Jim Groom is getting ready to launch another massive open online course (MOOC). Tony Hirst, who drew my attention to Jim’s course Digital Storytelling (ds106.us) with this post: Massive Open Online Courses all you need to know, has curated a few videos from PLENK2010 facilitator Dave Cormier on the philosophy of a MOOC. I’ve signed up for Digital Storytelling, but I expect my role to be more as a lurker than turned out to be the case on PLENK....
Next year I’ve got a fairly busy schedule. Here are some things that I might be blogging about. I record them here as an aide memoir: Large group assessment The “Flip” Socratic questioning Peer Instruction, Assessment and Support LiveScribe Echo Social networks Student employability and entrepreneurship. Technically, I expect to be playing with Drupal, WordPress, BuddyPress, Moodle and Elgg and maybe, if there’s time, Ruby on Rails 3. I might submit something (probably a poster) to ALT-C 2011....
In the media, as the shortest day approaches and with it the end of the old year, it’s traditional to look back. Here is the first of my retrospectives on 2010. My tool of the year is Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com), which I discovered during PLENK2010. I’ve used this as both a curation tool (see my Plenk2010 collection) and as an exploratory learning object builder but it also has a social network discovery and connection building capability and recently added a group/team curation feature....
There’s an interesting debate forming around this post from George Siemens (My Personal Learning Network is the most awesomest thing ever!!) and a response from Jenny Mackness (In defence of lurking). George’s stance is that you can’t really learn in a community unless you are contributing something, Jenny’s that it’s OK to observe and not contribute. There are lot’s of other interesting points of view expressed in the comments. To me, I feel I got more out of PLENK2010 by being an active contributor, although in the end I wasn’t sure if I’d learned that much....
Stump Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling Winter has come early this year. No snow yet in Swansea, but cold enough for frost. For more see Frost on Flickr, and listen to Dylan reading his poem A Winter’s Tail (curated by Poetictouch.com), which seems quite appropriate.