#moocmooc

[jhoganpei]

It’s the first week of #Moocmooc Instructional Design (Nothing Will Stop the Incessant March), a cMOOC specifically dedicated to the type of work that I just been hired to do. Pretty great timing. But I went over that with my introduction.

This week we’ve been given a choice to remnenonic ADDIE, or reapproach Bloom’s taxonomy. I’ve encountered Bloom’s taxonomy in my education degree, but I’ve never heard of ADDIE, or at least I don’t remember it. So wouldn’t that be a better place to start? It definitely wouldn’t be a pitfall for someone with my experience (or lack thereof) to boldly step forward and redefine that which I do not know the definition.

So ADDIE is a framework for building support tools and training professional development. Right now the term is broken down into Analyze. Design. Develop. Implement. Evaluate. The steps seem well intentioned though they might be a bit soft, surely you’d design your work before developing it, and develop it before you implement it, right?

Right!?

One area for improvement is involving the participant or user in the design process. While you have your goals for whatever piece you’re working on, surely the user must have their own and can contribute to make the piece better for everyone involved.

A is for Audience

Who is the audience of the course, tool, or development? Where are they at in relation to the goals or outcomes? What insight or experiences could they bring? How are you connecting with them, how are you finding them, how will they find you or your material, and how will they connect with each other?

D is for Discussing Success

What does success look like for you as the designer of the course or the author of the material, etc.? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? What does success look like for participants and how are they defining success for themselves? Have an open discussion about goals and for the love of god do not let this happen again.

D is for Designing for Renovation

As you design, consider how you’ll get feedback to improve and how frequently you can work to implement feedback. Build these checks into your schedule and the piece itself to keep you honest to updating it.

I is for Identify what needs to be improved

The beautiful and tragic thing about perfection is that you can never reach it, there is something that can be worked or changed. Did you and your participants meet the definitions of success that you worked out, did those definitions change throughout the process, what are areas of opportunity, or outcomes of new research, or even a new mode of participating. What will be the context change for new participants and their definitions of success? Or maybe there are things that are superfluous that can be removed.

E is for Evolve

After you and your participants have identified what can be improved, it’s time for the piece to evolve. Enact improvements where you can, but remember to work through the process again as new participants will bring along new ideas and contexts that can help you and the piece.

After looking through the other remnemonicing’s that I’ve seen posted in our Google doc clearly I need to consider more research going forward in this course. Though as someone just early on their path in instructional design, shout outs for things to dig up are appreciated. I mean, why write E is for Evolve if I wouldn’t include myself in that maxim?

And if you’d prefer the Google Doc version to comment on.

[jhoganpei]

An introduction of sorts

Hey

my name is Jason Hogan and I’m one of the people participating in this year’s MOOCMOOC: Instructional Design (Nothing Will Stop the Incessant March), and I thought it’d be good to start a post to keep me a bit more accountable to working with and in the course and to give those who stumble onto my page a bit of background of who I am and where I’m at.

So I am UPEI’s newest instructional designer (there’s two of us with one instructional multimedia specialist). Up until November, I was that instructional multimedia specialist, having done some screencapture tutorials, animating, and video lecture shooting/editing.

I have a pretty shallow experience in instructional design, drawing mostly from my experiences from taking a bachelor of education program and working under the infamous Dave Cormier here at UPEI, as well as under the great instructional designers that I’ve worked with. The fact that this year’s MOOCMOOC (Nothing Will Stop the Incessant March) is all about Instructional Design, is really serendipity for my books.

I’m looking forward to these discussions and hope that I can come out of the course a better designer and a better resource for the people I have the fortune to work with. (link to doc)

[raymmax]

MOOC MOOC 16

http://olms.cte.jhu.edu/olms2/data/resource/99656/Skinner%20(1965).pdf http://hackeducation.com/2014/11/04/programmed-instruction-versus-the-programmable-web/ http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/situating-makerspaces-in-schools/…

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[raymmax]

#Rhizo 15 and Learning subjectives (vs. objectives)

#Rhizo 15 and Learning subjectives (vs. objectives)

#rhizo15 Learning subjectives (vs. objectives)

So, it may not be so bad to not know where you are headed, i.e., what one’s objectives are, as long as you know how you got here in the first place. That is where we are.

As a reference and instruction librarian, I am concerned about how we help students develop tools for finding, analyzing, evaluating information and how they use those tools to…

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[raymmax]

First teaching experience - Library Instruction

After action report.

I was so excited about my first day of teaching that I woke up around 2am and was basically await until daybreak. I got to work around 7am, made photocopies of the scenarios and cut them into individual strips. I decided to add a sixth scenario to allow for three to four person teams. By 7: 30 I was in the library instruction classroom, setting up laptops for each table,…

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[raymmax]

For my Wednesday freshman english classes (stand by for revisions)

For my Wednesday freshman english classes

Some thoughts on my first teaching experience this week.

1. I don’t want to bore them with silly platitudes about libraries. They’ll just say, “so what?” 2. I do want them to get first-hand experience of searching and finding information, to feel the thrill of the hunt. 3. So I am thinking about coming up with a series of “hunt” scenarios. 4. No more than 15 minutes of work in the classroom, then…

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[8bitmooc]

Discussions in #8bitmooc

For the next 23 hours, #moocmooc is in full swing again. We recently came across the issue of discussion forums, something that I've been wanting to address in #8bitmooc.

As we know, in #8bitmooc, I had the problem of trying to figure out why students would want to get experience points and gain levels. Originally it was a secondary thing that students could do while completing the course, but now I've turned the experience points and the levels into the grade itself. Once you reach Level 8, you pass. That's it. If you've worked enough to get that many points, you've either decided you care enough to learn the material, or you are so concerned with gaming the system you won't care no matter what we do. :)

So the first gating comes from the challenges. As you get to the higher levels, you unlock harder challenges and more opportunities to get more experience points. This is obvious, but I want to do something else - something tangible, without arbitrarily affecting the games that they can make.

Then I had it - as students gain levels, they unlock new forums that are only accessible to students who have also reached those levels. Part of the problem of discussion forums is the signal-to-noise ratio, where newbies are in all of the forums, drowning out the posts with redundant posts that disrupt deeper conversations you see on hobbyist forums that do quite well. By locking out forums based on levels, you won't have anyone in the thread about the affordances and limitations of the 4-bit sprite format who hasn't at least learned the basics of how the sprite format works. The point of #8bitmooc is to try it, and then discuss it.

Also, there's even a "Level 8" forum for the alumni of the course to stick together after they pass and move on!

The hope is that by gating the forums and trimming the noise, there will be people who are genuinely interested in a deep discussion about the content who won't be scared away from participating. I would love for students to be able to get experience points for deep discussions as much as shiny games, so maybe this is the first step to that goal.

[8bitmooc]

#moocmoocbar

Last night, I had the pleasure of hanging out with @readywriting, @martinlugton, @jessifer, and @patlockley on a Google+ hangout called #moocmoocbar. For those of you who don't know, #moocmooc is a meta-, mini-, micro-, and (I guess) anti-MOOC where the question on everyone's mind is "how many times can we turn this idea of online education inside out and still pretend we know what we're doing."

Before the Bar actually started, Martin and I actually got to talk about #8bitmooc quite substantially. I revealed all of the blog entries left on my queue for this week and talked about some of the deeper ideas behind how my course takes the best from both cMOOCs and xMOOCs to make something insane out of it. Martin is a good person to know, I suppose, since he runs the Connectivist MOOCs directory that could definitely help give me some visibility. :)

Visibility was one of the many important questions we came up with while participating in the Bar, mostly dealing with this notion of the Superstar Professor that is so prevalent in MOOCs. One reason for the success of these online courses comes specifically from the legitimizing effect of having big-name universities behind them. After all, if a student takes a CS1 class from Stanford, that is obviously more valid than if they take a silly course in 8-bit video game programming from some plucky grad student from North Carolina who's taking way too long finishing his Ph.D. Isn't it?

Jesse said that despite "best practices" saying that in an online environment, the teacher should have a video of his or herself to help give the students a face to recognize, #moocmooc intentionally went against that "belief" saying that it shouldn't be about the professor - it should be about all of the students. If anything was fun about #moocmoocbar, it was that it reinforced the idea that a Google Hangout would be a great way to get my students on camera and talking for a weekly podcast! This fireside chat proved to be an excellent way to help demonstrate that at its heart, HybridPedagogy is a community, and that's pretty awesome.

In a way, #8bitmooc is very focused around building an online community rather than emphasizing video lectures. I discussed previously in my post on UI, emphasizing the development of actual games with classmates as well as the discussion of games and the game development process. All such paths are equally valid in my eyes towards "passing" #8bitmooc. But what's the best way to encourage discussion in a community? Forums (yuck)? Twitter? IRC? Smoke signals? These are all questions that I'll need to answer before I go off and code yet another Django forum. :)