Connected Courses is a collaborative network of faculty in higher education developing online, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web.
Our goal is to build an inclusive and expansive network of teachers, students, and educational offerings that makes high quality, meaningful, and socially connected learning available to everyone.
Our Course on Connected Courses
For Fall 2014 (from September 2 to December 12, 2014), our major focus is on running a course for developing and teaching connected courses. The course is designed and taught by faculty from diverse institutions, some of whom are the folks behind successful connected courses such as FemTechNet, ds106, phonar, and the National Writing Project CLMOOC. You can find the syllabus here, and the people involved here.
A cool concept here and also an example of a course built on WordPress with a planet-like syndication model that allows people to post on their own websites and syndicate their content into the course via RSS. I suspect that Alan Levine built the site and that it’s based on FeedWordPress.
It’s not quite as open as or as “simple” as the IndieWeb News model which allows individual syndication by means of webmention, but it certainly gets the job done and is an excellent example of how this model works.
While the tech choruses croon on about scale and AI and datadatadata, I prefer the long tail. Looking in the corners of digital stuff I marvel when you find small signs of quirky human presence. Li…
Looks like he went on to build some other nice little web tools like ProjectNaptha!
Thread: There was a session today at #NCTE19, the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share some thoughts, and some reading material, to add to the conversation. #elachat #ilachat 1/x
I've been an education reporter for a decade+. A few yrs ago, I knew nothing abt the "science of reading." But in the past 3 yrs, I've read thousands of pages of books, articles, research papers. 2/x
I've interviewed hundreds of researchers, teachers, school leaders, tutors, parents, students and struggling readers. I've visited 9 states. And I've been shocked to learn that: 3/x
A tweetstorm that could be a meta-paper on the topic of reading and literacy.
hat tip:
Thread: There was a session today at #NCTE19, the annual conference of @ncte, called "Misreading the Science of Reading." I want to share some thoughts, and some reading material, to add to the conversation. #elachat#ilachat 1/x
This talk was delivered at OEB 2019 in Berlin. Or part of it was. I only had 20 minutes to speak, and what I wrote here is a bit more than what I could fit in that time-slot.
I've been thinking a lot lately about this storytelling that we speakers do -- it's part of what I call the "ed-tech imaginary." This includes the stories we invent to explain the necessity of technology, the promises of technology; the stories we use to describe how we got here and where we are headed. And despite all the talk about our being "data-driven," about the rigors of "learning sciences" and the like, much of the ed-tech imaginary is quite fanciful. Wizard of Oz pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain kinds of stuff.
An important message pointing out that many (particularly corporations) are operating on fear and not facts within the EdTech spaces. Some simple fact-checking will verify that vos veritas liberabit.
I’ve been working on a thesis lately relating to some simple ideas with relation to memory that make me think we should be looking backwards instead of forward. Part of the trouble is that as a society we’ve long forgotten some of the basic knowledge even indigenous peoples had/have, but somehow there’s more benefit and value in the information imbalance to some that we no longer have or use some of these teaching and knowledge techniques. We definitely need to bring them back.
Agitprop is a portmanteau — a combination of “agitation” and “propaganda,” the shortened name of the Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda which was responsible for explaining communist ideology and convincing the people to support the party. This agitprop took a number of forms — posters, press, radio, film, social networks — all in the service of spreading the message of the revolution, in the service of shaping public beliefs, in the service of directing the country towards a particular future.
Might be fun to mix up some agitprop art for various modern things. Perhaps for social media so as to frame IndieWeb as the good?
Although agitprop is often associated with the Soviet control and dissemination of information, there emerged in the 1920s a strong tradition of agitprop art and theatre — not just in the USSR. One of its best known proponents was my favorite playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Once upon a time, before I turned my attention to education technology, I was working on a PhD in Comparative Literature that drew on Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, on the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostranenie — “defamiliarization.” Take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. A radical act or so these artists and activists believed that would destabilize what has become naturalized, normalized, taken for some deep “truth.” Something to shake us out of our complacency.
Now, none of these stories is indisputably true. At best — at best — they are unverifiable. We do not know what the future holds; we can build predictive models, sure, but that’s not what these are. Rather, these stories get told to steer the future in a certain direction, to steer dollars in a certain direction. (Alan Kay once said “the best way to predict the future is to build it,” but I think, more accurately, “the best way to predict the future is to issue a press release,” “the best way to predict the future is to invent statistics in your keynote.”) These stories might “work” for some people. They can be dropped into a narrative to heighten the urgency that institutions simply must adapt to a changing world — agitation propaganda.
Many of these stories contain numbers, and that makes them appear as though they’re based on research, on data. But these numbers are often cited without any sources. There’s often no indication of where the data might have come from. These are numerical fantasies about the future.
Another word: “robots are coming for your jobs” is one side of the coin; “immigrants are coming for your jobs” is the other. That is, it is the same coin. It’s a coin often used to marshall fear and hatred, to make us feel insecure and threatened. It’s the coin used in a sleight of hand to distract us from the profit-driven practices of capitalism. It’s a coin used to divide us so we cannot solve our pressing global problems for all of us, together.
So I’m collaborating with some local colleagues on a Futurize Your Course competition as part of AUC’s Research and Creativity Convention in April. If you are an AUC faculty member or s…
I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly for those who are interested in the topic, but may not have been following as closely:
Inoreader has been working on a beta product that will make following social feeds in Twitter, Micro.blog, the Fediverse, and even IndieWeb sites with h-entry easier and prettier.
Kicks Condor has been iterating and doing some interesting work on the FraidyCat reader over the past few weeks.
Malcolm Blaney has a fantastic little feed reader in his Unicyclic site (not to mention that he’s also got a cool looking IndieWeb as a Service site with i.haza.website that I desperately want to have time to try out).
The volume of different and interesting content going into IndieWeb.xyz as a discovery hub has been increasing lately.
CJ Eller and others have been contributing to Blogging Futures as an extended online conversation in the form of an aggregated blogchain.
And none of this even touches on the excellent continuing work on Microsub readers which continues to astound me. Even with all of this activity, I’m sure I’m missing some fun little gems, so please don’t hesitate to mention them.
It’s a crossover episode! Ken Bauer is the host of the Ask The Flipped Learning Network podcast (@askthefln) and an associate professor of #CompSci @TecDeMonterrey in Guadalajara. We chat about our respective podcasts, Virtually Connecting, Open Education, hockey, tacos and a wide variety of things in between.
On shared, cross-over podcasts the running time should run as a function of the number of co-hosts raised to the second power, not as 2x.
One common complaint when I hang around with ed tech/learning technologist people (to be fair, we have a few) is that often universities don’t know quite what to do with them. They know they want them, but they’re n...
This is a good indicator of why some of the big corporate EdTech companies have such heavy influence. Higher education just doesn’t know what to do with technology and knee-jerk changes give corporations the upper hand despite the good intentions of the urgency of teachers.
For five years, Digital Pedagogy Lab and Virtually Connecting have orbited each other, each tending to members of an ever-broadening community of educators whose concerns range from open pedagogy and OER to critical classroom practice and equitable design to social justice and access for underrepresented voices in academe. Through their tremendous commitment to creating parallel... Read More
Fleming College faculty (and anyone else who’d like to add!) are building a community patchwork of ‘chapters’ into a quasi-textbook about pedagogy for teaching & learning in college. This space is that work in progress. Each patch of the quilt/chapter of the book (let’s call it a patch book) will focus on one pedagogical skill and be completed and published by an individual faculty member. Wherever possible, we’d like to have the student perspective embedded in the work as well.
I want to hear it from them.
The Open Faculty Patchbook is an ongoing collection of stories by post-secondary educators about their teaching. It was meant to serve as a community collaboration of how-to-teach tips and tricks that can be patched together to form a sort of manual on how to teach.
What...
This space is here to house the stories of how learners learn in higher ed. Below is a list to choose from for learners to write about how they develop or use that skill.
It has been cultivated from the open textbook from the University of Saskatchewan entitled University Success. A wonderful open resource that we hope can help springboard learners themselves into sharing their take on these skills and strategies.
It is a list of suggested topics. You are free to choose your own if you’d like to contribute.
As a part of our continuing series of AnnotatED events, Hypothesis is participating in OLC Live, the free online virtual conference running parallel with the OLC Accelerate 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida, USA. Join us and other educators online for 4 days of sessions focused on themes of openness and online education.
Definitely going to have to attend parts of this today!
Emily Hanford
Audrey Watters
Dr. Tannis Morgan
Terry Greene
Martin Weller
Terry Greene