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#edcmooc Week 4 Final Assignment

Here is my final assignment for the E-learning and Digital Culture MOOC. It is my digital artefact - a creation that combines visual images, sound and text to convey a message. The message represents my reflections on the course readings and material over the past 4 weeks.
Update: Sadly, Slideshare removed the free access service for education as of 2014. Happily, they allowed the possibility to download work and I am now searching for a new platform.

Week 3 Digital Image #edcmooc

The image is my own original painting in acrylic and transfer titled "Smoke and Mirrors" that I used as a basis for my comments on the theme of digital culture, the MOOC and being human. Hope you enjoy!

Photo located here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/92232175@N03/8463473682/in/photostream

MOOCs and Metaphors #edcmooc

In week 1 of the MOOC I noticed a common theme voiced by many of us and it can be summed up in one word: overwhelming.

Within my quadblog group, Martell wrote of a rolling, milling, moving, teeming mass of freshers in a virtual multi-level campus and I saw myself entering an enormous beehive of a university, heard the deafening buzzing of thousands of busy bee students, and felt that I would never find my way through the mazes of hallways. Jane wrote of a marathon race, where some were experts with the latest model running shoes and the training options were endless. I identified with her feeling of bewilderment and inadequacy to compete with these experienced marathoners. Tatiana used a Russian metaphor to express her feeling of beginning a journey on a long road with the first steps, not knowing where it would lead.  As for me, it felt like an enormous and frightening sea and I wondered if I would be able to navigate it.

Yet, just by the simple act of adding our names to the list of Quadblog 16, we connected with each other. Four classmates finding their way through the crowded campus; jogging together at our own pace; sailing in our own little quadblog boat; and walking the MOOC road together.  My first lesson that I learned in MOOC school has been that I do not need to use everything that is out there; quite obviously that is impossible. I have been developing my own list of sites where I have gone to try things out and some will probably be useful to prepare the final assignment. I discovered the fodey.com site to make the squirrel animation when I was scrolling down the facebook wall posts, looking for my fellow quads to let them know I had left comments on their posts. Most of these discoveries have been serendipitous and some probably have nothing to do with the MOOC per se, but they have been fun and they have been learning.

The videos are very accessible (my favourite was Plurality so I don't know if that means I am secretly wary of a dystopic privacy invasion) but I find the readings quite challenging. Some are highly theoretical so it is hard to bring back what I read to the level of application. They are, to continue the sea metaphor, the theory of why tides rise and fall and the navigational maps; understanding them is not necessary to ride in the boat and enjoy the ocean breeze but they are no doubt useful if one wants to chart a course and arrive at a destination. 

The Johnston article talks about metaphors for the Internet commonly referencing physical space, physical speed, destruction, and salvation and what this means in terms of our subconscious attitude toward technology and change. If I look at the MOOC metaphors I mention above, there is a lot of movement involved and physical speed seems to be the common element. This fits with our shared experience of perceiving unlimited options of digital tools, platforms, resources, material and viewpoints. If these are our metaphors, then they are not entirely positive. However, they are dynamic and allow for the possibility of evolution; indeed, this is what happened when we were able to find a few friendly faces among the teeming masses and slow down with them to chat and compare notes as we walk along the same road through the MOOC campus.  

My first Wordle #edcmooc

My first Wordle

I had never even heard of a Wordle until I began the MOOC and since I am concurrently doing a course on Adult Learning and have it in my mind front and centre, I thought I would give it a whirl. I am so pleased with the result and it was easy!

I also tried the Prezi.com application and created a great pathway map with text as a kind of marketing presentation for my firm's skills evaluation exam. We were all impressed here but when I mentioned it to several of the younger generation (20s and 30s), they were familiar with those two sites and did not get nearly as excited as did I and my contemporaries. These sites/applications are not new by any means, but they are new to me. It is like discovering a new flavour of ice cream!

I realize this has not much to do with Week 2 so far, and I will reflect and write some more in a day or two, however, in order to move into the future I necessarily have to travel through the present. It appears that these delightful tools on the internet are part of our present; they are neither utopian nor dystopian and they are not the message or the content. They are just tools. But they do allow me to exercise creativity without being an artist, making the knowledge more beautiful and to me, anyway, more exciting.

I expect that if I were to sit down with an adult who was not terribly comfortable with computers and have him or her play with Wordle, we would all be smiling and relaxed. 

And to add to my happiness, I found this site: 45 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle

Binary thinking and week 1 #edcmooc

I have to start this by saying "wow!". Attending a google+ hangout today with hundreds of classmates tweeting and commenting through google+ and having five professors from University of Edinburgh interacting with us through our comments in real time was nothing short of exhilarating. This one single experience has done more than any of the other exercises to make me feel like I had "gone to class". My point of comparison is that I recently went back to school after many years away to begin a college certificate program in adult learning, one night a week for three hours with 35 other students. Part of this classroom experience is the live exchange of ideas and participation in exercises that take place as part of our course. I leave feeling exhilarated in the same way - it is connection.

I heard the term binary being used in the google+ conversation today to describe the struggle between utopian and dystopian views of technology as well as between digital and non-digital. It was nothing short of illuminating to listen to that conversation.  

Eureka!

Up to then, from the readings and films, I had been imagining I had to determine whether I believe technology is the devil or the messiah, whether we drive the technology or it drives us.  I recalled a conversation in the car yesterday while driving back from a meeting with a few colleagues. I mentioned to them that I was doing a course through a MOOC and the topic this week is "utopias and dystopias". Everyone in the car had strongly held opinions.

One said that when her boys (who are now in their late twenties) were young, she never let them have video games or computers in their rooms and they all played hockey several times a week. According to her, all of these modern digital devices lead to nothing by trouble. However, she did say that she loves the convenience of being able to text to her family group on her Blackberry and let everyone know simultaneously that she is on her way home without having to make five separate phone calls. Another said that her 14-year old daughter was constantly texting and on facebook with her friends and that it seemed to her the "kids of today" can only communicate with each other in this disembodied way and when they do meet in person, some or all of them are constantly tapping away on their smart phones.

A binary vision is a useful construct to frame our love/hate relationship with digital culture and by extension, digital learning. Faced with the plethora of devices, applications and new developments we can feel unable to keep all of it within our control. Therefore, we feel out of control and inadequate. This leads some to blame the technology and label all that surrounds it a false experience: "when we were young, people wrote letters with a pen and paper and took time to frame their thoughts; we met face to face and people did not rudely text and check email during dinner and social visits". Does this mean that these technologies have somehow diluted or weakened our abilities and social connections?

I understand now why the course material for Week 1, looking at the past, tackles this question directly. 

What I can say now in terms of digital learning is that it is different than classroom learning, but not better or worse. On the positive side, it is certainly a democratizing force in the very real sense I am experiencing it through this MOOC, because it is allowing me to learn from experts who are freely sharing their knowledge with me and who I would otherwise never have been able to reach. But the fact is, and it was made manifest today by seeing five human faces on the screen, they are not digital creations. It is clear they are investing huge chunks of their own time in this endeavour. The technology that allows this to happen is the smallest part of the MOOC; by far, the most important element is the human energy and effort that the professors are pouring into the creation of this experience and the participation by my human "classmates" sitting at their computers all over the world. The other, indispensable element (and this is true for both my classroom learning and the online learning) is my own time spent listening again to the lecture and reading the material. I still feel like many of the concepts that are mentioned in the readings are wisps rapidly falling and floating around me and I can only catch a few at a time, with so many others escaping my grasp. Yet, after week 1, I am left clutching a few of them and hungry to continue our race into the present in week 2.

As for my own conclusion on the binary choices from week 1, I can only say that where learning is concerned, the medium is not the message; rather, the message is the message. 

Afwaid of da fish! #edcmooc

Yesterday I opened a hootsuite account and today I closed it. I must admit I don't really know how to work hootsuite so it may be groundless fears that led me to this decision but I have this fear of exposing too much of myself to public view and it seemed like hootsuite was opening my private home to the public.

When my daughter was about five years old, we went to see Free Willy, ostensibly a movie suitable for young children, but every time the whale appeared on the screen, she screamed at the top of her lungs "Afwaid of da fish!!"  It did no good to tell her that Willy was a good fish. The overwhelming size of this giant creature on the movie screen sent her into such paroxyms of terror that we had to leave the theatre. 

The Internet is a vast sea and for me, social media is a huge whale in that sea, one that I do not totally understand. After selecting my twitter, facebook and google accounts to appear on my hootsuite, I googled myself and to my shock, my google+ account came right up. I realized that my friends and activities were now available to the world and rushed to batten down my privacy settings there, which did, in fact, hide all of this information from the google-sphere. I had googled myself on previous occasions, in particular when job hunting, to make sure my private life was private, and had been satisfied with what came up. Now, my confidence was shaken and the only thing that made me feel safe again was removal of the hootsuite account that seemingly, had been the catalyst for this minor tsunami in my social media sea.

So, no hootsuite for me. If anyone out there in cyberspace feels inclined to explain how it works and what it is properly used to manage, I might dip a toe into the waters again. But for now, the owl is just a big, scary fish.

What I learned in the first hour of cyberschool #edcmooc

I feel breathless with the number of digital tasks that have exited my fingertips in the past few hours and intensely inadequate after seeing the incredible variety of blogs and creations of every kind associated with the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.  

What I have done:

• I carefully read the introductory email and followed the instructions to create a twitter account (I did have one set up but it was all but pushing up the daisies since I had only ever tweeted three times previously). I sent out a tweet using the #edcmooc hashtag.  It only took me three tries to get it right. (Which left me wondering, when I deleted the previous tweets does it mean three of them went out anyway? Or did the ones that I used the wrong hashtag for go into empty cyberspace? And also, who exactly sees my tweets?) 
• I created a Flickr account
• I joined the facebook group for EDCMOOC
• I pinned my location on the big google map
• I revived, cleaned up and re-purposed an old blog to use for my EDC blog and proceeded to write my first post
• As I found the EDC boards, I found a number of other blog posts and got lost in them for several hours, then saved them on my own blog to be able to follow them, in the process realizing there are more new concepts/applications out there than I had ever imagined
• Looking through those other blogs also led me to a few youtube videos and I was astounded at the level of ability and creativity in these videos from people who were apparently, just fooling around

At this point, I began to feel overwhelmed and on the heels of this flurry of cyber activity, I received an email from the course professors opening the course content to all those signed up for the course (how many are we? I thought I heard the number 36,000 but that seems impossible).  And so now, I will turn my mind to utopian and dystopian views of information technology on the Coursera "wiki" (now I even know what that is!).

You will notice I did not put any hyperlinks into this post, having perhaps overdone it on my first post. You see, I was just so excited at learning what a web essay is and trying out the fun of embedding links. I still feel like I know nothing in comparison to that vast sea of information (and only on this one topic), but at least my blog helps me remember that I have learned something.

That Awkward Age #edcmooc

I am at that awkward middle age of 50-something - too old for the kids' table and too young for the grownups' table.  The reason I say this is I love what is being served at the kids' table but I am the first to admit I am not a kid anymore and for me, the grownups' table is synonymous with those who are content with ordering the early bird special and not even interested in trying out a new place. It is a state of mind.

There are some who will tell you the awkward age is that between birth and death but I am here to tell you that we tail-end-of-the-boomers have it rough. Whereas the boomer generation was able to scoop the cream of employment opportunities from a frothy economy, my contemporaries were wearing diapers in the early 1960s and by the time we hit the pavement in search of jobs, we were fighting over the leftovers and heading into several waves of recession.  This is not to diminish the struggle of the Gen Xers or that of the Milleniums today. The fact is, the baby boom demographic herd lucked out by the mere fact of the decade in which they were born and a majority are now enjoying vested pension rights and healthy RRSPs (personal tax-free pension savings). 

Enough ranting about first world problems...I do have much for which to be grateful and I am especially excited about the infinite opportunities for learning and pleasure that exist by virtue of living in the internet age. I love hearing new music that others introduce to me through sites like 8 tracks and songza.  As far as social media, it seems that my generation is even more enamored of facebook than my children's generation; many 20-somethings are scornful of the facebook and twitter trend of posting the minutiae of daily life. As for me, I have delighted in finding and renewing old acquaintances. I remember the thrill of the first time I was able to text chat in real time with my sister, when I was living on another continent and phone calls were so expensive they were reserved for special occasions. I remember the nostalgia that gripped me when I first heard CBC radio live streaming while living abroad in South America for more 15 years. I used to tune in to the local Toronto broadcasts to hear the traffic reports in winter and as I looked out my window at the sun and bougainvillea, I marveled at this science fiction prediction come to pass. 

I loved science fiction as a teenager and I still have a very big soft spot for Star Trek (all the series, especially TNG, and the movies), Star Wars, the Matrix series and in particular, any sci-fi that deals with social commentary and not just blowing up space craft. Suggestions are welcome.  

Now I am working in adult education, managing programs that are delivered through traditional text and just starting to dip a toe into experiments like an online forum to interact with students. I am working on a certificate in studies on adult teaching and training and straining to catch up to the leaps and bounds that have taken place over the past few years in online teaching tools. I am hungry to taste that buffet but, despite my considerable motivation and the fact I am considered to be a little more tech-savvy than many of my contemporaries, I struggle to feel comfortable with the myriad of options. We adults of a certain age also want to enjoy this smorgasbord of opportunities to learn and connect with wonderful minds in far-off lands who can teach us and enrich our lives. I want to be part of that revolution and understand how to make it accessible to those who are also at that awkward age and who will never be as comfortable with this technology as our young digital natives.