group initiated by Dave Cormier.

I can’t even define the Change 11 MOOC community, let alone collaborate with them. Who are you? Where are you?

It really is up to you, what you want to get out of Change 11 MOOC. How will you define your success. Are you a bystander? Or are you diving in at the deep end?

Shirky, C. (2008, July 14). Institutions vs. Collaboration (Video file). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPQViNNOAkw