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It’s kinda personal
Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this! You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're…
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Chips ahoy for MOOCs
In a post some time back I mentioned that academics now have to compete in an attention economy, and this isn't something we're used to doing (or very good at). It means making your slideshare attractive, or making your blog post punchy, or giving your paper a snappy title. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems awkward and artificial. MOOCs/Open courses will be the next in this line. I've heard more than one commentator say you have yo grab learner's interest in the first 5 minutes of a MOOC (maybe that's too long). That probably isn't true of formal education, where you have a captive audience. It may be a good…
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How do you fix a problem like education?
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/7408506410/ > I've blogged a couple of times before about my frustration with the education is broken rhetoric. To be clear this doesn't mean I think everything is rosy and we carry on as we are, but I think it's too simplistic and doesn't really get us anywhere. I'll try and explain why in this post. Clay Shirky posted a piece on MOOCs as higher education disruptors last year, and has followed up with another piece here. He uses the phrase "school is broken" so my education is broken klaxon went off, forcing this post. I should say that, unlike some of my edtech peers (stand up David Kernohan and…
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The MOOCs that ate themselves
[Image by David Kernohan] Unless you’ve been in a very long meeting you can’t have missed the story about the Coursera/Georgia Tech MOOC that ran into difficulty and was cancelled (yes, we get the irony that it was Fundamentals of Online Education, no need to go on about it). The Georgia Tech MOOC was trying to do some different things, maybe they didn’t all work, but I don’t think it was the disaster it’s been portrayed as. In the early MOOC days this level of experimentation would have been accepted (I didn’t sign up for it, so I’m just going on the reports of others here). It seems that the level…
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Open scholarship as resolution to the academic dilemma
There is something of a tension at the heart of the relationship between academics and the institutions that employ them. Institutions want to have academics with a high profile and external recognition. But they also want them to do work for them, as they're paying the wage. Academics want to have a high profile and external recognition, but also recognise that a good proportion of their work may need to be for the institution in roles that don't attract much of this. Usually this balance is fairly easy to maintain, but the problem is that much of the work involved in scholarship doesn't directly benefit the institution. Consider these examples:…
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MOOCs are your friends
<Image Giulia Forsythe http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8028605773/> (I know what you're thinking: "if only someone would write an opinion blog post on MOOCs, there just aren't any out there"). Reactions to MOOCs tend to fall into two camps. The first is the MOOC will conquer all group who see them as saviours of learning and destroyers of universities. See Clay Shirky's MP3 analogy for an example (and also David Kernohan's excellent response) although this month's MOOC hyperbole award goes to this techcrunch piece. The second camp are the dismissers. MOOCS are a fad, they aren't anything new, or they're so flawed they aren't worth considering. See for example, MOOCS fad and bubble . What I…
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Twitter is your IT support
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/> This post isn’t intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I’ve noticed from several others also. I’m running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It’ll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog. Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won’t go in to, I haven’t been able to get this done at the Open…
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Openness has won – now what?
As we start the new year and survey the open education landscape, it's hard not to conclude that openness has prevailed. The victory may not be absolute, but the trend is all one way now – we'll never go back to closed systems in academia anymore than we will return to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Whether it's open access publishing, open data, MOOCs, OERs, open source or open scholarship – the openness battle has largely been won. Time to rejoice! But, of course, it's never that simple. When it was simply open vs closed it was a clear distinction. Openness was good, closed was bad. As the victory bells sound though…
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MOOC disco
So just before Christmas I finally managed to air a slot on DS106 Radio (thanks to Alan for being patient with the most needy DJ in DS106 history). It was remarkably easy to do, so I'd recommend it to anyone. My idea was to create a set where each song reflected on some aspects of MOOCs. On reflection I don't think this came across without me doing some talking inbetween. I opted for film clips instead, but I think the "music connected by a theme we can discuss" approach has merits which I'd like to revisit. I know from compiling the set that even if it's an issue you've thought…
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Gravity always wins
More out of tradition than profound insight, here is my annual running review post. First, since you demand it so, is the data: Miles run: 1049 Duration: 188:58 hours No. runs: 141 Av. distance: 7.44 miles Not bad overall, on a par with last year. It seems that having struggled to break the 1000 mile barrier for a few years I can now do it, but not with much to spare. Any significant increase would mean changing my approach drastically. It's been a bad year in terms of events though, I signed up and trained for the Llanelli marathon in April, but went to India, caught Delhi belly and bailed…
