Comments on: MOOCs, Learning Points

By: Ben Tremblay

Ben Tremblay — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:00:33 +0000

Just one point here: I often want to refer to “Socratic method”, but don’t … it seems fuzzy, if not completely misunderstood.

Teeing off from your “we’ve emphasized knowledge generation” … can I say that the Socratic method engages the learner in a transaction? (Okay 2 points; is that transaction “dialectic”? “discourse”?)

fair winds
–@bentrem

By: gsiemens

gsiemens — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:21:10 +0000

Thanks Jutta – pleased to hear that you found the experience valuable!

By: Jutta Pauschenwein

Jutta Pauschenwein — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 18:45:45 +0000

Hi George, I participated in the Change MOOC last year and it was my greatest and most exciting learning experience ever! – Yes, it was chaotic and frustrating when in January everybody moved to the next MOOC – but I got so many new ideas, perspectives – and I liked the other participants’ blogs, tweets, etc better than most of the experts input. The transfer in different fields of work (or first ideas about it) were amazing. Bye, jupidu

By: Stuart Berry

Stuart Berry — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:30:12 +0000

Thanks George for sharing this. I was a little challenged by the overall tone of the article particularly as it appears to have been written for a professional audience. A tremendous amount of emotion. I have just reread your various blog posts about MOOC’s and have reaffirmed my understanding on their intent and as such feel that the article author has presented quite a 20th century industrial model of education as her point of comparison. I appreciate the marking challenges and some of the more personal challenges she was faced with but come on – let’s begin to push our thinking beyond the narrowness of today’s institutional-driven models.
I know I need to better appreciate the world of learning that you and others are encouraging and am drawn to much of the thinking of people like Christensen in his book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. As you and others have indicated MOOC’s may not be the answer but it will be as a result of MOOC’s and other ideas that help to pave the way to that much needed change in our teaching and learning.

By: Daniel Bassill

Daniel Bassill — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:11:02 +0000

Thanks for continuing to write about this. Over the past year I’ve been forwarding ideas from you and Vance and others via my own blog articles with the goal of connecting people interested in the well-being of youth in poverty in on-going learning, networking, idea creation and collective actions that support youth in many places. http://tutormentor.blogspot.com/search?q=mooc . I connected with Vance this past weekend in the Webheads plaform and will continue to learn from you and others who share ideas in this arena.

By: Vance Stevens

Vance Stevens — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:37:12 +0000

I’m glad you posted this because it reminded me go an look up the slides associated with Week 20 of Change 11/12 when Rich DeMillo, Ashwin Ram & Mike McCracken talked on Social Networks, Learning Communities and Web Science. My hopefully not too simplistic take-away from the talk and PDF http://gtmooc.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/web-concepts.pdf is that the way institutions see “the value points of a hierarchical controlled system” is normally in terms of bell curves; whereas more valid insights might be gained from measuring connectivist learning in terms of power laws, which produce long tail curves, the implications of which were pointed out in the talk. Thanks for reminding me to review that, and for maintaining a repository of highly worthwhile recordings.

By: Mark Bullen

Mark Bullen — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:45:04 +0000

Good points George. The different understandings of what a MOOC is are getting in the way of a meaningful discussion. Apples and oranges. There is also a depressingly familiar lack of understanding of the history of online learning. One could easily get the impression that online learning is new and we are only just figuring out how to use the technology for teaching and learning. This happened 15-20 years ago when online learning began and nobody paid attention the rich history of distance education.

Mark

By: Jay Cross

Jay Cross — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:41:51 +0000

George, this is reminiscent of when blogs first came on the scene. Lots of folks said blogs would never fly. First of all, you couldn’t trust them. I was criticized for not having footnotes to back up my opinions! Second, the drop-out rate was high. What else would you expect from a free service with no barriers to entry?

In the very old days of blogging, we knew most of other bloggers by name. The future of blogging was in doubt. It was a tiny world. Now that the number of blogs on the web is approaching 200 million, the doubters have conceded.

It’s a bit early to declare MOOCs a failure.

By: Helen Blunden

Helen Blunden — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 23:49:21 +0000

I’m interested in this too. I’ll be starting the Gamification Course through Coursera today and looking forward to how it’s all going to pan out. I’m doing it out of curiosity really. It would be interesting to get research from both institution and learner points of views. Regards

Helen