…once upon a #mooc…once more into the breach. Re-purposing is a kind of making, another word for the same activity or nearly so but from another (unnecessarily disconnected) realm, another Information Silo effect. Tracking them and reflecting on the differences would make a good word make…or unmake. So then, would deconstruction be just another unmake/remake?

What’s my plan? Do I have one? I want to feed three blog to feed into the aggregator’s maw but have no plans. Planning gets in the way of navigating chaos, an inherently intuitive process. “Intuitive planning” has the ring of a top 10 on anyone’s oxymoron list. So does “planned intuition.”

I have ideas, two, maybe more. If you count NaNoWriMo as an ur-MOOC (for another post), both involve other MOOCs. They don’t fit into “Make Cycles”  either. Meh. I’m with Rebecca Hogue’s rule of thumb: fit what you do in a MOOC  to your needs, not the course’s design or  syllabus. That expectation, even in the most connecitvist models, is always problematic for me since I am not actively teaching (unless you count blogging to educate my constituencies and community outreach as stealth teaching) and thinking of other purposes. 

I have already blogged about the first one on Computers, Language, Writing: NaNo/clmooc as digital Reese’s peanut butter cup. The second would be “MOOC making,” e.g. folding City MOOC “planning” project into a Make for Making Connected Learning. Other, less elaborate, notions include ATC, working out way to reduplicate apps with basic programs like Paint, collecting makes by other names, etc. 

Delineating the blogs: CWL is, as its name suggests, about computer mediated writing and language learning, a broad topic that fits some moocs better than others, It also relates to my teaching areas. 

Et tu, mooc? originated as an experiment, a single topic blog just for #etmooc because the etmooc aggregator did not do Tumblr. #clmooc does. Some course takers (followers, participants, drop ins, sporadically active visitors, and so on) start a blog just for a course. Occasionally, that blog survives the course. I’m recycling it to more general, multi-mooc use for those occasions that don’t align well with CWL. I’ll blog about MOOC Making here

Others use an existing blog. WordPress bloggers can designate separate tabs for different categories. WP signposts me into the third MOOC blog, appropriately named MOOC Madness (that I came up with before it entered general usage). I have a deliberately frivolous template ~ balloons floating on a purple background ~ and use it mostly to reblog different kinds of “about MOOC” articles and posts, with occasional breaks to reflect on them.