Well my good intentions turned out to be just that – good intentions. I created many blog posts in my head – but none of them made them here – I came up with many thoughts for this space – but that is all they ended up being – thoughts – none of them captured here in cyberspace.
Tonight I am wondering about those etmoocers who have not yet tweeted or blogged or followed @etmooc. There are 1600 people who have registered – but “only” about 600 have joined the google community and just over 800 are following us on Twitter – so where are the others? what are you doing? Fellow ET mooc-ers – please call home! Let us know where you are – but since it is not likely that you will be reading this blog – you will never know that I am wondering about where you are and what I can do to assist you to find a space and a place and to join the conversation on this new planet – ETMOOC.
I have been “infowhelmed ” this week – infowhelmed is a word I learned while moderating the inaugural #etmchat . There was so much to read and think about, so many links to follow and post to read that I could not “turn” my brain off to sleep – I just simply could not find the switch!
As the orientation week in ETMOOC ends – I see it is 11:59PM on my computer clock – I have already learned too much to articulate here (unless I plan to not sleep tonight) and I close the week thinking about this post by Stephen Downes @oldaily:
Stephen (one of the fathers of the MOOC movement) writes at http://halfanhour.blogspot.ca/2013/01/what-makes-mooc-massive.html : Consequently, when I have been asked in the past what number a course needs to attain in order to be considered ‘massive’, ………I provide the figure of 150, Dunbar’s Number, as the cut-off line.
Now to be clear, this would refer to *active* participants, and not merely the number of people who signed up. Thus for example the course that has 170 active blogs *does* qualify, while CFHE, which had 83 blogs, is on the cusp (it would need another 70 people active on other platforms, such as Twitter or Google Groups).
Why Dunbar’s number? The reason is that it represents the maximum (theoretical) number of people a person can reasonably interact with. How many blogs can a person read, follow and respond to? Maybe around 150, if Dunbar is correct. Which means that if we have 170 blogs, then the blogs don’t constitute a ‘core’ – people begin to be selective about which blogs they’re reading, and different (and interacting) subcommunities can form.
There is no doubt that ETMOOC is massive – there are well over 500 active contributors and it has not even really started…. and so the learning continues as I look on from the edges and look out from the inside. There is no place I would rather be.
