I have been thinking a lot about ET these past few days – not ET as in educational technology, but E.T. the extraterrestrial alien –  as I think I am experiencing a bit of what he must have felt when he found himself stranded on earth.  This was prompted by a tweet by @alison seaman  which said “#etmooc confessional: I almost set geo location on @etmooc acct to “Somewhere between a course and a community”. Still tempted to do that..”.  It got me thinking about what etmooc is for me –  at this stage (and it hasn’t even really “started” yet) I am stranded somewhere out there in cyberspace, as I try to connect my traditional notion of a course with the conversation and collaboration that the C in MOOC has already come to mean to me.

I wonder how I will ever be able to process/manage/filter/ all of the information that is already coming at me from the blogs, tweets, hastag, posts, collaborate sessions and other channels.  Today I tried to read the Introductions in the Google+ community – there are almost 500 kindred spirits hanging out there – my goal was 25 (as I was eating my lunch at my desk).  I think I managed to read and comment on 6 (I kept clicking on all of the interesting links in each introduction post/video/about.me/animoto/poster – the list of creative tools used is endless.  the Information in the google + community is already too big to know.  This course exemplifies what David Weinberger’s writes about in his book: “Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That The Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room”

The word that best describes my learning is divergent – it is moving  in diverging directions involving many different people and  aspects –  which which hopefully lead (it already has)  to novel ideas as I seek to thoughtfully integrate and model the use of educational technology and media in my teaching and learning.  I will use this space to document those ideas and highlight  some of the links and resources that I stumble upon.

How will a divergent learner fare in a connectivist MOOC? I will try to document that journey here – hopefully time will permit and I will overcome my “fear” of blogging which I have always viewed as talking to myself “out loud”.