Sloan-C eLearning Landscape. At a recent conference, David Wiley, open education pioneer said that MOOCs (massive open online courses) were essentially 1999 online learning with the password protection taken away.
He’s certainly not alone in his dislike of all things MOOC – and no wonder. In the last three years the theory-work of decades of educators has been ignored and co-opted. A few good self-branders have suddenly discovered people can learn online. Worse, these people are becoming the voices of online learning and are, in some cases, claiming to be the discoverers of educational approaches we’ve all been using since the dawn of the Internet. Along with these activities, old school behaviorist approaches to learning have been married to MOOCs as if the only way to learn at-scale on the Internet is to standardize everything. I have a complex relationship with the word MOOC. We are all aware, at this point, that the Internet has ushered us into a powerful moment in the history of learning. Written by Like this:
Assessment and Rhizomatic Learning – Course start Tuesday. Well… it’s that time of the year again folks.
Time for me to teach my Educational Technology and the Adult learner course. I think of myself as being very privileged to teach this course every year. The course is, in many important ways, unfettered by its institutionality. It not connected to any other courses in any registrarial way… no pre-requisite, no follow up courses. I have no other instructor also teaching the course and was not given any material or specific guidance on what or how to teach to begin with. And the students are fascinating. Some have never stepped foot in the classroom as teachers. I need to give them all a number grade. Learning Contract When i taught this course three years ago, a finishing student of mine said “you know, I think i understand your whole rhizome thing… but you know what it needs?
What I learned year one Many of my students were actually quite familiar with the idea of a grading contract… which I hadn’t expected. Shortfalls… Optional Thursday? Making the community the curriculum. Rhizomatic Learning posits, among other things, that the community is the curriculum.
That being able to participate with and among those people who are resident in a particular field is a primary goal of learning. In each of my classes the curriculum is, of course, filled with the ideas and connections that pre-exist in the field but the paths that are taken by the students are as individual as they are, and the path taken by the class is made up of the collected paths chosen by all the students, shaped by my influence as an instructor and the impact of those external nodes they manage to contact. What follows is an artifact of different ecologies of learning. A given chapter represents my best guess about a direction that would best serve the overall path the class was on. Making the community the curriculum. Rhizomatic Education : Community as Curriculum « Dave's Educational Blog. Below is my paper as it appears in Innovate – Journal of Online Education.
Many, many thanks to the fine folks there for all their help. Note: this journal has since gone ‘out of print’. the originals are still available at archive.org but i have adjusted the links here so that they continue to work. The truths of which the masses now approve are the very truths that the fighters at the outposts held to in the days of our grandfathers. We fighters at the outposts nowadays no longer approve of them; and I do not believe there is any other well-ascertained truth except this, that no community can live a healthy life if it is nourished only on such old marrowless truths.
—Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People (1882/2000, IV.i) Knowledge as negotiation is not an entirely new concept in educational circles; social contructivist and connectivist pedagogies, for instance, are centered on the process of negotiation as a learning process. On Knowledge. Dave Cormier discusses cMOOC and MultiMOOC, connectivism, and openness in learning. Venue: Bb Collaborate / Elluminate, with thanks to Recording: Dave talked about his ideas on learning and differentiated the nature of what needed to be learned into David Snowden's simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.
MOOCs he said were expecially good at promoting learning at the complex and chaotic levels. Listen here and find out why. We expected to ask Dave about And if conversation flags (not likely :-) ...