I haven’t updated any of my blog sites for a long time. I just accepted whatever I started with and went from there. But thanks to Coursera’s class in E-learning and Digital Cultures (EDCMOOC) starting in January, I’m venturing into more blogging on the internet than I’ve done in the past. So it was time to update my site. But I’m finding a lot of quirky new features that will take me some time to get used to. More likely, I’ll just figure out the bare minimum. I plan to continue writing in MS Word and then cut & paste to the blog. I find it easier than the dashboard to wordsmith unless very short like this post. I hope those following like the new “Motion” theme. I find the colors very soothing and I like that the letters seemed lit from behind which helps make them visible to my aging eyes. I may switch between this and Greyzed which really speaks to my junk art sensibilities.
Tag Archive: edcmooc
I recently finished my first Coursera.org class in Gamification taught by Kevin Werbach, Wharton School, UPENN. There were many lessons just from that course that I may cover later, but now I want to spend some time on lessons learned in trying to take online classes over the past few months.
I started Coursera with a class on Machine Learning because of number of colleagues in our community were taking it. At first it was a great refresher and brought back memories of research projects involving artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the early 2000s. But then the module started in on linear algrebra – something I had purposely forgotten since an Army course in operations research and systems analysis (ORSA) 20 years ago. Because of stress at work, I wasn’t ready to turn my mind around linear algebra so I stopped following the course schedule. Probably not a noble thing to do but consistent with the other thousands who also stopped along with me. Then the Gamification course started and I was hooked. The concepts were fascinating and the exercises were challenging without being overwhelming.
But I came away from the course feeling like I had not fully experienced the digital learning process since all I really did was view the lectures and participate in the exercises. I took very little time to participate in the forums. And while I did follow the Twitter hashtag #gamification12, I did not participate in the Facebook group. As a result, I missed opportunities for learning whether from sharing information or asking questions on how something might apply in my workplace.
I’m almost finished with my second Coursera course on Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society taught by Karl Ulrich at UPENN. This has been much more hands on and challenged me in very different ways than Gamification. But I still did not take advantage of the discussion forums.
I just recently started Coursera’s Think Again course from Duke University. This has a new feature called a StudyRoom that provides whiteboarding interaction. It’s very interesting and I can see the potential. I’m just not sure that I can figure out how to make “time” stretch far enough to fully engage in all these different aspects of digital learning. I am signed up for the E-learning and Digital Cultures Course taught by Edinburgh University ( #edcmooc) which starts in late January 2013. It was very exciting to receive the first email announcing that they wanted to start building a community before the class starts. And I can see increasing opportunity for interacting and learning, yet I cannot find the time to do much between work, personal activities and now online courses. So perhaps this might be something that can be discussed during #edcmooc.
In Search of Knowledge 