Organizers

That’s my photo, but that’s not my name or occupation. My mug has been hijacked by someone pretending to be someone who does not exist. Like many of you, I had no idea this kind of thing went on. It’s called Catfishing. Welcome to the dark underbelly of openness. I’ve read with the greatest respect how Alec Couros has dealt with this. He’s dealt with this a lot, yet he did not clam up his presence on the net, run off to live in an ice house in Forward, and probably shares more of his photos than before. It’s not only brave, it provides valuable lessons in digital literacy, the kind where we need to Question Everything. It’s happened a lot to Dean Shareski, too. Maybe it’s just Canadian educators who’s photos get stolen to create fake online identities to lure woman on dating sites to somehow con them. I […]

creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by xJason.Rogersx Does anyone set out to go down such a hole? It all started because Matt Rafalow contacted me- he was hoping to use medium.com to publish his work for Connected Courses. Simple, I thought. I knew medium publishes RSS feeds for user accounts. RSS is RSS. It should Just Work. Well, these RSS feeds do work in a Feed Reader. Because they are generally forgiving on the format of the feeds. But Matt reported an interesting problem. He tested his URLs. But when he puts it in the forms on our site, he gets a message that it’s not a valid URL It looks like to me that the URL validation code on the Gravity Forms plugin is failing on the “@” in the URL, although technically, it is a valid, though not common, construct for a URL. The […]

I often don’t know what I don’t know. Ben Harwood posed a question this morning @cogdog Looking for a way to export FWP list to another site. Not that I'm lazy, well.. but maybe there's a post that isn't on WP org site? — Ben Harwood (@BenjaminHarwood) September 24, 2014 Basically to export the sites you have in a Feed WordPress site, all you need to do is export the WordPress links, that us a kind of data originally built into the software when people were big on doing these things called blogrolls (a list of recommended blogs). Links are a useful thing I have used time to time to built collections of sites, you can put them in categories and use widgets/shortcodes to push them to your site. On the bottom right of my site are two widgets to list sites “other webs” and “stuff I’ve made”; these are […]

When I started asking my college co-learners to set up RSS aggregators, they panicked until I told them what I now tell them when I ask them to start following RSS feeds: Treat this incoming information as a stream, not a queue. You don’t have to tick off every item. Learn the art of sampling. Dip in as your time and interest allows. Participate in ways that you feel moved to participate. Don’t stress about “keeping up.” If you are busy otherwise for a week or two, don’t drop it, just sample from the current stream. Think of #ccourses this way and you will remove some anxiety from the process!

Stream in Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia — Public Domain

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by RobotSkirts Blog comments. Once the only social network, the way we conversed among blogs, wikis in the pre-twitter, pre-facebook era. It was, really, where the interaction happened. Now, thanks to Google providing the link bait incentive, blog comments are the honey pots for bot gibberish; Akismet snags some 10,000 spam comments per week on this site. But they are still rather important in Connected Courses– nothing, absolutely nothing, motivates someone new to blogging, reflecting in their own space than getting feedback. Especially when it comes from a person they do not know. It cracks open the “why” of what may appear to be pointless blabbering. We seek to be hear, to be acknowledged. Blog comments do that in a simple, but effective way. There is, and has been, for a long time a desire to be able to “track” comment […]

My mom was a teacher.

She was my teacher. I learned from her that learning should be fun, that the learner should take charge and not just follow orders, that people enjoy learning together — I later understood that social learning is what humans do better than all other species.

She also taught me that learning can and should be fun.

It took me a while to get off the podium. 

I started by moving the chairs in a circle and joining the circle. It was scary at first, but I started turning my teacher power — and the responsibility for learning — over to the learners. Eventually, we moved from this:

to this:

As I found techniques that worked, I realized that more important than my expertise in the subject was my growing expertise — and confidence — in transforming a classroom of individual learners into a cooperative learning community.

creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog Maybe it’s the ramp up of Connected Courses but it’s also some upcoming presentations that made my slap my had with a loud “DOH”. I want to create a collection of examples of (and here is where I mumble because I do not know what to call them) how about DS106ish courses– ones using a distributed participation model but also using syndication/push technology to collect or aggregate activity in one place. I know my own examples, all framed around the WordPress / Feed WordPress structure I’ve been deep in since ds106, but also have built out maybe 7 others (and another in the works this week). But others have done this same thing (UMW Abroad has posts back to 2009), in other platforms (all of the cMOOCs Stephen Downes fostered with gRSShopper (Hey Stephen, I thought you had a […]

Image: http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/archives/here_look_under_the_hood.jpg This week’s “pre-course” unit is about digging more deeply into WordPress as a platform for open, connected courses – and about exploring the cPanel...

Image: http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/archives/here_look_under_the_hood.jpg

This week’s “pre-course” unit is about digging more deeply into WordPress as a platform for open, connected courses — and about exploring the cPanel that enables domain of one’s own participants (and people who access similar platforms from other providers) to install WordPress, MediaWiki, Discourse, and other applications/media on servers that they can control. I’ve been through the process of moving from blogger to blog publisher to media platform tinkerer myself, and I’m still somewhat in the novice camp. Fortunately, this unit’s co-facilitators, Jim Groom and Alan Levine, are experts, to say the least. In this week’s Blogtalk (2 PM Pacific, Friday, September12), I’ll be looking under the hood with them.

Why go through the bother of installing and configuring WordPress or MediaWiki, Disqus or Discourse or Etherpad or all of the above? To me, it’s magic. For practically nothing — $25/year — I can create a co-learning environment for a seminar of 25 or a MOOC of thousands. Blogs, comments, forums, collaborative documents. The technologies of publishing and discourse that become available to those who are willing to look under the hood and try some tinkering can be used as powerful amplifiers of co-learning. The objective is not to teach mastery of web media, but to make it easier for students to take responsibility for their own learning and enough co-responsibility for their classmates’ learning that a real learning community can emerge.

Mastering these tools is a means to an end for educators, but learning such mastery involves a meta-skill for educators and co-learners alike — in an era of inexpensive or free web apps, open educational resources, and increasingly experienced peer-learners, knowing how to roll your own learning community infrastructure is becoming essential.

I’ve been messing with social media learning platforms for about ten years, and thinking about them even longer. In 1995, I designed a demo of a “university of the future” for the NEC corporation — they built a working version at the cost that probably ran into millions of dollars. Here is what the mockup of the student profile page looked like (remember — 1995 broadband was the 22,500 baud modem):

When I started teaching about social media at Berkeley and Stanford, I grew aware of the limitations of learning management systems, even the open source ones such as Sakai and Moodle, when it came to the affordances for social media — blogs, forums, wikis. So I used a wiki from one source, a forum from another vendor, and yet a third platform for blogs. My students complained that not only were they climbing the learning curve of these media, but each one had a different log in and interface. So I entered HASTAC’s Digital Media and Learning competition and from the most award I hired a developer, Sam Rose, to create an integrated social media learning environment based on Drupal. We called it the Social Media Classroom and I used it for years. I still use it for my Rheingold U courses. Learners can log in once and switch from wiki to forum to blog to social bookmark by clicking on different tabs in the same browser window.

Then my curiosity about all the action around the mysterious hashtag #ds106 led me to discover what Jim Groom, Alan Levine, Martha Burtis and Tim Owen were doing with WordPress and open learning at the University of Mary Washington. In three one-hour sessions (which we recorded: the first, the second, the third), Groom showed me how to set up a domain of my own, operate cPanel, install and configure WordPress and set it up as a class hub. Using WordPress pages and menus, easily accessible from the dashboard, I added a MediaWiki, a series of syllabus pages, and a Discourse forum (now I start with a Facebook group). We use the blogs for individual voice and conversation about texts and the forum or Facebook group for group voice about overarching issues that emerge from the text. And each student claims a domain and installs their own WordPress blog.

My co-learners and I learn about social media, the subject of the course, and we also learn about how to make our own social media learning environments. Knowing web publishing doesn’t just confer a mighty learning power — it’s about the power to persuade, inform, and organize that is now available to more than a tiny elite, but only to those who are willing to experiment, tinker, and learn.