Tag Archive: Elearning


#EDCMOOC IMAGE ACTIVITY – PICTURE 2

Filed under: Photography — Leave a comment
February 10, 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.

This is another photo of street art from my Flickr back pages that I have chosen.

It was taken in San Francisco and it makes me think of time travellers returning to the Garden of Eden (wherever that is!). The fact that the couple has not been coloured in adds to the sense of their disconnection from the natural surroundings.

It makes me think how technology separates human beings from our surroundings so that we feel we are aliens trying to come to terms with where we are and how we are supposed to interact with the world around us.

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#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

Filed under: Photography — Leave a comment
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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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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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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