….. with an orientation week. For those who don’t know, a MOOC is a massive open online course. Details about this particular MOOC about Change: Education, Learning and Technology can be found here http://change.mooc.ca/ and the weekly schedule can be found here: Change MOOC Schedule
Stephen Downes has posted this presentation:
As someone who attended the first MOOC run by Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier, I am particularly interested in how their ideas have been developed and refined since 2008. This is evident throughout this presentation, but my attention was drawn to slides 60 – 67, where Stephen Downes outlines the principle characteristics of MOOCs –autonomy, diversity, openness and interaction.
It is interesting to compare how these characteristics were described in the 2008 slideshow Connectivism: A Theory of Personal Learning (2008) (slides 63-67) to how they are described in the slideshow How to Organize a MOOC recently presented … and then again …..to how they are discussed in this blog post – Connectivist Dynamics in Communities – in 2009.
From my perspective and recognising that everyone will have a different perspective on this, particularly Stephen himself, there have been the following shifts:
- Diversity: has shifted from being about the diversity of the environments to the diversity of individual perspectives
- Autonomy: a subtle but important slight shift from managing your own learning to including recognition of individual values
- Openness: less of a shift here, but an indication of moving from a view of openness as being about inclusion (no barriers to being in and out) to being about openness as flow of information (no barriers to flow of information)
- Interaction: The idea that knowledge is in the network, not in the individual remains, but the shift seems to be in dropping the word connectedness – perhaps assuming that this is a given in people’s understanding?
These shifts in the way in which language is used are important. For me they are reminiscent of the process of nominalisation that scientists work through when refining their ideas and searching for more economic ways of representing them. For example when Newton was working on the concept of force and shifted from talking, thinking, writing about objects pushing and pulling each other to the word ‘force’ to describe these actions. (I think I have written about this before somewhere – it often crops up).
Here it is not so much about nominalisation (the words autonomy, openness, diversity and interaction are still the same ones as were used in 2008 and before), but it is about refining our understanding of them. If MOOCs are going to become a common phenomenon, which seems to be the case, then we will need to continue to unpick, refine and share our understanding of their basic principles.
More information about Change MOOC 2011 can be found in this slideshow: