Tag Archive: COURSERA


STERNBERG’S LOVE ON THE DOCKS

Filed under: Gender, Movies — Leave a comment
September 23, 2013

DOCKS OF NEW YORK  directed by Josef Von Sternberg (USA, 1928)

compson-bancroftThis silent movie was chosen as a compare and contrast exercise with Street Angel, which was the first movie in the syllabus for the  MOOC in film history  run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’.

The hard-hearted and cynical movie centres on an improbably eventful 24 hours in the lives of a group of sweaty stokers who take a break from the physically demanding work on ship to spend time ashore whoring and drinking.

George Bancroft is the leading man, playing Bill Reynolds, a macho guy who gets his kicks from barroom brawls and is the type to boast of having a girl in every port (his heavily tattooed arm serves as a check list of his conquests). Continue reading →

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THE SILENT MELODRAMA OF STREET ANGEL

Filed under: Gender, Movies — 1 Comment
September 22, 2013

STREET ANGEL directed by Frank Borzage (USA, 1928)

street-angel-borzageThis week I began a 5 week MOOC in film history at Coursera run by Scott Higgins of Wesleyan University called ‘The Language of Hollywood: Storytelling, Sound, and Color’.  Street Angel is the first of ten movies on the syllabus and will be a hard act to follow.

What a great film this is!

It was chosen because it was made at a time when silent movies were about to be replaced by talkies and shows how directors with visual style didn’t really need dialogue to tell a rich and emotionally powerful story.

Prof Higgins says, rightly, that “it contains all that is great and weird about silent films”. Continue reading →

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OPEN EDUCATION : PUNKS vs THE X-FACTOR

Filed under: Blogging — 12 Comments
April 14, 2013

LEARNER EXPERIENCE IN MOOCS

Coursera+DS106

This is my assignment for activity 14 of the Open University’s ‘Open Education (#h817open) course  in which I look at how MOOCS have been defined and  compare the Direct Storytelling courses (ds106) with those provided by Coursera.

DEFINING MOOCS

The MOOC acronym was coined in 2007 by David Cormier and Bryan Alexander to describe the University of Manitoba course ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’. This attracted less than 3,000 students so was, by some degree, less massive than more recent online courses.

Some have argued that the monolithic nature of MOOCs now depersonalises them to the point that they can only pay lip service to the principle of ‘connectivity’ and makes the use of the adjective ‘open’  a bone of contention.

An example of the backlash can be found in Reclaim Open Learning, a network which prefers to talk in terms of “small pieces, loosely joined’ rather than an unwieldy and impenetrable mass of resources.

Continue reading →
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WHY OPEN EDUCATION IS NOT AN OPTION

Filed under: Music — 2 Comments
March 12, 2013

Scholars can no longer seek refuge in an ivory tower.

Today, to mark Open Education week,  I began looking at the readings for the Open University’s h817 Open Education course .

I started with an article by Martin Weller entitled ‘The openness-creativity cycle in education’ and published in the Journal of Interactive Media Education (JiME).

In this paper, Weller notes that the concept of openness in education is now taken for granted and that few talk in terms of resources being ‘closed’ or limited solely to an elite (paying) group of users.

He quotes from Gideon Burton’s article on the ‘Open Scholar’ : “In the digital age, the traditional barriers to accessing scholars and scholarships are unnecessary, but persist for institutional reasons”.

This begs the question as to how long these institutionalised barriers can resist to pressure from the digital networks in which Open Educational Resources (OER) are becoming the norm.

With sharing being the default position the million dollar question as to how this actually improves the learning process. Continue reading →

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OPEN EDUCATION: THE BADY vs SHIRKY DEBATE

Filed under: Blogging, Music, Politics — 3 Comments
February 6, 2013

Yesterday I wrote how impressed I had been by Clay Shirky’s blog article about the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) and the implications these have for ‘traditional’ educational establishments.

This article (‘Napster, Udacity, and the Academy’) is part of the reading resources for Week 2 of the Coursera MOOC ‘E-Learning & Digital Cultures’ being run by the University of Edinburgh.

In the interest of balance, the course organisers have also included a link to a critique of Shirky’s piece. This is by Aaron Bady, a doctoral candidate in English literature of the University of California and was published online in December 2012 by Inside Higher Ed.

Bady’s criticism is lamely argued and contains a series of misreadings of Clay Shirky’s article. For example Bady writes that “Shirky talks dismissively about his own education at Yale” whereas Shirky is at pains to praise Yale’s “incredible intellectual community where even big lectures were taught by seriously brilliant people”.

It suits Bady’s misguided argument to brand Shirky as someone with a “vested interest in arguing the benefits of radically transforming the academe”. In other words, the charge is that he has an axe to grind against educational establishments that fail to move with the times. The absurd suggestion here is that Shirky is not being transparent and bent solely on heaping unwarranted praise on MOOCS. Continue reading →

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