Aug 2012
The Myth of Efficiency: a #digped Discussion
August 29, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Sean Michael Morris, Pete Rorabaugh, and Jesse Stommel
This Friday, August 31 from 1:00 - 2:00pm Eastern (10:00 - 11:00am Pacific), Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion under hashtag #digped to explore the changing political economies of higher education. The practicality and future of the university has fallen under scrutiny. “There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan debt,” Leslie Leigh Scott writes in “How the American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps”. Few who have pursued life in higher education can deny an affection for the college campus. From the quad to the cafeteria, from the library to the biology lab, universities are sites of charm, intellectual industry, and perpetual nostalgia. However, “Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty.” The nostalgia is wearing off, and many are proclaiming the end of higher education as we’ve known it.
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This Friday, August 31 from 1:00 - 2:00pm Eastern (10:00 - 11:00am Pacific), Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion under hashtag #digped to explore the changing political economies of higher education. The practicality and future of the university has fallen under scrutiny. “There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in our graduates, the out-of-control tuitions and crippling student loan debt,” Leslie Leigh Scott writes in “How the American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps”. Few who have pursued life in higher education can deny an affection for the college campus. From the quad to the cafeteria, from the library to the biology lab, universities are sites of charm, intellectual industry, and perpetual nostalgia. However, “Attention is finally being paid to the enormous salaries for presidents and sports coaches, and the migrant worker status of the low-wage majority faculty.” The nostalgia is wearing off, and many are proclaiming the end of higher education as we’ve known it.
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Udacity and Online Pedagogy: Players, Learners, Objects
August 27, 2012 | Filed in: Online Learning
by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel
This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam. Like a photograph, a moment in a video, a discussion prompt. As online learning has grown, learning objects have become something of the Holy Grail of instructional design... Or the windmills at which it tilts.
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This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that we can create units of learning so fundamentally simple and reusable that they can be applied in different ways to different objectives and lessons, no matter the context. Hodgins’s dream was of “a world where all ‘content’ exists at just the right and lowest possible size.” Like a single sentence. Like a single question on an exam. Like a photograph, a moment in a video, a discussion prompt. As online learning has grown, learning objects have become something of the Holy Grail of instructional design... Or the windmills at which it tilts.
Read More...Learning as Performance: MOOC Pedagogy and On-ground Classes
August 24, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Chris Friend
I once heard an interesting story about my former collegiate marching-band instructor, Dr. Richard Greenwood. According to legend, Greenwood once held up the score to an extensive piece the band was working on, pointed to it, and said, to the surprise of those around him holding instruments, "This is not the music we are playing. This is not the song we are performing. This is only a map. It's a guide to get us where the composer wants us to go." He then went on to discuss the merits of interpretation, flexibility, and improvisation within a framework.
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I once heard an interesting story about my former collegiate marching-band instructor, Dr. Richard Greenwood. According to legend, Greenwood once held up the score to an extensive piece the band was working on, pointed to it, and said, to the surprise of those around him holding instruments, "This is not the music we are playing. This is not the song we are performing. This is only a map. It's a guide to get us where the composer wants us to go." He then went on to discuss the merits of interpretation, flexibility, and improvisation within a framework.
Read More...A MOOC by Any Other Name
August 13, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Hundreds in Google Docs
On August 13, as part of a collaborative exercise in Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, nearly 500 participants worked together in seven separate documents to create essays about MOOCs. They were given specific parameters -- half a day, cite three sources, write exactly 1,000 words, and illustrate with an image. Working in sections of about 50 participants each, each group succeeding in massively co-authoring, and massively peer-reviewing their articles. The article below stood out as one ready to publish, but all the articles were noteworthy. We’ve included a short Storify at the end of the complete piece below, including links to all the Google Docs in which the essays were written.
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On August 13, as part of a collaborative exercise in Hybrid Pedagogy’s MOOC MOOC, nearly 500 participants worked together in seven separate documents to create essays about MOOCs. They were given specific parameters -- half a day, cite three sources, write exactly 1,000 words, and illustrate with an image. Working in sections of about 50 participants each, each group succeeding in massively co-authoring, and massively peer-reviewing their articles. The article below stood out as one ready to publish, but all the articles were noteworthy. We’ve included a short Storify at the end of the complete piece below, including links to all the Google Docs in which the essays were written.
Read More...Audrey Watters Wrestles with MOOCs
August 11, 2012 | Filed in: Open Education
by Pete Rorabaugh
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as they are situated both inside and outside of traditional higher education institutions, naturally raise questions about those institutions. My recent article, "Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media," began to uncover some of those questions. In that article, I assert "that academic work must be useful beyond its tower and that digital culture offers new opportunities to achieve that goal." Perhaps MOOCs are a way to take academic work beyond its traditional boundaries. Or perhaps MOOCs are so extra-institutional that they will work no real changes on higher education. I recently invited Audrey Watters to an interview over Twitter to discuss what road MOOCs might be paving for us all. Both of us will also be participating in MOOC MOOC, an experimental, investigative one-week course hosted by Hybrid Pedagogy. This interview is an invitation behind the critical lens of MOOC MOOC.
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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), as they are situated both inside and outside of traditional higher education institutions, naturally raise questions about those institutions. My recent article, "Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media," began to uncover some of those questions. In that article, I assert "that academic work must be useful beyond its tower and that digital culture offers new opportunities to achieve that goal." Perhaps MOOCs are a way to take academic work beyond its traditional boundaries. Or perhaps MOOCs are so extra-institutional that they will work no real changes on higher education. I recently invited Audrey Watters to an interview over Twitter to discuss what road MOOCs might be paving for us all. Both of us will also be participating in MOOC MOOC, an experimental, investigative one-week course hosted by Hybrid Pedagogy. This interview is an invitation behind the critical lens of MOOC MOOC.
Read More...#digped Storify Pt. 2: A Backchannel in the Backchannel
August 09, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Robin Wharton
The first installment, "We Interrupt This Broadcast," deferred the question about the use of video lectures and broadcast education in MOOCs, and focuses instead on those contributions related to the other questions Sean's #digped post raises. In this installment, I pick up the MOOC-related strands of the discussion and the resulting conversation about shifting funding models for higher education and the pressing questions they raise.
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The first installment, "We Interrupt This Broadcast," deferred the question about the use of video lectures and broadcast education in MOOCs, and focuses instead on those contributions related to the other questions Sean's #digped post raises. In this installment, I pick up the MOOC-related strands of the discussion and the resulting conversation about shifting funding models for higher education and the pressing questions they raise.
Read More...#digped Storify Pt. 1: We Interrupt This Broadcast . . .
August 07, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Robin Wharton
In his article, "Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera," Sean asks us to consider, "If online education has made so much progress, why isn’t it more obvious? Why are the good folks at Coursera (who are actually just now catching up to those of us who’ve been doing this for a decade) getting all the attention, while also not putting the best face of online education forward?" He ends the piece with a call for pedagogues "to innovate, to experiment, to play and be played with," and cautions against oversimplification of online learning and MOOCs, of both the forms they take and the issues at stake when we are debating their merits and demerits. In an effort to engage some of the more productive discursive strands weaving in and out of the recent media "MOOCopalypse", we decided to focus last week's #digped discussion on the broader question of broadcast learning, which is the model (as Sean points out, sometimes erroneously) most frequently associated with MOOCs and other, more traditional (did I just write that?) online courses.
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In his article, "Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera," Sean asks us to consider, "If online education has made so much progress, why isn’t it more obvious? Why are the good folks at Coursera (who are actually just now catching up to those of us who’ve been doing this for a decade) getting all the attention, while also not putting the best face of online education forward?" He ends the piece with a call for pedagogues "to innovate, to experiment, to play and be played with," and cautions against oversimplification of online learning and MOOCs, of both the forms they take and the issues at stake when we are debating their merits and demerits. In an effort to engage some of the more productive discursive strands weaving in and out of the recent media "MOOCopalypse", we decided to focus last week's #digped discussion on the broader question of broadcast learning, which is the model (as Sean points out, sometimes erroneously) most frequently associated with MOOCs and other, more traditional (did I just write that?) online courses.
Read More...Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media
August 06, 2012 | Filed in: Critical Pedagogy
by Pete Rorabaugh
Teaching is a moral act. Our choice of course content is a moral decision, but so is the relationship we cultivate with students. Both physical and digital learning spaces require us to practice a politics of teaching, whether we’re conscious of it or not. However, traditional relationships between students and teachers come freighted with a model of interaction that often impedes learning. They are hierarchical. Progressive teaching, informed by a critical attention to pedagogy, resets the variables and insists on the classroom as a site of moral agency.
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Teaching is a moral act. Our choice of course content is a moral decision, but so is the relationship we cultivate with students. Both physical and digital learning spaces require us to practice a politics of teaching, whether we’re conscious of it or not. However, traditional relationships between students and teachers come freighted with a model of interaction that often impedes learning. They are hierarchical. Progressive teaching, informed by a critical attention to pedagogy, resets the variables and insists on the classroom as a site of moral agency.
Read More...Broadcast Learning: A #digped Discussion
August 01, 2012 | Filed in: #digped
by Sean Michael Morris
This Friday, August 3 from 1:00 - 2:00pm Eastern (10:00 - 11:00am Pacific), Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion under hashtag #digped centered on the difference between content-delivery and learning in online education. We’ll use as focal point for the discussion the problems and advantages of, and future potential for, the video lecture as utilized in flipped classrooms, MOOCs, hybrid courses, and more. In “Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera”, we suggested that video lectures used to create large-scale, “auditorium”-style learning environments may not be the very best application of technology. Our discussion on Friday will inspect how this technology is being used and abused, and how it might be used better.
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This Friday, August 3 from 1:00 - 2:00pm Eastern (10:00 - 11:00am Pacific), Hybrid Pedagogy will host a Twitter discussion under hashtag #digped centered on the difference between content-delivery and learning in online education. We’ll use as focal point for the discussion the problems and advantages of, and future potential for, the video lecture as utilized in flipped classrooms, MOOCs, hybrid courses, and more. In “Broadcast Education: A Response to Coursera”, we suggested that video lectures used to create large-scale, “auditorium”-style learning environments may not be the very best application of technology. Our discussion on Friday will inspect how this technology is being used and abused, and how it might be used better.
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