Reflection: Manuel Lima: The Power of Networks

I find this to be one of the most lively, condensed and persuasive rationally presented videos I have ever seen. The cartoon character makes it into a work of art too. This fulfills my expectations of what teaching should be. Ten minutes imaginative and visually attractive input followed by hours of reflection. This is one of those events that will remain with me.

Reflections on 'Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch ?'

In their paper 'Could the Web be a Temporary Glitch?', Carr, Pope and Halford conclude with these words:

'Openness is a property of the Web architecture and a contributory factor in the success of its adoption, but it is not an inevitable property of the user experience in the coming decade.'

This 'inevitable' clearly implies that the current situation is both dynamic and fluid. Everything in web history is about periods of transition. We don't live through periods of transition, as in the past, we live in transition. We see that in the recent past teens have moved and are moving away from facebook towards WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk. Their reasons appear to be greater privacy, restriction to friendship groups and avoidance of selfies, silly self portraits. Yet we know that despite many protestations to the contrary in the end economics take control as in almost all aspects of life (not creative commons hopefully)...so just maybe we are currently enjoying the Indian Summer of the web. Thanks to Mark Nash for his highly relevant links.

Personal Learning Environment tools: preparation for Southampton MOOC Personal Learning Network

As there aren't any MOOC guidelines in my hands from Southampton yet, for the learning experience I researched what I think I will need as a minimum to prepare to be successful in the way I want.

I set up a blog (this one) as a place to reflect on my experience so that I am in a position to share it with others in a spirit of compare / contrast / grow. I gathered feeds about MOOC experiences from the instigators and participants; of course Downes and Siemens loomed large amongst them. I am instinctively  drawn towards the necessity of connectivism as a digital age dynamic theory. In my information gathering I need ways to organize and refine what I got, so I found myself trying out a variety of sources. The best amongst them were netvibes, rss feeds, bloglines, evernote and pinterest (for thematic graphic storage). Sources of inspiration were mainly You Tube and slideshare. I figured that my most detailed sharing would likely be done through something like dropbox after I learn who my like-minded fellow students are. I have used delicious as a bookmarker for years so old habits die hard. I'm not really proficient with google+ yet and I haven't really forgiven them yet for the death of various cherished tools. For getting the answers to my basic questions I have chosen a bundle of sources which I have used in the past - although on this occasion Techopedia has helped the most so far. That's my plan - let's wait and see how well it works. I guess the official estimate of 3 hours per week for 6 weeks will prove to be a massive understatement!

Related articles

• University of Southampton MOOCs...coming soon!
• Five Possible Advances for Online Learning Courtesy of MOOCs

Techopedia impresses this relative beginner and computing autodidact

I know a bit about computing I think. Yet when you have taught yourself, as you went along, with a few (half-understood) conversations with experts in computing (but not necessarily communication) it is great to find a fall-back position where you can check your knowledge and plug the gaps. That's what techopedia.com  does for me, at a basic, easily readable level, as well as updating and rounding up my half-knowledge in the following areas for example:

• the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web
• the pioneers of the World Wide Web
• a timeline of the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web
• understanding social media
• a beginner's guide to internet memes
• 6 key trends in online business
• what do massive open online courses (MOOCs) mean for education?
• cloud computing
• top 10 cloud computing myths busted

I hope this will all be useful background to my Web Science MOOc later this month and if not I have learnt something useful anyway. It satisfied my curiosity and at some point I had to stop clicking yet another hyperlink.

Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - Opportunity, Challenge, Responsibility (Photo credit: Anna L. Schiller)

An Overview of the MOOC Research Initiative from George Siemens

MOOC Research Initiative from gsiemens

Related articles

• MOOCs
• Reinventing higher education - MOOCs, SPOCs and hubs
• Open Education: OER, OCW and MOOCs
• European Universities Catch the Online Wave
• MOOCS as the alternative

Lessons for MOOCS from Traditional Online Learning from George Siemens

P2PU: A University for the Web & Distance learning history.

This great idea comes out of Australia where so much began in distance learning - to quote from the website:

'LEARNING BY EVERYONE. FOR EVERYONE. ABOUT ALMOST ANYTHING. COMPLETELY FREE'

https://p2pu.org/en/

It looks well worth a look and a try.

This prompted me to search out K Keairns report on the History of Distance Education (under its various synonyms). It van be found here and makes fascinating reading as well as being clearly presented in my opinion:
http://mysite.du.edu/~kkeairns/doc/history.html

Related articles

• Getting Started with P2PU: Webmaking 101 #1 Introduce Yourself

Tell it like it is...the future for learners and facilitators

Tell it like it is...

As a young learner and a bit later as a young teacher, I dreamed of having the classical library of Alexandria on my desktop. I also dreamed that I could have access to the thoughts of others; their impulses, their motivations, their conclusions, their successes and their near misses. That I could readily communicate with like-minded people both near and far. That I could share their dreams and they mine. Within my lifetime this has all come true. At the touch of a few keys I have the world at my fingertips, in my ears and in my eyes. And all I had to do was to learn where to look and master a few simple skills. Of course I have to be careful not to get knocked down by crazies but that has always applied in life. As I am older I don’t have to make the decision like parents and children do – at what age should all this begin if I want to allow childhood to be physical, psychological and emotional play – but that is only a matter of control and degree. Not whether but when to start experiencing 21^st century skills. All of this is a question of healthy balance and will require practice, parental and facilitator support and help in the growth of wisdom to get that balance right.

So when I, as the new learner, embark on my odyssey to find these 21^st century skills what can I expect to await me?

In the construction of my personal learning environment I will find fellow travellers in life (on social media websites) or people searching for the same interests as I have (in learning communities). I will be able to gain access to them everywhere I go through my mobile devices (smart phone, tablet or phablet). I will become overloaded with possibilities and have to make crucial decisions about what to access and what to discard. As Wordsworth wrote: ‘The world is too much with us…’ That will become an on-going series of major decision-making process in my life; controlling information overload. I will be able to communicate face-to-face, by mobile, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, by email, skyping, through the internet, by sms, on social media, by posting my profile and creating a network Xing or Linkedin or through slideshare and the like. To search I can use a search engine, a metasearch engine or a specialist search engine like google scholar or sweetsearch. As tools I will have my laptop, netbook or tablet, phablet or smart phone. I can view and listen also on my ipod. I can film with a digital camera and orientate myself or plan travel with tom tom or garmin (or even do all of these on my mobile phone). I can handle writing, figures databases and presentations with open office. I can organise my music and videos with itunes, upload my original musical creations to soundcloud and customize my photos with photoshop and post them on flickr. Of course these are only well-known examples. For a fuller listing of possibilities see http://www.go2web20.net/ . I can communicate online with a learning platform, in virtual classrooms and physical ones with smartboards and get free tutorials with MOOCs or https://www.khanacademy.org/ . The latter is ‘completely free forever’. I can hone my reactions and live out my phantasies in online game-playing communities. When I am ready I can provide myself with a university education to doctorate level and publish the theses I produce on the way. I can publish my autobiography, my poetry and songs, my art or my hyperlinked novel novel. I can finance my causes through crowdsourcing. To this I can add everything desirable that my fellow users dream up in our collective futures and may much of it be opensource...

The question then is:

 ‘will learning institutions at all levels be ready in terms of the training of facilitators and their intellectual acceptance to meet this new challenging digital age and develop with it into web 3.0 and beyond or will they die out like the dodo?’

Image: www.en.wikipedia.org (no further info available)

Related articles

• Hyperlinks: More complex than spiderwebs
• How do the affordances of a networked media culture(hyperlinks, multimedia, sharing etc) enhance online communication?
• 
  
• 
  

About 'The MOOC model for digital practice'

This 64 page paper presented by Alexander McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and Dave Cormi from 2010 covers the following aspects of MOOCs initially related to Canada:

• the digital economy
• as digital practice
• learner roles
• the implications
• gaps in knowledge 

It is available to download under CC licence:

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/MOOC_Final.pdf

New directions for a digital age - MOOC 'Connectivism' (CCK12)

Following the Stanford Artificial Intelligence MOOC in the summer of 2011 George Siemens and Stephen Downes MOOC.ca decided to create a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to work on developing a theory called connectivism because all main educational theories were pre-digital age and therefore neither up-to-date or comprehensive.

This MOOC in its ongoing form was their sharing and developing experience with thousands of other interested parties.

http://cck12.mooc.ca/

Stephen Downe's ebooks can be accessed here:

http://www.downes.ca/me/mybooks.htm

Setting out the shop

Having decided to participate in the Web Science MOOC from Southampton I needed to get prepared with a fresh blog and pinterest as collection point. The off is 11th November 2013.
 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/futurelearn-is-go-but-it-is-not-quite-thefinished-article/2008347.article

MOOCs are already spawning offspring:
 http://www.technoduet.com/mooc-spoc-moor-and-the-walking-dead-the-journey-continues/

Through pearltrees I found this informative advice about starting and succeeding in a MOOC:

 http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1023/how-to-succeed-in-a-massive-online-open-course-mooc

I like this interesting insight into 'the dark web':
















http://www.riehler.com/the-dark-web/

Related articles

• FutureLearn Launches Free Online University Courses