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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.