Digital Student Writing (Tags #change11 #potcert11 #evomlit)

Upfront disclaimer and confession: this post has nothing to do with current or even recent lesson topics in either Change 11 or Program for Online Teaching. Aha, serendipity alert: inadvertently, I seem to be in sync with the POT Wk 20 topic, instruction design. 

 

Whatever, Digital Student Writing and the perennial problem of getting students to write are germane and central both to the declared focus of this blog and online or computer assisted learning (whatever the current nomenclature flava is). Moocxtination (just made that up, more or less a mashup of MOOC + destination) is less clear, especially without a map or well beaten path to follow. For now, I'm relating it online writing and study groups (e.g. in areas such as GED, ESL, college prep, continuing education, DIY PD, etc. that I have perhaps futile hopes of adapting MOOC model to)


Taking where learners write from the most and are more comfortable writing strikes me as a logical starting point. It's like planning a drainage systen: first see where the water wants to go (or not) and then design accordingly.

Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students :: WIDE Research Center, Michigan State University

This white paper reports initial findings from a Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center study entitled Revisualizing Composition: Mapping the Writing Lives of First-Year College Students. These initial findings are drawn from a survey of students enrolled in writing classes at a sample of US postsecondary institutions.

at long last: hello #multiliteracies, #POTcert11, #CMC11 & #change11

Finally! Today is the day I break the block, stop procrastinating and MOOC blog. So long, too much territory to cover.  I won't even try. Even so, it is still long enough to invite procrastination. 

I started impressions in 750words, an online writing application to develop the habit of daily writing. The purpose is just to write, get started writing and keep writing, with no other purpose ~ certainly not create blog posts, create documents, answer mail and so on, but the morning word dump gets me started.

Quick take on current state of my mooc activity at this point: if I had a compelling reason (i.e. credit, professional development, to add to CV) to or cared about optimum keeping up, I'd be in a drowning panic. I'm not though. Each mooc is a different gem, a view through a different lens that I'd rather not set aside in order to meet recommendations set by someone else.

Sure, I'd like to be getting more done but this is not all I am doing, not even all I am doing online. Try six+ blogs, four Facebook pages (in addition to profile and a number of groups), a bulging feed reader (even the filters have filters), four Scoop.it pages, three Pinterest boards, four Twitter lines (unsuccessfully trying to hand off local farmers market one), a NetVibes aggregation page and a static web page. No surprise that neither of the last get enough maintenance time. Moocs enrich and inform the lot.

That aside why am here? Orient, declare, network, cluster, focus and all that jazz?

Complexity, self-organization, #Change11 etc

 Even if not specifically designated as such, thoughts on navigating chaos, an ongoing Multiliteracies consideration, shine through. Besides relevance, this sharing-as-post gives me the opportunity to a) post by email to posterous; b) autopost to CLW; c) get in the habit of using Diggo features; d) comply with MOOC tool building mission, even modest tools with less bling and glitz (and thankfully requiring less bandwidth); e) participate; f) contribute, however modestly, to artifact creation; g) and surely more

Quotes:

Complexity, self-organization, and #Change11: reactions to Siemen's presentation on online courses - michael sean gallagher

• presentation from George Siemens on Self-Organization in Online Courses (embedded below) that addressed some aspects of learning complexity (through the context of a MOOC)
• we need to sift through the chaos to create signal, perhaps even a pattern language
• I liken this process to language itself and the alphabet. The alphabet developed to take a series of meanings and weld it to one symbol (a process more pronounced in Chinese and ancient Egyptian perhaps) that everyone might recognize and accept.
• It reduces the complexity, yes, but more importantly it provides a starting point for a common process. Without it, we would be lost in theory. 
• The same holds for learning to some degree. We look for structure, but if none exists on sight, we combine things until some structure emerges. That structure can be represented in a single symbol, but its foundation might shift as new understanding emerges. Occasionally, there is need to ditch the symbols or invent a new one altogether as emerging learning dictates. That is a healthy and complicated process. The MOOC captures this process a bit and adheres to an open structure to allow pattern language to emerge, a shared vocabulary, a knowledge construct (however ephemeral).
• Feedback as friction as forces interact. A spark, a collision, waste, and occasionally a nova. A big (learning) bang. This makes me think a learner's responsibility (among many others) is to be open to this collision of actors, agents, feedback, waste, noise, and then, ideally, pattern, understanding. The only way out is through.
• Disturbing- an ontological disturbance, an unknown, an uncanny sense of veering through uncharted, potentially treacherous waters. It is a good place to be as a learner, but it requires a strength and confidence that only an empowered learner could put forth. But in that disturbance, that mess, there is the friction, that meat-grinder of understanding.
• This is learning as curiosity and sometimes it can be quite scary. 
• Often we seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge (anyone subjected to my endless banal history lessons will understand this), but I do believe that most learning is action oriented. To learn not only to get a job, to live in a world, to subsist, but rather for acting as best as we can. For improvement, for progress, for self-actualization.
• self-actualization (the development of self) can only be realized through sharing, group interaction
• disaggregated, emotive, functional machine of interaction. One that has to be tinkered with constantly. 

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Basic Blogging, #potcert11

Explaining how to get started blogging was on my mind before this course started: a friend asked for help with basics. I assumed (and we all know the cliché about how that breaks down) everybody taking the class would already be a blogger. So I thought, why not revise and repurpose for the class? Too basic, just ignore it: filtering practice.

Blogging is not that different from writing email. The compose screens are very similar. Instead of emailing to designated addressees, you publish - send it into cyberspace. A number of blogging platform offer post by email, making blogging even more like email. Compose in your email program and save in drafts. Alternately, you can compose in a word processing program and then copy paste into the message screen. Use WordPad and save to rtf because Word has too much hidden garbage code that may not transfer well 

Explanatory stuff + links below the fold. Looking over a few blogs about teaching and in your subject area will help you get a feel for blogging and the possibilities. Best advice: just do and figure out the details as you go along. Ask questions: anyone you know who blogs is part of your learning network.

Comparing MOOCs

~ no two alike, about how they evolved and extending the comparison / discussion to large open courses such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Stanford’s Massive AI Course, by Michael Atkisson at Ways of Knowing, briefly excerpted with exhortations to click through and read the entire piece + bibliography. Size matters but is not everything, nor, according to some, is it even the most important element, which might (my best guess) be interactive, distributed networks operating according to connectivist principles. I've been told before by mooc-urus that I was wrong so could be again.

What is a MOOC?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are large-scale online courses (in the thousands of participants) where an expert or group of experts from a particular field both 1. create the large draw to the course, and 2. facilitate a multi-week series of interactive lectures and discussion forms on critical issues from that field. Participants are expected to self-organize, to share and discuss the course material, and to create and publish new artifacts that represent their learning. Additionally, MOOC participation is recorded and published openly so that those who come upon it later may follow peripherally.

Where did MOOCs Come From?

This is best answered in the words of David Cormier and George Siemens,

“The term was coined in response to Siemens and Downes’s 2008 “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” course. An initial group of twenty-five participants registered and paid to take the course for credit. The course was then opened up for other learners to participate: course lectures, discussion forums, and weekly online sessions were made available to nonregistered learners. This second group of learners–those in The Open Course who wanted to participate but weren’t interested in course credit–numbered over 2,300. The addition of these learners significantly enhanced the course experience, since additional conversations and readings extended the contributions of the instructors.” (2010, p. 32).

Since 2008, several other MOOCs have developed....

What is a MOOC Experience?

The scale of interaction among MOOC participants is like that of massively multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft, but where as in the gaming environment large numbers of people come together online to play, self-organize, develop skill, strategize as a group, and execute strategies, MOOCs, on the other hand, facilitate learning about or the development of a particular knowledge domain at a participation scale ripe for diversity....Other ways to experience a MOOC are to lurk or to follow the course after-the-fact.... there were lots of ways to participate... I thought it was remarkable how much I felt that I was there in the class....felt immersed through my after-the-fact peripheral participation.

Is MIT’s OpenCourseWare a MOOC?

The short answer is no. I again point to Cormier and Siemens:

“In an open course, participants engage at different levels of the educator’s practice, whether that be helping to develop a course or participating in the live action of the course itself. This is distinctly different from the idea of open in the open content movement, where open is used in the sense of being free from the intellectual property stipulations that restrict the use and reuse of content” (2010, p. 32).

Though MIT’s OpenCourseWare is revolutionary, making content publicly available is not enough because it only focuses on the content.... MOOCs seem to differ from Stanford’s classes in these principle ways 


(now read the entire piece online, bookmark it, save the bibliography)

#POTCert11: Introduction

Here's my introduction. Now that I am not teaching classes and sending out or posting obligatory welcome notes, I no longer had an appropriate bio on file. Writing a fresh one took a bit longer than expected, evoking the inevitable bout of self-reflection about identities. The result may be both too long and not long enough. My 67th birthday was just a week ago: a lot happens in that many years, some lived in interesting times and places, some of it even pedagogically relevant. 

I moved to Mountainair NM from Davis CA at the beginning of 2000. Mountainair is a small, rural community in central NM. Although remote in being relatively isolated and not suburb distance from a significantly larger town, it is not a long a drive from much larger and better known Albuquerque or even Santa Fe. There are historic buildings, notable examples of wild folk art, pre-Columbian and Spanish Mission ruins, a small arts community, a bank, a gas station, a grocery store, a volunteer run community library, a blinker light, ranchers, developers selling the Old West mystique, even a gated (mostly) SoCal exurb and all too soon, our very own Dollar Store. I live alone, have cats, two very large hairy dogs and, until a few years back, took in two retired Welsh mares I bred in another life time, yard ornaments.

After living in the Lafayette LA area for 25 years straight after returning from eight years residence overseas, I headed westward ho to study Comparative Literature at UC Davis. Since then I've taught composition, English literature, World literature and Classics in translation, Spanish, ESL, developmental writing and study skills as well as directing a local family literacy program and teaching in after school programs. I've taught hybrid and online since the mid 90s ~ public, for-profit and as a volunteer. 

Retired now, I occupy myself online and with words, blogging, keeping up with far flung friends and family, following wide spread interests, community networking, curating social media content for fun and other projects that occasionally intersect ~ and still volunteer teach ESL online. This past year I added open online courses to the list. None have been for credit, nor all completed, but I still get a lot out of them ~ and keep coming back for more. Each time I get a better sense of the format and feel for the potential of distributed networks. 

It's a whole new learning culture, very likely a game changer, but one I feel like I've been waiting for all along.

Diigo: done did it

 or Adventures in Diigo-Land: not that much of adventure since I already had a Diigo account that I use some but less than Delicious, which is faster, especially with marklet plug-in. The speed bump was lost note with login information (geriatric hard drive melt down) and forgetting which email account I signed in from. I'd say try not to have systems problems right when starting a course or project, but that's not something we have control over. Too bad.

I should use Diigo more and have been inching up on it, a bit more each online workshop, class or MOOC that calls for it. Inching is my approach of choice for assimilating apps ~ minimizes frustration and keeps long term memory from going out on strike for unfair working condition. Turbo-techno-teachers might bear that in mind dealing with students new to the tech they themselves take for granted.

Diigo won't supplant or completely replace Delicious but don't doubt it will find its place in the Repertoire of Useful Performing Apps. This round I'll use the sharing tools more and maybe just maybe explore it for quick & easy blog content posting. With the gang of blogs I have, I'm always on the lookout for that.

Into the #MOOC again

... but you never enter the same MOOC twice.

Adding the blog right off as part of the enrollment process put the feed right out there. Will that encourage regular blogging or blogger's block?

My own MOOC-blogging reticence puzzles me. I run a gang of blogs and generally post to about three a day. That's not counting affiliated twitter accounts and Facebook page. In other words, I've danced at this party plenty of time before, in front of both friends and strangers, so why be shy now? Maybe regular assignments are what I need ~ just like setting realistic blogging goals as New Year's resolutions.

Here I am, working my way through the POT list:

• already in the FB group
•  just filled out form
• waiting for password to add feed
• already in Diigo but need to join mccpot group
• finish reading syllabus (e.g. practice what we preach)
• writing that 1st blog post right now
• and then the Howdy Y'all blog post 
• on FB too

I am particularly pleased to have learned how to create a feed just for a single tag or label. Good news for a schizo multiple strand blog like this one. Although I've used this blog for a number of online workshops or courses with blog requirements, that is not it's primary purpose, especially between times. It started out being about the intersection of computers and the internet with teaching language/s and writing. Multiliteracies didn't take it OT, but MOOCs about teaching online have been a stretch. Both functions have suffered as a result. From the sidebar:

ABOUT ~ Writing includes email, blogs, wikis, genres less bound to but still involving computers. Web 2.0 collaboration, interaction, feedback, tech tools and apps that enhance the writing process. The blog started as part of an online workshop about teaching writing, with ESL instructors the intended audience, but has now gone beyond that and other boundaries. What happens to language when writing and computers collide? Or writing when language and computers meet up?

 Maybe I should write separate learning objective (per previous post) for each MOOC, including past ones with self-evaluation (eek). Learning objective should keep writing component in mind. I still intend to get to the Digital Divide too.