Lynda Sez » CCK08

YouTube observations

rgdaniel — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:46:37 +0000

It’s gratifying that much of this connectivism course seems to be relevant to what I have tried to do with my information architecture teaching — to help people understand that the digital interaction, the connectivity that the technology is part of, influences and even determines the information that is created, consumed or shared. Today I had time to catch up on some of the forum posts, and found this from Dr. Michael Wesch: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, presented at the Library of Congress. You’ve probably seen his world-famous video:The machine is us/ing us. He talks about his work with undergrads at Kansas State University, who study YouTube using participant observation. At last, support for me nagging my students to sign up for and play with all the social software they can find.

Yikes, almost missed a day

rgdaniel — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:13:07 +0000

I’ve spent the past two days mostly on the phone with the interns I am coaching, and fitting time into breaks and late afternoon spots some efforts to keep up with emails from the connectivism course. Not easy, when there are just under 2000 people in the course, posting their introductions and greeting others they know, plus engaging in some discussions of the course ideas. Every message goes to the group and all of them come into my inbox. I debated allowing this, and decided that if I didn’t, I would probably never go to the online forum to read them. As it is, there are other threads of discussion starting up and I am not subscribed to all of them. Of course, this problem is directly relevant to the course itself. How can we connect within a group this large? Is it feasible? Or desirable? Already, a subgroup has formed of Ontario people with a separate list of discussions. Meanwhile, in my other course, landscape design, there is also a pile of introductions, but at least there are only 42 people in that one.

Who doesn’t have time?

rgdaniel — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:28:04 +0000

I heard this a while ago, but a blogger connected(!) to my Connectivism course brought it back to my attention. Listen to Clay Shirky on our cognitive surplus. Good reminder for me as I face the explosion of material landing in my lap for this course.

Connecting about connectivism

rgdaniel — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:30:51 +0000

One of the courses I am starting tomorrow is Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). And massive is certainly a good description. Our pre-course activities include posting an introductory message, so that everyone can get an idea of who is participating. I chose to receive these via email (although you don’t have to) and my inbox is swamped with greetings from hundreds of people all over the world. Many participants are bloggers or already involved in various online learning initiatives. Some messages include links, but I haven’t attempted to follow them all yet. One that I enjoyed this morning is Tom Friedman’s July talk in Israel. Friedman is author of The World is Flat, a book I haven’t read yet (sigh, will I ever catch up?). He has an entertaining, concise way of laying out how the world came to be flat and how we should educate people to thrive in it.