MOOCing About

Mitch Resnick, Philipp Schmidt, and Natalie Rusk discuss Learning Creative Learning, the 4 Ps (projects, passion, peers, play), and tinkering with MOOCs. Love that meme.

This week I am completing The Science of Happiness (edX platform) presented by The Greater Good Science Center. WooHoo! Completion! Disclaimer: this is the first MOOC I have completed.

I dove headfirst into MIT's 11.132x Design and Development of Educational Technology (edX platform), catching up by covering the first 4 weeks this weekend (suboptimal but hey...I did it).

I logged into LCL2 - Learning Creative Learning - which is less a MOOC, more a community. I've invited my colleague and collaborator Barry Gelston to be my LCL creative learning co-learner here.

Extreme relevance is sustaining my motivation. In the Science of Happiness MOOC, I watched all the videos, read almost all of the papers, did the weekly practices, took extensive notes in an Evernote notebook, tested my understanding with the short, well-placed assessments, and when I really had something to say on a topic, posted to a discussion and read a few of the other posts. I watched many of the videos on 1.25 - 1.50 speed. I did not multitask.

Observations: Participation takes a lot of time (which is why video speed selection is a key feature). I am tired of people still referencing the MOOC hype. We're way beyond that now. I appreciate the nuances that are emerging. More on that in future posts. I'll leave you with an example of a nuance I really appreciated by Chade-Meng Tan and colleagues in their Search Inside Yourself course. I loved the moment when the static little meditator in the frame suddenly comes to life with a thought bubble message. 

I've been on hiatus from MOOCing About posting, but I haven't been on hiatus from MOOCing. Having a delightful experience in #clmooc - here is the MOOC description from the #clmooc G+ Community. 

Making Learning Connected (#clmooc) is a collaborative, knowledge-building and sharing experience open to anyone who is interested in making, creativity, and learning. We will design and engage in "makes"--creative projects-- that tap into our personal (and professional) interests. Then, we'll share what we've done with Making Learning Connected community, learn from each others' experiences, and reflect on our own growth. We'll be agents in the recursive creation and re-creation of this experience we're describing as a Massive Open Online *Collaboration* (MOOC). Throughout the MOOC, we'll engage with and employ Connected Learning principles as they relate to making and learning.

Attempting to do some rapid catch up this morning on #cfhe12 - Current/Future State of Education, hosted in Desire2Learn. Hitting some significant drag at lift off. Took log in weirdness in stride (system showed me as logged in but when I clicked link from Course Content, system showed me as guest. There was a note from admin that they were having log in issues--reset password as instructed. I tried a few more rounds, didn't manage to get out of guest mode when in the Course Content, and moved on to view the presentations that have happened. Screen shot here is the result of attempt to view Jeff Selingo presentation archive in GoToMeeting (I tried Safari, Chrome and Firefox--same message for each). I don't have time to jump into Twitter to find what's up with this. I imagine it will get solved. Moved on to watch Siva Vaidhyanathan's presentation which was offered up as a .mov. Yay for success but by now, enthusiasm seriously dampened.

I expect a little drag. More than a little, as I experienced today, is rough.

These days a person could spend every waking hour MOOC-ing. I have one friend who almost is...participation in several MOOCs simultaneously requires a lot of video viewing, at a minimum.

Recently, I advised a young friend transitioning into a Masters Program after a year off focusing on work--she was seeking strategies for keeping up with the volumes of reading she needs to do every week, and of course, comprehension which is always useful ;D

Videos present a unique challenge. While exploring what professors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are up to with Marginal Revolution University, I discovered one possible approach in a post by Alex--Speed Video. Wow.

Day 1 of Stanford School of Ed's (not a MOOC) 403x

That's Roy Pea on the set of 403x. Stanford is certainly one of the hotspots of MOOC experimentation and evolution - with the runaway success of Thrun and Norvig's AI class, Thrun's exodus ("Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again...I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”) and launch of Udacity, and Coursera's innovations like tapping the long tail and "callibrated peer-review."

As Stanford makes clear in the 403x overview, THIS IS NOT A MOOC. But it's certainly related. 403x - open to the public for participation and no credit - looks at the digital future of education and asks some big questions.

I especially enjoyed reading this statement ('bout time someone noticed):

...the boundary between high school and college is becoming ever more fluid, to the point where it is largely symbolic and a potential impediment to positive innovation.

Why I love #DS106 and CogDogBlog: Playfulness extremely alive and well. Discovery--now I know about iTimeLapse = Delight. 

I really appreciate Nancy White's recap of her week hosting #change11 conversation on Social Artistry. I like having a new role available for myself....social artist. And a new skill to wield more consciously through awareness. Nancy borrowed the term from Etienne Wagner. Here's a quote from Etienne she pulled from David Wilcox's blog...I want to capture it here in my own #change11 trail notes (my bolds):

“The key success factor we’ve found is learning citizenship where learning citizenship is a personal commitment to seeing how we are as citizens in this world. Let me give you an example: I know an oncological surgeon in Ontario, Canada who asks himself how to provide the social infrastructure for patients to learn about cancer. An act of learning citizenship is to be able to use who you are to open this space for learning. I’ve come to call these people social artists, people who can create a space where people can find their own sense of learning citizenship.

“I love social artists. In fact I worship them. First because social artists know how to do what I only know how to talk about; and second because I care about the learning of this planet. I think we are in a race between learning and survival. We live in a knowledge economy where any expertise is too complex for any one person. One person can’t be an expert so anyone who can give voice to that need to work together is a social artist.

“I do a lot of consultancy work for training community leaders, but in my heart of hearts I know the real secret of those social artists is not something I can teach. The real secret of those people is knowing how to use who you are as a vehicle for opening spaces for learning.  I don’t really have the words – but I just know when I see it. It is a way of tapping into who you are and of making that a gift to the world … it’s about being able to use who I am to take my community to a new level of learning and performance.

“I want to leave you with three questions…

How can you act as a learning citizen in this world?

How can we as a group help , sustain, celebrate that capability among ourselves? If EQUAL has done a bit of that – how do we capture it, nurture it cherish it?

For those of you who are movers and shakers – how can you build an institutional structure that enables people to find their voice in the interests of the people they want to serve? Social artists need to fight … How can we enable a structure that enables those people to do the work that they do?

“These are urgent questions. Social innovation is a matter of the heart, not just projects. We need you to do that for the world, not just Europe”.

Want the whole thing in context? Here is Etienne's keynote from ShareFair in Rome, September, 2011.

Nancy asks the question, Can social artistry be learned, or it is something some of us just carry with us? My answer, heartily, is YES, social artistry can be learned. Just a few of my dozens of social artistry mentors: Heinz Von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, Laurie Thomas and Sheila Harrie-Augstein, Marshall Rosenberg, Salvador Roquet, Carol and Tom French Corbett, John Holt, Parker Palmer.

The last two mornings I had 12 people add me to circles in Google+ - all from #change11. What a great way to start my day...stepping through each of their pages, reading their Abouts, glimpsing their photos and recent posts, and then adding them to my #change11 circle and occasionally a second circle. I realized that #change11 is a powerful filter for kindred spirits, like Second Life was in 2005 for early adopter changemaking edge-ucators. And I'm really thrilled to be meeting some of the many #change11 participants. I don't take this opportunity to connect for granted. Such an event is still far too rare. So I am making the time to participate (no small feat) and inventing my own ways of participating that are relatively easy to do (like my visual screen captures).