Tag: Stephen Downes

Change MOOC – #change11

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

After seeing several MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) come and go over the past couple of years, I’ve decided to play a part in a new one being facilitated by Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

What’s a MOOC?

Allow Dave Cormier to enlighten you:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc?rel=0&w=640&h=390]

What do you have to do?

Pretty much anything you like. To paraphrase from change.mooc.ca

This is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person.

…

This type of course is called a ‘connectivist’ course and is based on four major types of activity:

Aggregate

Remix

Repurpose

Feed Forward

…

When a connectivist course is working really well, we see this greate cycle of content and creativity begin to feed on itself, people in the course reading, collecting, creating and sharing. It’s a wonderful experience you won’t want to stop when the course is done.

And – because you can share anywhere – you won’t have to. This course can last as long as you want it to.

The schedule consists of people who are pretty much who’s-who in my corner of the digitally-connected world; I’m particularly looking forward to:

Week 3 – Martin Weller (Digital Scholarship)
Week 9 – Dave Cormier (Rhizomatic Learning)
Week 17 – Howard Rheingold ([How] can [using] the web [intelligently] make us smarter?)
Week 25 – Stephen Downes (Knowledge, Learning and Community)
Week 30 – Alec Couros (Facilitating Networked Learners)
Week 33 – George Siemens (Sensemaking, wayfinding, networks, and analytics)
Week 34 – Bonnie Stewart (Digital Identities & Subjectivities)

That’s because these are people I know will provide interesting stimulus material and sound guidance. However, I’m also looking forward to being surprised by others!

MOOCs have a structure that allows you to dip in and dip out. This course is running (at least) until 20th May 2012 so there’ll be times when I can pay more or less attention. Given that I’m handing in my thesis in the next 14 days I should, on average, have a whole lot more time on my hands to get involved.

Why don’t YOU take part as well? It’s a great way to meet new people and think through new ideas!

http://change.mooc.ca

Project Reclaim: or, how I learned to start worrying and love my data.

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

The irony of a 'trailblazer' being rendered inert

A few days ago, via Stephen Downes, I came across Project Reclaim, an attempt by Boone Gorges to ‘reclaim’ his data from the multiple silos he’s been putting them in. He’s talking about those places where it’s easy to get data into but not so easy to get them out of: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter… the list goes on. I was in the right frame of mind to take action after listening to Jason Scott be interviewed recently about the importance of digital heritage.

To be clear: none of what follows is about getting a warm fuzzy feeling from being more ‘open’. It’s everything to do with having access to my data when I’m the same age as my parents. This stuff is important.

Eventually, I’d like to be running open everything, but the first step is to have control of my data. I certainly can’t trust Facebook to host my data, but that’s not to say it can’t be an output – a place where data from other places is mirrored.

The first thing I decided to do was to map as many places where I store things online. I highlighted those services in green that are based on Open Source technologies. Those in orange are services where it’s reasonably straightforward to get your data out. Those in red are those where it’s difficult to download and export your data.

Project Reclaim - mindmap

Over the rest of 2011 I’m going to be trying to make that mindmap greener. You can see that I’ve started to add (in pink) alternative services. I may have mis-coloured some elements (Dropbox should be orange, for example) – but the idea is sound.

Where am I going to start? I’m going to invest in Linode which means I’ll be able to host things like Sparkleshare (to replace Dropbox) and FlexPaper to replace SlideShare and Issuu. I’m not so concerned with the Google-based stuff at the moment as their committed (at the moment) to making exporting your data fairly painless – but I wish I could bulk-download my YouTube videos…

Image CC BY ecastro

Speaking in Lolcats: What Literacy Means in teh Digital Era

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

Speaking in Lolcats, Take 2

View more presentations from Stephen Downes

In 2009, Stephen Downes gave several presentations entitled Speaking in Lolcats. He put forward three theses:

That New Media is a new vocabulary (and therefore people can literally speak in Lolcats)
That languages can be understood analytically through a semantic framework
That 21st century skills are languages (not just content + skills + tools)

Of particular interest are the six elements of ‘literacy in teh digital era’ identified by Downes:

Syntax
Semantics
Pragmatics
Cognition
Context
Change

The talk is just over an hour with another twenty minutes or so of Q&A. Well worth listening to with the slides in front of you. Doug’s mindmap notes are here.