It’s nice to resurrect this blog and to see so many familiar faces of contributors here. I hope MultiMOOC participants will join as well, as this blog has a set of affordances different from others, which need to be experienced to be well understood. It’s a good blog for students because it can work via email. Participants can post via email, and subscribers can recieve those posts via email and reply to the email to leave comments. This creates a user-friendly forum that threads on the original post.
I’ve also connected this blog with ETMOOC, Alec Couros’s new MOOC at http://etmooc.org/. MultiMOOC and ETMOOC run on similar sets of principles. The principles for MultiMOOC are articulated in many places at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com. Let’s see where ETMOOC’s are similar:
From http://etmooc.org/orientation/
Rather than use an LMS, “an array of ‘small tools, loosely joined’ will be adopted as to provide participants with an authentic, networked-learning experience.” This derives from David Weinberger’s characterization of the Internet social jigsaw as being ‘small pieces loosely joined’ http://www.smallpieces.com/index.php. Similarly to MultiMOOC, ETMOOC’s tools or pieces include Twitter, Google+, Bb Collaborate (Elluminate), a mailing list, a blog portal and “your blog” which gets listed at https://etmooc.org/hub. MultiMOOC experiments with other tools as well, for example one of our moderators (Ana Cristina Pratas) is hoping to make use of Edmodo. It’s good to experiment, though this can confuse participants, so if you’re getting confused, you can limit your array of interaction with our group to just a few tools; perhaps our Yahoo Group mailing list, Twitter, and maybe our Posterous blog? Well, try and be daring, but you choose.
Aggregation of blogs is tricky. Stephen Downes uses a gRSShopper script, essentially the same technique to register known blogs and then “aggregate” just those; whereas I leave it more to chance by using http://spezify.com/#/evomlit. This is why we have two tags for MultiMOOC. The tag #evomlit canvases the community of previous participants in the course, whereas this URL http://spezify.com/#/mmooc13 is intended to gather content just for MultiMOOC 2013. As can be seen, that latter tag has been used before, though we might be able to suppress prior content if we use it often enough.
I’m asking our MultiMOOC bloggers and tweeters to use both tags in their posts to try and populate these aggregations. http://spezify.com/#/etmooc looks like a winner though 🙂
I like the look and feel of ETMOOC. My web design skills are rudimentary, but I notice that most most MOOCs are more imaginatively navigable than mine. On the other hand MultiMOOC is not a MOOC per se but it’s a session about MOOCs. But it’s designed on MOOC principles. These principles are given in a nutshell at the ETMOOC portal, http://etmooc.org/.>
First you must understand that we are cMOOC and not an xMOOC. The c in cMOOC stands for connectivist and as the ETMOOC portal states:
- “cMOOCs are not proscriptive, and participants set their own learning goals and type of engagement.
- cMOOCs are discursive communities creating knowledge together.
These are key characteristics that, once understood, may either reduce or increase anxiety levels of first-time participants. While the organizers will design environments provide sessions, nurture interactions, and outline activities, the active learner plays a dominant role and choice and autonomy are key.”
The ETMOOC portal page points to Dave Cormier’s post on the topic: http://reflectionsandcontemplations.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/what-is-a-mooc-w…
Dave coined the term MOOC in 2008. He is scheduled to talk to us at MultiMOOC at 1400 GMT on Sunday Jan 20: http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded#SunJan202…
We’ll find out more from him then. I’m hitting the end of my window of time I have to post here.
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