The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Observations on My First MOOC
I was excited that Dr. Allison Rossett asked me to be a guest blogger recently, and here's the result: http://www.allisonrossett.com/2013/03/13/my-first-mooc/.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Final Assignment for "E-learning and Digital Culture"
The University of Edinburgh professors who created the assignment required it to have a five-minute duration. Accordingly, I've created:
Without further ado...
Human Nature and the Nature of Humans and Their Implications for [E-]learning
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Do you agree with the robot's sentiments? If a robot can express such feelings, is the robot human?
Human Learners Need Human Attention While We Learn
e-learning is about self-motivation, but legacies of historical learning make it such that I expect attention from professors. When the cohort is 7K+ who are active, it is hard to gain such attention, so I find it amongst peers.
Finally, a Pinterest Board, MOOC Marvels - "E-learning and Digital Culture"
To view the full board, please click here. You can select to read my comments for three out of the nine pins, so that your review time of my assignment won't exceed five minutes.
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
#EDCMOOC & Me
Had to wait an hour to see a doctor for a routine checkup this eve and read the Chandler articles while waiting. Just blogged:
#EDCMOOC - Fave line from D. Chandler readings - Writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said: "we have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."
I'm feeling calmer today about the weirdness of the format of the course. Yesterday, I was a bit on edge all day, thinking of how there was a wildly active parallel universe that I was missing either due to my full-time job or because of my non-European time zone. It agitated me to dip in for just a couple of hours off and on and stimulated me in parallel as I did. And you already heard yesterday how I felt about not getting my few comments voted up.
Posting in the Facebook group, so far, was most gratifying, as a number of my classmates acknowledged me and I made a few new Facebook friends as a bonus. Twitter is a helpful way for me to have a quick snapshot of classmates' reflections, and to share some quick ones myself.
Perhaps the healthiest mood-change I've had is in letting go of a chunk of the anxiety. So what that there are 40,000 enrollees and hundreds of posts to review in the Forum section of the course? Wasn't that what I wanted to experience first-hand?
This MOOC experience is helping me re-consider the ideal learning cohort size. For face-to-face leadership development sessions, conventional wisdom was that if we had more than 30 managers per cohort, some would get left behind, but every now and then, we had to do it. Here, the scale is so massive, it's ludicrous to even wonder about who's getting left behind...and yet one of the instructors did a wonderful job, I noticed, in the Forum, of acknowledging and linking a number of people's posts -- just not mine yet, but I'm not bitter :-)
Here's the train of thought I'm having that's the most interesting to me right now: This afternoon, a colleague asked the number of virtual participants we'd had for a Livestream session we'd produced for a VP's all-hands meeting recently; it was 574 worldwide. Then she asked me, What was the percentage of the participants who were active in the live chat. In the morning, I may go and count the different names in the live-chat transcript...or I may try to help my colleague see that there's no use in trying to gauge the learning value of the session based on live-chat activity, since the majority of participants lurked, just like they appear to be doing with this MOOC so far. I think her jaw will drop when I tell her that we have 40,000 enrollees and just dozens or scores or hundreds of active post-ers. The 40K number is powerful.
Finally, I want to mention that another way I'm managing to lessen my learning anxieties: not to worry about the parallel universe as much as focusing on the reading assignments. I'll be back in the Forum when I have something substantial to say on our topic. Meanwhile, I'll likely keep posting my observations and feelings here and then letting people know they're here, as well as taking peeks at the EDCMOOC on Facebook and Twitter and getting to know some more of my classmates. #edcmooc
The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Day 1
So far, the MOOC is over-stimulating in a good way -- all topics and people that interest me, and it's embarrassing that I don't already know how to make sure this blog ends up in the RSS, aggregated EDC MOOC News page. All four of the first four short films felt dark to me and I'm typically a hugely optimistic person re: technology's potential for good, so maybe this is a good reality-check, this course, or just a buzz-kill. Not yet sure which.
Having a purring cat on my lap as I type humanizes the alone-ness so far. Am excited by the many hundreds of new people whose viewpoints I'm being exposed to, and need to guard against self-consciousness in my posts in response to others' posts.
That's the tricky part: to acknowledge others' contributions without feeling like I'm just responding without posting original thoughts of my own. I think from now on, I'll ignore the tip, "Search before you post" because then I just get caught up in what others think and feel blocked in spouting my thoughts.
Instead, first I'll post and then I'll trawl through others' input and add selected responses to theirs. I also need to guard against feeling competitive and trying to write to attract votes....Still, earlier, I thought that at least one of my two posts was somewhat clever and was disappointed to check later and see no votes. The lesson, if it's like other online, asynchronous learning I've done, is to get in early. I don't think I'll be able to do that with this course, since psychologically, I know that there is relatively little consequence for not giving it my all vs. ensuring that I'm focusing on my job.
#edcmooc
