Tag Archive: edcmooc


#EDCMOOC: OPEN EDUCATION FOR YEARNERS

Filed under: Music — 1 Comment
February 9, 2013

Today I watched Gardner Campbell‘s brilliant keynote speech for the Open Education conference in Vancouver which he delivered in October 2012.

This was one of the extra resources for  week 2 of the mind-expanding  E-Learning & Digital Cultures MOOC .

Campbell talks a lot about how what we mean by education and creative thinking. These topics have gotten deeply imbedded, lost or confused as a result of the plethora of open online courses. If you believe the hype, which he doesn’t, these offer a magical panacea to issues like quality, cost and accessibility in Higher Education.

The widespread availability of information (i.e. knowledge) on the Internet could, on the face of it, suggest that the dream of a tailor-made education for all who want it has become real possibility.

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EDCMOOC WEEK 3 IMAGE ACTIVITY

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February 8, 2013

In week 3 of the E-Learning & Digital Cultures MOOC .  students have been invited to create an image that represents any one of the themes encountered in the course so far.

I’m not entirely sure if cropping my Flickr photos counts as being sufficiently creative but I’ve been going through my past shots of graffiti and street art looking picture that fit this category.

My favourite is this one I took in a side street in Ravenna, Italy which I think serves to counter balance the dystopian notion that machines are taking over our world.

if robots are invested with human characteristics, perhaps they can feel lonely too.

This yellow bot certainly looks isolated and in need of love.

Perhaps the true fear we should address is not  that machines are becoming too powerful but that human beings are too distrustful of the idea that technology can be a force for good.

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MOOCS AND METAPHORS

Filed under: Music — Leave a comment
February 5, 2013

For week two of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)  – E-learning & digital cultures, students are asked to look into the crystal ball and imagine what the future holds for technology, language  and society.

The resources include a brilliant blog article by Clay Shirky likening the seemingly unstoppable rise  of MOOCs to the way MP3s (and Napster) transformed the way we consume and listen to music.

Even if you have no interest in subscribing to a MOOC, I’d urge you read this entertaining and informative piece.

A less happy choice of resource is that of the core text by graduate student, Rebecca Johnston, from Texas Tech University. When compared to Shirky’s sharply argued writing style this is as dull as dishwater.

In the course discussion forum, I explained why I this was a poor choice. I’m posting my gripes here too as a way of getting them completely off my chest: Continue reading →

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EDCMOOC: HERE ARE THE PROFESSORS!

Filed under: Blogging — Leave a comment
February 2, 2013

agooglehangout‘Where are the professors?’ was the title of one of the threads posted anonymously in the discussion forum page of the E-learning and Digital Cultures  MOOC.

To reassure us that there are, after all, real human beings behind the digital interface, Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair from the Edinburgh University all showed up yesterday evening in person for a live broadcast on a Google hangout which has now been archived on You Tube. Continue reading →

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EDCMOOC : E-LEARNING FOR DIGITAL NATIVES

Filed under: Books, Italy — 3 Comments
January 31, 2013

A new born digital native.

A new born digital native.

One of the texts from week one of the MOOC  – E-learning and Digital Cultures  is Marc Prensky’s influential 2001 essay Digital Native, Digital Immigrants in which he wrote that “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors”.

One of the posts in the course forum linked these ideas to the following video showing K-12 children, i.e. kids in America from kindergarten (K) to 12th grade (12).

The unequivocal (utopian?) message is that new technology equals creativity and that classrooms without computers cannot hope to engage ‘digital natives’. This is exemplified by the little girl in the video who holds up a paper full of handwritten text, then picks up a flash card which says: ‘How will this help me?’ Continue reading →

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