Presentation about #ds106 in EDUC650

On May 7, 2013, around 4:45  or 5:00 p.m., I’ll be presenting about Digital Storytelling 106, more commonly referred to as DS106. This is a part of my Ed.D. coursework, for a class titled “Technology and Cognition” with Dr. Fred Hofstetter.

Below are my slides and links of interest.

DS106 preso v.1 from Mathieu Plourde

Video recording of the session:

• The daily create (May 7, 2013)
• My creations on Flickr so far

(from UMW Students Explain ds106)

I am overall so impressed with what DS106 has become in so little time. It’s an amazing, eclectic, informal learning space and community that never back down in front of a challenge. It’s also a virtuous circle of grassroot positive energy that keeps you going as a learner. Once you start DS106 and engage with the community, you become a part of that community. It’s what the Internet is all about.

Short URL: http://bit.ly/ds106-preso

#OER – Washington SBCTC’s Open Course Library adds 39 courses

If you weren’t aware, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) has released 39 additional openly licensed courses, bringing the total to 81. Courses made available in the Open Course Library (OCL) are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-By), so they are prime for David Wiley’s 4Rs!

The courses are designed as Google Doc collections for easy remixing (how-to guide available here).

The Student PIRGs, a student advocacy group, has updated their cost savings analysis to include these new courses. Copied below are the highlights, as listed on their announcement.

• Lower Prices: OCL materials cost 90% less than the materials that faculty members used prior to adopting OCL, saving students $96 per class. The average OCL material costs $12 while the average traditional textbook replaced was $135.

• Massive Savings: The Open Course Library has saved students $5.5 million in textbook costs to date, including $2.9 million during the 2012-2013 academic year alone. The vast majority, $5.1 million of these savings are within the Washington community and technical colleges.

• Return on Investment: The textbook savings have more than tripled the original investment of $1.8 million.

• Branching Out: The mathematics departments at Green River Community College and Shoreline Community College have switched to using Open Course Library’s Precalculus textbook, which was developed at Pierce College. During this academic year alone, these departments have saved students $197,395 and $162,848 respectively.

• Projected Savings: Our 2011 analysis found that savings could rise as high as $41.6 million if the materials are adopted for all 410,000 annual enrollments at Washington’s community and technical colleges. While 100% adoption is unlikely, usage at other colleges and universities across Washington and the nation will almost certainly produce even greater savings.

If you or a colleague teaches a college course, it’s well worth a look. Besides content, there are also instructional design elements included, such as activities, prompts, assignment ideas, etc.

Twitter: Trying really hard to make itself irrelevant

Since early 2008, I’ve been a Twitter user. Twitter has always been a large part of my professional development toolkit. I’ve made so many connections over the years with people who have influenced my thinking and my career path.

One of the strongest strength of Twitter has always been the non-reciprocity of the platform, allowing me to follow someone else’s work without requiring a formal handshake like LinkedIn or Facebook requires. Twitter is a very strong discovery platform. But it’s not the only game in town anymore.

Archiving

A couple of years ago, every time I participated in a conference, I would create an archive on a service called TwapperKeeper. TwapperKeeper allowed to easily create a list of all the tweets following certain search criteria, such as an event hashtag. Since the service was bought by Hootsuite, it is my understanding that the archival process is now a premium service. I haven’t found a free service that could archive tweets as simply as TwapperKeeper did, but, to Twitter’s defense, their search indexing has gotten a lot better (for a while, search results would stop at around 2 weeks back, which is not the case anymore). 

Eventifier seems like a good “affordable” alternative. Storify is a free curation alternative, if you like to manage archives manually…

Following limit

This one really makes me upset. In January, as I was attending Educon, I was doing my usual following routine on Twitter. As attendees were tweeting about the event, and I found their comments useful, I started following them. But then, I got an error message, saying that I can’t follow more than 2,000 people (see explanation from Twitter).

I have built my list of followers over FIVE YEARS, this is not excessive. Basically, I need to get more followers to allow me to follow more people. Or I have to unfollow contacts to make some room for new ones. So I either have to be more picky from now on, or I have to adopt a spammy behavior to get more people to follow me, even if they are spam bots or porn stars. This works well for celebrities, not for common professionals like me.

UPDATE: Tweetdeck, the Twitter client owned by Twitter, has led me to believe I could follow people beyond the 2K limit, but FAILED SILENTLY while I was attending #digedcon. This is beyond ridiculous!

Hoarder behavior

Twitter likes for everyone to direct their information to them, but frowns upon anyone taking their feeds and displaying and storing them elsewhere. For instance, I used to be able to aggregate Twitter feeds seamlessly in Yahoo Pipes of IFTTT.com, but not anymore. Twitter is banning other services to use Twitter triggers to other services. This means you can create a recipe in IFTTT.com to send a tweet, but you can’t take a tweet and send it to your Evernote archive, of generate an RSS feed to send to your tablet’s reader. I understand this might be related to traffic and spam control, but it’s getting a little ridiculous for the average “civil” user.

Conclusion

I have started to pay less and less attention to Twitter, shifting my attention to Google+. I am not saying that I am abandoning Twitter; it will still be a must for conferences, because of the sheer volume of users using it. But you should expect less activity from me on that service.

My first #ds106 post

Creating this bogus post just to make sure I have something in my ds106 category. Because yes, I intend to join in on the creative mayhem.

The fuzziness of the #MOOC concept #moocposter #digedcon #elifocus

I have been circulating an online poster for the last couple of week focused on the issues with MOOCs. It is my submission for the the 2013 Saylor Foundation Digital Education Conference. www.saylor.org/posters-2/

 

My poster/meme is targeted at exposing the mixed bag of what people mean by the term Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. As with many trending topics, many people and institutions have jumped on the MOOC bandwagon, but have little shared understanding of what they actually are, or what they are useful for. By adding prompts around the potential meaning of each letter, I wanted to represent visually the fuzziness of the concept, and the need to develop a better taxonomy of what it means to learn online.

Although I have represented this concept visually myself, I would not have come up with the idea without attending Educon in Philadelphia in January 2013. I borrowed the tagline from Jon Becker, Assistant Professor at VCU.

I also got some feedback from Derek Bruff during the ELI Focus session on MOOCs, which lead to this version 3. (previous versions: 1, 2)

Feel free to use, reuse, comment! It’s always a work in progress!