A few weeks ago, I signed up for #etmooc, my first attempt at taking a mooc after reading and hearing about them for a couple of years. The course started last week, and I attended one of the live sessions and wrote the obligatory introductory blog post, brief as it was. I’ve also joined, and posted in, the Google+ community and tweeted with the #etmooc hashtag.

Ok. So now what?

With over 1600 partcipants in the course and over 350 blogs registered in the blog hub, I will have to take it as a given that I can’t connect with everyone. It’s just too many people to attempt to have any meaningful interaction with.

Also, the live session I attended via the Blackboard Collaborate app was fascinating and invigorating, but left me possibly more confused about the course than I was before it started. With nearly 100 people connected at once, with live audio and video as well as a backchannel chat and twitter going all that the same time the experience becomes more like stream of consciousness than a traditional learning environment. And that, I suppose, is part of the point.

What I have to do is go back to my motivation for taking a mooc, and, more specifically, this mooc, a connectivist mooc.

One motivaiton is simple curiosity. I want to see what all the fuss is about. Is this something lasting and interesting, or is it a fad that will fade away? I am inclined to believe the former, but need more information and experience to hold a qualified opinion.

The other motivation is professional. I have previously blogged about some of the challenges that I believe are particular to teaching at an artistic film school, and write, at the end of the post, that I am finding that connectivism can be a useful tool for us in understanding how the the student learn in particular situations.

This is not within the scope of «traditional» connectivism (if there is such a thing), which tends to focus on the connections technology can provide in something like #etmooc. It does fall within the core of connectivism as a learning theory, however, as it provides a framework for understanding how students learning happens in a collaborative art form like film.

This is what I am hoping to investigate over the next few weeks as I participate in #etmooc. I hope I will find there are people interested in investigating similar issues, and we can form a little sub-community within the large mass of participants. Perhaps we can host a Blackboard Collaborate session in addition to sharing thoughts and ideas on blogs and google+. It may even be interesting to some of the educators who, while they do not teach artists, are interested in developing connectivism as a learning theory further.

Time will tell.