This last Sunday, EdTechTalk was kind enough to host the second conversation on how we’re developing the connectivism course. Our first session was more theoretical/conceptual in nature. The second session focused on more practical elements - tools, approaches, assignments, and so on. Thanks to EdTechTalk for hosting the discussion…and for Alec and Leigh for joining in.
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Connectivism & Connective Knowledge Blog
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Discussion on EdTechTalk - #2
Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 7:50pm GMT by gsiemens
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Registering for the course - for credit
Posted: August 20th, 2008, 8:21pm GMT by gsiemens
As previously mentioned, this course is available for free (all content and conversations will be open and online) and this course is also available for credit. Those participants who are seeking credit for the course (which is now for credit in U of Manitoba’s Certificate in Adult and Continuing Education…but will also count as a course in our Certificate in Emerging Technologies for Learning - more info on that soon) are required to enroll and pay the usual course fee.
What’s different between taking the course for free vs. enrolling?
Participants who enroll in the course will be expected to complete a series of assignments, will receive personal feedback on those assignments, and will then be recognized as having completed the course through University of Manitoba.
If you would like to enroll, you can find more information here. Or you can go straight to the registration/payment page.
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Connectivism and Second Life
Posted: August 20th, 2008, 6:49pm GMT by gsiemens
Openness = innovation. It’s really a simple equation, but one that is the heart of what Stephen and I are attempting to promote in this course. Due to the openness of both course content and interaction, we’re hoping for many opportunities for multi-perspective interactions. We’re seeing this already with course translations and meetups.
Another valuable community is developing in SecondLife. Chilbo, under the activities of Chris Collins - or Fleep in SL - has organized a Second Life Cohort. It’s a great opportunity to extend the conversation. From the site: “Participants will meet weekly for synchronous discussion in Second Life and will have the opportunity to create a home or office in the Chilbo community for the duration of the course. Due to space limitations, this cohort will be limited to approximately 50 participants.”
Thanks Fleep!
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Assignments
Posted: August 12th, 2008, 6:11pm GMT by gsiemens
I’ve been thinking about assignments for this course.
We have two groups: those who are interested in enrolling and paying for credit (~30 - we’re technically full, but if you’re still interested, we could likely add one or two more) and those who are interested in taking the course for free.
Assignments for enrolled learners will include:
- Weekly reflections via blogs and/or podcasts.
- Several short opinion papers (~2 pages/500 words, can be produced as a blog post)
- Weekly personal concept maps of how ideas/concept relate (using CMAP - free download)
- Group work concept map summarizing distributed conversation (groups of 2 and 3 will each be assigned one week where they are responsible for maintaining/developing the concept map).
- Final presentation - using any tool. I’d recommend Articulate if you’re using PowerPoint(free trial download). This presentation will address the following: What is the quality of my learning networks: diversity, depth, how connected am I? How has this course influence your view of the process of learning (assuming, of course, that it has)? What types of questions are still outstanding? This presentation will be approx 15-20 minutes in length.
For other participants
Participants who are taking the course for personal interest, not enrolled, obviously don’t have formal assignment requirements. However, I’d encourage participants to provide comments through blogs tagged with the course tag (CCK08), contribute to the Moodle forum, create and share concept maps, and so on. I’m hoping that the availability of an open course will result in a higher level of dialogue for all learners - both enrolled and otherwise.
Is it a fair request to ask all participants to reflect/contribute to the conversation? Or how would you provide an assignment/assessment structure?
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Narratives of coherence
Posted: August 6th, 2008, 4:00pm GMT by gsiemens
Grand narratives - such as provide us with a large umbrella that we can use to make sense of the world - have been besieged over the last several decades. Grand narratives in the form of newspapers, newscasts, and books are now augmented by blogs and YouTube videos. As discussed in a previous post, one of our key challenges in this course is to find a way to bring together the numerous ideas and viewpoints in a way that makes sense for participants.
Self-selection is one model (i.e. follow certain threads in Moodle and blogs). Centralization is another - bring the conversation to one central spot - as we’re doing with Moodle. Aggregation - in this case, with PageFlakes - is a third. Each of these approaches is an attempt to provide or create some type of a narrative - namely, a narrative of coherence. But coherence in this context is created by each learner. In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator’s bias influences what is included and excluded. What we’re talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence.
While it is obvious that information shaping approaches such as we find in newspapers and books are fading in prominence, we still need some type of framework to make sense of it all. For example, while I don’t read newspapers (except when traveling and they magically appear on my doorstep each morning), even people who are avid newspaper readers find other ways to augment their interpretation. The comments on the online newspaper site, for example. Or blogs. Or a Google Alert. Or a Technorati search.
In a recent bizzare murder in Manitoba, I found information through traditional news channels online. But of greater interest were the extensive comments, Facebook group, etc. All of us are actively engaged in trying to bring together multiple voices in some type of coherent structure. Sometimes the coherence we seek is around a particular event. Other times it is more broad, such as when we are trying to make sense of what’s happening in society. Or politics.
We repeatedly hear how intelligence failures result in catastrophe. The information that was needed to find out what was happening - with terrorist attacts, for example - is later found to have been present. People viewing the information were simply not able to put the pieces together into some kind of a coherent whole. In a sense, the information wasn’t being connected in a meaningful manner.
I’m personally quite interested to see how the concept of a narrative of coherence will unfold in this course. We all face information abundance. We all face the reality that we will always be missing some key pieces of information. In our previous online conferences, we had large numbers enrolled, but I would say less that 5% were active contributors. A common concern voiced by many of the active participants: how do we assimilate/makesense of this information?!? There’s just too much of it.
Part of the solution is to rely on one’s learning network to filter out nonsense and to draw attention to key ideas. This is particularly effective when we can “plug in” to a network with high levels of diversity and with people we quickly begin to trust. Technological patterning is another - and in the long run, very promising - approach. ManyEyes, tag clouds, social interaction, word frequency and occurence analysis, and other ways of surfacing connections and interaction trails offer great opportunity. But these approaches are not yet commonly available. Or intuitive. For example, ManyEyes is great for visualizing word occurence. But, it’s not intuitive. I have to cut and paste text into the site. I’d like more of my sensemaking tools to function automatically. That is, I don’t want to explicitly add text to a site. I want the site to continually evaluate what’s happening and to provide information to the user. A learning management system often provides very useful analytics to faculty. Why not turn that around and make interaction information available to learners?
If you have ideas on how to increase the ability for individuals to form personal, coherent narratives, let us know…
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Tools
Posted: August 1st, 2008, 1:47pm GMT by sdownes
Thinking aloud about what tools we want to use, drawing from George’s post on the weekly activities.
> Each week will have a clearly defined topic. The topic will be introduced by a short article or introduction (in this case, a two page description or opinion piece)
OK, I would like to actually distribute these, and not just passively hope that people will visit the website. Thus I would like people to have to option sign up for a mailing list or to sign up for an RSS feed.
The more I think about this, the more I am inclined to want to use my own gRSShopper tool for this. It allows both types of subscriptions. And we will be able to include other content with the mailouts. And I have experience using it with thousands of subscribers. See [grsshopper.downes.ca] for more information.
Also: note that george says that each week begins with the clearly defined topic. I actually think we should have a mailout each weekday. More on this below.
> or podcast, or whatever. Some weeks both Stephen and I will post an introductory piece, other weeks only one of us will.
I had originally thought I would want to longer talks, but on second thought, posting a one-hour video is probably not very effective. We want people to be able to actually view these, and people mostly won’t view a one-hour video.
That said, my intention is to provide content for each week - certainly an introductory piece at the beginning of each week, and likely some follow-ups. I will offer (more or less) the same content through various media, including:
- Slideshare (with slide downloads)
- YouTube or Google Video (with video download)
- Odeo (with audio RSS download, and enclosures in the RSS feed)
- Text, as articles posted somewhere (either here or in gRSShopper)> Links to external resources for additional reading/viewing will be provided weekly as well.
Again, gRSShopper provides this; the format could be similar to OLDaily’s (we can adapt the template for this course if we desire).
These links will appear as posts in the daily mailout, as well as the RSS feed, and will be provided by both George and I.
> Short podcasts and opinion pieces will be presented - i.e. “Stephen’s views” “George’s views”. Stephen and I share many overlapping views of knowledge and learning. But a few core disagreements exist. We’ll try and provide a diversity of thought - complimentary and at times in conflict - for you to consider.
See above.
> Discussions will be held in asynchronous forums like blogs, moodle, and wikis. Use of the course code - CCK08 for tagging posts or sharing del.icio.us resources will be helpful.
This is a key point. I don’t think it will be helpful to try to provide some sort of common discussion forum or content management system. It would mean that everybody had to learn the system and that they would be constrained by the limits of the system.
We want people to be able to discuss things wherever they feel comfortable. That’s why George talks about blogs, Moodles and wikis, and recommends a course code.
We want to encourage people - either as individuals or groups - to establish whatever web presence they want for the course. We can throw up an open wiki or Moodle for people who want that, perhaps. But those will not be the course and we will not favour any locally hosted system.
Basically, what we will be asking is for: people who would like to participate in the course discussion to send us their RSS feed. We will aggregate the RSS feeds and post links and summaries to the daily mailout. Most of this can be done automatically by gRSShopper, organizing discussion around links or topics.
> Assignments and activities for participants who have enrolled “for-credit” will be required for completion/reflection on a weekly basis as well. Full assignment details will be provided to all enrolled learners.
Basically, what we’re looking at here, I think, is for enrolled students to complete assignments by creating summaries and perspectives on the course discussion. Again, there is no need to create a centralized platform for this; students can use blogs or whatever.
> Weekly live lectures and presentations will be held as well. These lectures will likely be delivered in Elluminate.
This will be a challenge as the course enrollment exceeds the Elluminate license by a factor of ten. We may want to reconsider how we conduct live events.
I would like to explore using a set-up similar to that used by Ed Tech talk (or maybe even their actual tools - we could discuss this). They have a lot of experience with the live show and we should draw from that.
> They will be recorded for participants who are in different time zones and prefer not to get up in the middle of the night to listen to two Canadians presenting :).
Also, the Ed Tech Talk recordings don’t require proprietary players… :p
> We will likely have a series of guest presenters through out the course…more information soon.
What is key to me, I think, is that our interactions during the course be more like conversations than presentations. More like talk radio than National Geographic. The reason for this is that it’s more interesting and allows us to integrate diverse voices more easily.
> Mind maps of key discussion topics will be co-created with participants at the conclusion of each week.
Not a bad idea, though I am not a mind-map person. George can siggest a technology here…?
That said, I’d like to see other artifacts created by participants. What would really interest me, for example, are photo-slides created by participants and stored as a Flickr group. Like this (there’s a better example out there but I can’t find it).