Am I smart enough to participate in a MOOC?
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 22, 2012
… is the title of my abstract for the 11th Annual IAS-STS Conference “Critical Issues in Science and Technology Studies” where I want to report about my MOOC experiences in the Special Session: Mobile learning and working – how ‚smart technologies‘ change our lives.
Writing the article I realised that as much as I need to live through the MOOC with all its activities and stimuli I need time to reflect my learning experiences as well, and to connect my experiences with theories of learning and knowledge management.
Maybe this time for reflection is the most valuable part of the MOOC for me? Or I’m really not smart enough 
Diskussion zu Karl E. Weick’s Sensemaking
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 21, 2012
- In: Literatur | Methode | ZML-Leseclub
- 1 Kommentar
Im heutigen ZML-Leseclub ging es um “Sinn machen / geben” – “Verständnis schaffen” bei Karl E. Weick’s Konzept des “Sensemaking” – wobei wir uns anstatt auf Sensemaking in Organisationen auf Sensemaking in Lernprozessen, in unseren Trainingsangeboten und in dem eLearning Netzwerk an der FH JOANNEUM fokussierten.
Ich habe über dieses Konzept in diesem Blog bereits einen Post verfasst und Weick’s Konzept dient mir gerade als Basis eines Artikels für die GMW-Tagung, der schon recht weit gediehen ist. Gerade deshalb war die Diskussion mit meinen Kolleginnen Natasa und Erika für mich besonders bereichernd. Wir haben um Übersetzungen von einzelnen Ausdrücken und um unser individuelles Verständnis gerungen, es mit unserer “ZML-Didaktik” in Beziehung gebracht und uns immer wieder Beispiele aus unserem eLearning-Umfeld erzählt.
Relating the article “Search for a New World” to Lévy`s IEML
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 12, 2012
In this post I will relate Pierre Lévy’s ideas to the article “Suche nach der neuen Welt” of our Austrian newspaper “Der Standard” which starts with the sentence: “in 20 years, artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence”.
The article refers to the Singularity Summit 2011, which took place in October 2011 in New York. (The annual conference was founded in 2006 by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel as the first academic symposium for Singularity dialogue.). Looking at the program it seems that only men … about future, there was only one woman under 26 speakers.
According to the introduction to the conference
A number of noted scientists and technologists have predicted that after the Singularity, humans as we exist presently will no longer be driving technological progress, with models of change based on past trends in human behavior becoming obsolete.
A key person of the conference is Ray Kurzweil, his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology porpose the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of information technology. (Ray Kurzweil: Die Zukunft des Menschen)
Keywords of the Austrian article are robotics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, the participants of the conference (9000) want to further develop their businesses.
Lévy expects a big change when massively distributed automata are dealing with symbols in the digital medium – the fans of the singularity theory expect a change as well based in information technology.
Other postings with respect to Lévy’s IEML Philosophy
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 12, 2012
Serenaturri writes
Come trasformare l’oceano di dati in conoscenza? How to transform the ocean of data into knowledge? Come trasformare il medium digitale in un osservatorio che riflette l’ intelligenza collettiva? How to transform the digital medium into a observatory that reflects the collective intelligence? Come sfruttare questo nuovo mezzo per migliorare il processo di cognizione sociale e controllare lo sviluppo umano? How to exploit this new medium to improve the process of social cognition and how to control human development?
The problems in this process are l’opacità semantica, l’incompatibilità dei sistemi di classificazione e la frammentazione linguistica e culturale – the semantic opacity, the incompatibility of classification systems (in programming) and the linguistic and cultural fragmentation.
Jenny connected shares her impressions (in English 
there were some postings in Portogues as well, but I didn’t read them…).
The focus of his book is the need for a symbolic medium and a new indexing system to replace current systems such as those based on the ways in which libraries organize information.
He writes that ‘the crowd’ is not stupid; it is essential to our collective intelligence and knowledge, but the individual’s role in collective, creative conversions is not forgotten or underplayed.
These topics are on the heart of my experiences in the Mooc as I try to organize myself, to keep an overview of all the activities, to swap languages (using Google translator sometimes – and it isn’t that bad). I’m looking for tools, which will help me in my efforts, I’m testing them – and I want to be open minded about frameworks which can support me. Nevertheless I’m sceptical that a programming language can do what I’m doing …. structuring, evaluating, skipping.
Pierre Lévy: The IEML Philosophy
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 11, 2012
Week 22 in the Change Mooc
According to Pierre Lévy , one of the major philosophers working on the implications of cyberspace and digital communications, we humans manipulate symbols and each augmentation in doing so has changed our live (see http://mooc.wikispaces.com/levy).
Lévy identifies 4 periods of big chances, the third being the invention of the printing mess and the forth is starting now when massively distributed automata are dealing with symbols in the digital medium.
Lévy is working on the symbolic system Information Economy MetaLanguage (IEML) which is an artificial language that translates itself automatically into natural languages, a metadata language for the collaborative semantic tagging of digital data [I don't understand the next 3 aspects as I never did some programming of semantic nets…. IEML means conceptual addressing solving the semantic interoperability problem, a programming language specialized in the design of semantic networks, a semantic coordinate system of the mind (the semantic sphere)]
And then there was a great file called Change11-plevy with a lot of meaningful graphics and with the title “Toward the Hypercortex”:
- Evolution of Mediasphere: Orality – Writing – Alphabet – Mass Media – Digital Media
- Logic Automata (1950) – Internet (1980): connections between automata – Web (1995): connections between data – Semantic Sphere (2015): connections between ideas
- The digital hypercortex combines multimedia data with semantic metadata and should augment the collective intelligence.
- Semantic information combines the URL with the USL (meaning, semantic address, concept) [didn't understand C - the semantic current]
- The textual machine deals with texts, the linguistic engine with languages, the conceptual machine with concepts
And a text about Knowledge Evolution:
- compulsory school (from 1500): mass pedagogy, natural sciences, state institutions – “social schools” (from 2100): social pedagogy, life-long open collaborative learning
Summarizing these ideas I understand that the web will change toward a semantic sphere where based on a high developed programming language the collaboration in the web will be easier (f.e. automatic translations into natural languages), the social media of the future will be more powerful and less confusing (with connections between ideas and concepts). How this could be done in detail and if mathematical concepts and computer programs are able to achieve such a development is my open question. Nevertheless I would be happy to observe the change of our compulsory schools toward “social schools”.
“Sensemaking” in the Mooc
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 5, 2012
- In: #change11 | Methode
- 3 Kommentare
At the moment I’m working on an article for a German eLearning conference – and it is time-consuming and I’m distant of the Mooc, a sensation which I do not like much.
So I want to ask you: how are you making sense of the Mooc????
According to Karl E. Weick (1995, Sensemaking in Organization, Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks) there are seven parameters for Sensemaking and I appreciate them all! I want to describe them in my words and relate them to my Mooc experiences (the change Mooc is my first Mooc).
- Sensemaking works around identity creation – in every environment f2f or virtual I’m building my identity and this “self” is in continuous interaction with the environment and with the other learners as well.
- Sensemaking works retrospective – I’m making sense out of experiences reflecting about them, as I’m doing it now with this article I want to write. And therefore sensemaking is influenced by my memory of situations.
- By doing sensemaking we enact our environment – hmm, it’s not so easy to understand or translate this aspect. My understanding ist that within the Mooc I’m designing my learning environment (what expert’s inputs do I use, what participants’ interaction do I follow, what technical use do I use to organize myself). So I’m in continuing interaction with my environment and my environment does influence my learning progress (does that make sense??).
- Sensemaking is social – of course it is in the Mooc! I’m a kind of aware of some the learners who participate in the Mooc, who write in their blogs, twitter, discuss, think about the questions of the experts, reflect the online sessions, relate the inputs to their daily work, comment their ideas, …
- Sensemaking is ongoing - yes, of course, we are in the middle of something, reinventing learning, cooperating … and at the moment we don’t know how this Mooc actually works – and we, all the Mooc participants try to make their individuell “sense” out of the Mooc
- Sensemaking means to “extract cues” – and I do understand it and nevertheless I’m struggling to translate it into German. It is never possible to read all reflections around our change Mooc, read the whole “daily news”, deal with all expert’s input, answer all experts’ questions, .. Nevertheless I try to “make sense” out of the weeks of the Mooc. So I’m extracting relevant cues of course!
- Sensemaking is not accurate but plausible – I don’t believe that I’m accurate in my participation in the Mooc (and as former physicist I know about accuracy ..) but I try to deal in a plausible way within the Mooc translating the content, contexts, ideas to my every day work and further develop my concepts.
So I want to ask you fellow change Mooc learner how do you succeed to make sense out of the Mooc and could Weick’s concept help us in the process of sensemaking??
Lurking in the MOOC ?
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Januar 26, 2012
It seems that in these weeks after Christmas I’m only lurking in the MOOC and I’m reflecting if this is ok for me??
As the semester ends there’s some grading to do, there’s a deadline for European project proposals, I’m moderating my Gender and eLearning course and I’m preparing an online training for google+ which is rather tough work. I do not have that much time for the Change MOOC.
But I’m thinking about the MOOC and I’m doing some work around it: writing an article about the MOOC for our university’s newsletter, working on our version of the MOOC cow, planning some articles about my MOOC experience. I even took part in the online meeting yesterday with Preetha Ram, Hua Ali and I wrote some notes about social filtering but it was not enough for a blog post.
What about you other MOOC participants? Do you share my experience of variable committment?
Vom Personalentwickler zum Community Manager? im ZML-Leseclub
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Januar 17, 2012
Thema des heutigen ZML-Leseclubs war Jochen Robes (2011) Artikel “Vom Personalentwickler zum Community Manager? Ein Rollenbild im Wandel” – Personalentwicklung 2.0. in A. Trost & T. Jenewein (Hrsg.) Personalentwicklung 2.0, S. 11-28. Köln: Wolters Kluwer.
Diskussion von Robes’ Artikel
Abgesehen von der genderungerechten Schreibweise (und da ich gerade einen Online-Genderkurs moderiere, bin ich sehr empfindlich) gibt der Artikel einen guten Überblick, wie die neuen Technologien die Rollen von BildungsexpertInnen (in Unternehmen) verändern.
Robes’ Fragestellungen (Seite 69) habe ich mit unseren Kompetenzen im WebLitercyLab und unserer Rolle als Social Artists in Bezug gesetzt. Für Online-Lernen und Wissensaustausch braucht es:
- die Arbeit der Social Artists: Planung & Support & Motivation,
- redaktionelle Prozesse und
- Verbindung von Qualifizierungen und informellen Lernumgebungen (ein wichtiges Thema im Change MOOC)
Wir haben dann intensiver über redaktionelle Prozesse diskutiert. Natasa meinte, dass diese in ihrer Moderation nach dem Konzept von Gilly Salmon inkludiert sind, indem sie “gutes Schreiben” vorlebt, die Wichtigkeit von Betreffs, Steuerung von Diskussionssträngen (wann eröffne ich einen neuen), fokussierte Beiträge.
In meinen Online-Trainings nehme ich das anders wahr. Ich bin besorgt, dass die Betonung des redaktionellen Prozesses die Spontanität der Teilnehmenden reduzieren würde. Im aktuell laufenden Kurs sind einige TeilnehmerInnen gerade dabei Verantwortung für den eigenen Lernprozess zu übernehmen und freuen sich explizit über die “Freiheit” im Kurs, unverblümt schreiben zu dürfen.
Andererseits würden Beiträge, die redaktionell zumindest überdacht wurden, eine stringentere, intensivere Diskussion ermöglichen?? Dieses Thema wird mich noch länger beschäftigen.
Der Hinweis auf die Top 100 Tools 2011, zusammengestellt von der Expertin Jane Hart, bildete den Abschluss der Diskussion zum Artikel. Wir checkten die Liste, identifizierten unsere Lieblingswerkzeuge und wunderten uns, dass die Positionierung von Twitter (1), Youtube (2) und Google Docs (3) die gleichen sind wie 2010.
Weitere Diskussionen
Natasa meinte in Bezug auf unseren letzten Leseclub und Wenger’s Artikel, dass Social Learning Spaces in unseren Online-Kursen (in der Plattform Moodle) “nicht funktionieren”. Das verblüffte mich etwas, da ich den Artikel in Hinsicht auf unsere Kurse gelesen hatte und trotz der Einschränkungen durch eine Lernplattform durchaus einen Social Learning Space in den Kursen wahrnehme.
Erika erweiterte mein Wissen zu youtube-Videos, indem sie voll Begeisterung erzählte, wie durch das Taggen von Personen Übergänge von einem yotube-Video zum anderen möglich sind. Verstehen werde ich das erst, wenn ich ein Beispiel sehe.
Online course “Gender & eLearning” and the MOOC
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Januar 15, 2012
End of Week 1 in my Gender & eLearning course – time for reflection
What are the differences between my Gender & eLearning course and the MOOC?
- In the Gender & eLearning course I’m the moderator / social artist / eTutor / facilitator / …and in the MOOC I’m a participant.
- There are at the most 15 participants in my course compared to over 2000 in the MOOC.
- My course lasts 3 weeks, the change-MOOC 36 weeks.
- In my course the participants should invest about 25 hours, in the MOOC my time of investment is not fixed. I made a kind of estimation at the beginning of the MOOC and wanted to spend at least 3,5 hours for the change-MOOC. Some weeks I have more time, some weeks less.
- There are no lurkers in my course, the access of participants who do not become active during the first week is cancelled, whereas in the MOOC many participants are reading and reflecting without sharing their insights with others.
- My course is using a closed environment – the MOOC is an open environment.
What is similar between the Gender & eLearning course and the MOOC?
- An expert or experts prepare/s the room.
- The assigments are open assignments.
- The participants are working mostly asynchronous – there are only some synchronous meetings (in my course one meeting in week 3, in the MOOC two meetings a week).
- The concept of my course is to encourage participants to relate their every day work to the topics of the course. – I’m doing the same in the MOOC.
- In my course the participants are collaborating / cooperating by discussing the topics, reflecting there observations, learning processes, interaction with others – whereas the collaboration in the MOOC until now is an open questions for me.
What did happen during the first week in my Gender & eLearning course?
14 participants enrolled into the course and 12 of them became active members. The course is based on Gilly Salmon’s 5 stage model of virtual groups. According to Gilly Salmon access & motivation and online socialisation are the first steps toward a virtual group. The basic component of this course is the anonymity of the participants. They have to choose a nickname and a photo to represent themselves. As the first week is the week of online socialisation they reflect their observations of each other during their discussion of Gender issues (netiquette, media observation).
From my perspective as social artist the course start and week 1 went well. The participants are active and enjoy their discussions. Some of them reflected their fantasay-identities and tried to investigate their own choice for a name and a photo.
I have fun observing and reflecting my reactions to their names, symbols and contributions. There are several groups of names, e.g. Illy & Billy, or Pop & Pillepop, or London & Down Under, or Powder & Schneemensch (both names around snow=Schnee). The name Oxygen excited memories of a song “Love is like oxygen” from the 80s (and I’m listening hits from the 80s all the time now), other names didn’t ring any bell, so I struggle to perceive these participants as intensively as the others. At the moment I’m reading Karl E. Weick’s “Sensemaking in Organizations” with special attention to his chapter about “Identity Construction” to get some theoretical basis for my thoughts about Online Identities. Is there somebody who has a link to great online ressource regarding Online Identites??
In any case the work of moderating the course was one of the reasons because I skipped this week in the MOOC 
Am I smart enough to participate in a MOOC? – The discussion continues …
Verfasst von: jupidu Am: Februar 23, 2012
As I was trying to answer the comments to my last post additional ideas emerged so I will summarize my answers to your comments in this post.
As the Change MOOC lasts so many weeks (I remember that I was happy about this long period during the first 12 or 15 weeks) I need some “time out” for reflection. And I never could start to participate in a new MOOC parallel to the Change MOOC (in contrast to some of my Change MOOC fellows).
Of course I’m seduced by the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2012 MOOC, but I believe that for my real MOOC experience I should focus on one MOOC and not hop in and hop off. I try to convince my students as well that they should stick to one tool (e.g. twitter) and explore its potential for at least 2 months before they “hop on” to the next nice tool.
It’s great to detect soul mates
Often I’m convinced that I don’t use today’s technology sufficiently and if I would organise my tools in a better way or discover the “ultra-tool” I would understand in greater detail what’s happening in the MOOC. As George doubtlessly is using more and more advanced tools and nevertheless struggles with similar problems I return to my starting point: that learning, understanding, sensemaking don’t depend that much on technical tools.
I like Doris Reeves-Lipscomb comment a lot and I got some interesting insights. An exerpt of her comment:
Like Doris I’m moderating online learning groups for several years. Until now I prepared a password-protected room with materials, questions, and room for my participants to discuss and reflect and contribute based on a social-constructivistic approach. The max number of participants was 15 and in spite of my support there were dropouts, persons who couldn’t become active in the virtual room.
Currently I’m establishing a network in Google+ (no password-protected room, about 60 participants, every day there is a different number of participants) and my training approach is less supportive than in previous trainings. I offer tasks and materials, and aggregate their content on a website, but I nearly do not provide individual support. I have the “feeling” that the training runs ok but I’m curios of the evaluation!
Great! Just during my “time out” the most important questions are discussed! I will try to catch up on the session with Geetha Narayanan during the weekend.