What is etmooc? Below is the main website, but most of the action took place in Twitter, Google+, blog posts, and vlogs. We followed each other through a blog hub that aggregated all our etmooc blog posts, and through Twitter and Google+. We shared resources through Diigo.

It was through etmooc that I first heard about Storify, through a video by Andrew Petrus called “Wading through the Mooc.” This was one of the first videos I watched for etmooc, and it was extremely helpful. Andrew walked the audience through numerous tools, like how to add the etmooc Google Calendar items to your Apple mobile device and the “Feedly” app. He also introduced Storify, and it was from this video that I was inspired to storify my etmooc experience.

Topic 1: Connected learning
In the first two weeks of the course, we discussed things such as connecting with others through blogging and commenting on blogs, creating a personal learning network, and “rhizomatic learning” (according to Dave Cormier).This short tweet, during the first etmooc weekly twitter chat (#etmchat), hit me like a ton of bricks:

This makes complete sense, and yet it’s something I’ve never thought about before, and certainly haven’t yet done. I search through hashtags on Twitter, and read through blog posts suggested through Twitter by people I agree with (or look at blogs on the blogrolls of people I agree with, and have been building my PLN that way. When I come across people disagree with on a hashtag, I read their tweets and otherwise ignore them. But by doing that, I deprive myself of an important part of the conversation on whatever topic is being discussed. Obviously, knowing various sides to an issue is crucial before making up one’s mind (cf John Stuart Mill, On Liberty). This tweet inspired me to no longer ignore those people I disagree with on Twitter. But how else to find them when all the social media connections I’ve made are to people I agree with? This issue came up again later…more on that, below.

This tweet ended up generating a good deal of discussion, as both Keith Brennan (see below) and I blogged about it. We took the point in slightly different ways, and Keith and I had a little back and forth on the issue of whether or not to include more structured learning paths in cMOOCs. See Keith’s post, below, and my reply after that.

Here, Keith Brennan talks about how some people in etmooc were feeling overwhelmed, especially those who were relatively new to many of the tech tools, and how MOOCs like etmooc need to take into account the prior knowledge of learners in order to improve their sense of self-efficacy (in psychologist Albert Bandura’s sense). Keith offers several suggestions for MOOCs to help do this, such as setting up clear paths for learners to go through if they wish, and offering many tutorials and tips for use of tools.I picked up on a different aspect of Christoph’s original tweet, as well as some of Keith’s post, in a blog post I did:

Here I reflected on how xMOOCs (content-focused MOOCs) tend to be more crowd-centric in the sense that they offer the same content, in the same way, to everyone. It’s impossible to individuate the content for different learners, and difficult to change the course as it goes along to respond to the needs of the learners at the time (in part because there’s so many learners with so many different needs!). But I have found etmooc to be more learner-centred because it emphasizes finding what is most meaningful to you and focusing on that, rather than trying to give everyone the same content. But there’s still potentially a problem in that not everyone is comfortable with this more free and open style of learning, and may be looking for more structure. A number of great comments followed this post to continue the discussion.The following tweet is highly relevant to this issue as well:

Excellent advice–something those of us who feel relatively comfortable with technology should do. Been trying to offer advice and answers to questions where I can. Moocs are too big for the moderators to answer all questions and give individual help; it’s up to we participants to do that for each other. Nevertheless, I still get overwhelmed myself with all the great things to do, the great ideas on offer, and I can’t possibly do them all. Thus, the next post really helped me.

An amazing point: “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t do everything — only feel guilty if you don’t do anything.” I want this as an #etmooc t-shirt! It was amazing during the second week or so of etmooc (when I joined), how many tweets and posts were about feeling overwhelmed by the amount of things one could do in the mooc, new things to try, all the tweets one could read, the hundreds of blogs one could read and comment on, plus all the Diigo links and the discussion on Google+. Many of us felt like we needed to get to as much of this information as we could, and even then we were missing the vast majority of it. Some of us felt guilty about not being able to do as much as we thought we should, as evidenced in blog posts like this one. The idea of only feeling guilty if you do nothing at all is right on, and helped me put my own etmooc work into perspective.The following video by Ben Wilkoff really helped me think about feeling overwhelmed in etmooc.

Ben points out in the video that the way to make one’s way through a large learning situation like etmooc is to find a smaller group, link up to others who share interests or concerns with you. Ben says: “we need to take the massive … and break it off into these smaller conversations that we can be passionate about and move forward after this big event.” We need to find our own slices of this huge experience.The following blog post is relevant as well, as it talks about curation of information as more than just collecting a massive amount of things and sharing them with others.

This post emphasizes that curation is about making sense of an issue, not just making a pile of items. It helped me clarify why I don’t usually like Scoop.it or Pinterest boards–they are often just a collection of websites, blog posts, photos, etc., without much or anything in the way of commentary. There is little sense-making. It’s okay to have some collections of useful websites, articles, posts on certain topics for those who just want to see various resources, but these things can quickly get so large that they’re impossible to use. The best curation strategy, for me, is: (1) to curate those things that you find most useful, sifting through all the possible things to link to and selecting a limited number, and (2) make some commentary on each link to help people see what it is and why you think it’s useful.Now, I don’t always do this; for example, my Diigo page is a bunch of links without commentary. But I do try to organize them carefully into folders and with tags, so they are easily cut down to a manageable size according to topic. And I only bookmark those things that I find useful. If I haven’t read something I’ll put it into the “read later” folder, which (I think) doesn’t show publicly. That way, I don’t share things I haven’t even read.

I much prefer Learnist as a curation site (see, e.g., my Learnist page)–it’s focused on teaching something to others, so you’re encouraged to pick the sites that you are think are most important, make commentary on each, and pay attention to the order in which you present them, so as to introduce topics, then go deeper into them. Not everyone does this on Learnist, but I think it’s the best way to use it.

Alan Levine, or @cogdog, asked for people to share their stories of what has happened to them as a result of sharing something openly, online. I decided to record a video of myself for the first time ever, and post it openly, as part of Levine’s call. I was nervous about doing it, but committed to trying nonetheless. I think Levine’s project is a great one, and wanted to contribute.Plus, the following tweet was inspiring–though I worried that what happened to me as a result of open sharing was kind of mundane, well, who knows…it might inspire someone else to do more open sharing.

So, here’s the result of my first video recording of myself as a “talking head,” and my true story of open sharing.

As the first two weeks went on, I came to agree with Peter Newbury:

Peter’s tweet was in response to an etmooc chat prompt that asked us what we had learned this week. I completely agree with Peter–every time I try to write a short blog post, thinking this will only take me about an hour at most, it’s still not done two or more hours later. I seem incapable of doing short blog posts. Maybe that’s the philosopher in me, in that I feel I must explain and thereby understand details carefully before making a judgement on anything, weighing various options, looking at several sides of an issue, etc. Plus, I’ve starting adding images to my posts, which takes a long time. Finding the best image, then embedding it where you want, then making sure to attribute it correctly…all that can take 30-45 minutes at least! Still, I’ve managed at least one post per week while in etmooc, which is quite amazing for me.

The idea of feeling overwhelmed by complexity and huge waves of information continued through the second part of the “connected learning” topic, during which we discussed “rhizomatic learning.” I did two blogs posts on rhizomatic learning (here’s the link to the first), but here I want to focus on the idea of “drinking when thirsty.” I really like that image, and want it on my etmooc t-shirt, along with “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t do everything — only feel guilty if you don’t do anything.” Must keep these things in mind. Though, as Carina van Heyst says in a later tweet:

The problem with me is, that I’m so thirsty I want to follow a lot of links, read a lot of blog posts, post a lot of comments, read the twitter feed all the time, etc. Must learn to contain my enthusiasm so I can focus more and also get other things done. Some sage advice:

Okay, so I’m more like 30-45 minutes, but I think 30 minutes is a good limit. That is, if I save the links people send that look interesting, to read later. And for those things I miss:

I thought a lot about “rhizomatic learning,” and did two blog posts about it: one that considered what rhizomatic learning might look like in a philosophy course, and one that presented “a worry and a question.”

This one generated a fair bit of traffic and discussion, and is related to a point made earlier: the importance of finding and listening to people who disagree with you. My worry was that in self-directed, rhizomatic learning situations, one chooses what one wants to pursue, what one wants to learn, who one wants to connect with, etc. I fear that by starting with one’s currently-established interests and desires, one may end up just focusing on what follows from those, rather than critically examining them. One thing instructors can do is act as Socratic “gadflies,” encouraging students to reflect on and examine their own assumptions and beliefs critically. Perhaps in rhizomatic learning we need to make sure to include such gadflies in our PLN’s.

Topic 2: Digital Storytelling

At first, I found myself not terribly interested in this topic. I couldn’t figure out why, so I wrote a blog post trying to figure it out. Mostly it came down to being concerned that I don’t know enough about storytelling, telling stories well, to be able to do anything effective in digital storytelling. Also, I didn’t see myself asking students to do it in philosophy courses. The blog post below explains.

I think a lack of confidence was playing in there as well. I was concerned that I didn’t know enough about telling stories to produce something worthwhile. I also wasn’t sure that my stories would be of interest to anyone else–mostly I could think of just personal stories. And I had to get over my sense that my story of openness, linked above, would be worth telling; after all, didn’t such a thing happen to a lot of people, online, every day?A tweet during one of our etmooc weekly chats, from Alec Couros, spoke to this concern:

We were talking about how to get started with digital storytelling, and I do think that Alec’s point is right on: you have to at least start with the sense that you have something useful to say.But then, my view of digital storytelling began to change. I realized how much fun I was having with six word stories (some in my blog post, above); I agreed with Valerie Lopes:

And I also participated in Alan Levine’s presentation on digital
storytelling. A summary, the slides, and a list of resources from that presentation are here:

I’m not sure exactly why or how, but during this presentation I started to get more excited about storytelling in general, and digital storytelling as well. I was inspired to re-record my “true story of openness” for Levine, and to put it into Mozilla Popcorn maker to add some links and other visuals to the story.

I had loads of fun making this, even though it took me the better part of a day, from recording to finished project.Part of why I started to get excited about digital storytelling is that I saw its potential as a means for improving lectures. Why not try to make one’s lectures in courses more like stories? I’ll admit that at this point I’m not yet sure how to do so, but it provides a motivating factor for me to continue to look into storytelling further. If I can engage students in lectures more that way, then I’m happy to do the work to find out how.

Here’s a blog post in which I explain my increasing interest in digital storytelling:

In our last twitter chat for digital storytelling, many of us reflected on how much we are learning from each other, which is one of the main points of this cMOOC.

One of the things I am learning in this MOOC is the value of learning from connections. The facilitators of the course are more or less in the background, and though we have some “experts” doing lectures, much of my learning is coming from my interactions with others in the course. Alison Seaman & Lisa Domeier said it well:

A smartiepants room indeed. In a good way.Topic 3: Digital Literacy

I honestly didn’t know much about this topic before we began–I hadn’t really heard the term “digital literacy” much, and wasn’t sure what it was all about or why it was important. I can see, though, that it’s a valuable idea for teaching, especially younger people; though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to include it in university courses as well.

A presentation by Doug Belshaw for etmooc revealed just how complex it is to try to define what “digital literacy” might mean. Here’s a TED talk by him that explains some of his points in a somewhat condensed form.

The part I found most intriguing about his talk was the idea of digital literacy as a “condition.” I didn’t quite get it, but was able to ask him more about it during our weekly etmooc Twitter chat.

I think this fits with what many of us discussed in the etmooc Twitter chat that day, which is that it’s hard to define digital literacy because what is needed to be digitally literate is continually changing. Having literacy as a “condition,” or a way of being, could include being flexible, being interested in learning about what is changing and how, and being engaged in using new tools and ways of communicating whenever they come up. In the TED talk above, Belshaw notes that digital literacy is a lifelong, ever-changing project. He also notes the value of being digitally literate–if one can communicate using various methods, one can reach more people and have more lasting impact.Alec Couros brought up another point re: digital literacy and power, in our weekly Twitter chat:

This led to an interesting conversation:

Another presentation I watched for Digital Literacy was with Howard Rheingold, on “Literacies for Attention, Crap Detection, Participation, Collaboration, and Network Know-How.” You can get a sense of the topics of this presentation, as well as some resources on each topic, in the wiki for the course he has taught on the same issues:

The parts that resonated with me the most from Howard’s presentation were those having to do with “attention.” He pointed out how important it is to pay attention to where your attention is when you’re online. You need to be thinking about what you’re doing, what you want to focus on, what is distraction and what is an opportunity for meaningful learning. It’s important to learn how to make quick decisions about what to read, what to ignore, what to save for later reading, what to tag and bookmark, what to save to blog about, and more. He calls this notion “infotention,” and it’s something I need to work on.Here’s a prezi that captures some of the things he said about attention in his presentation:

The idea of having a list of daily goals is one I have already used, but I haven’t kept it in my vision and thought about where my attention is when I see it. Interesting.I ended up buying Rheingold’s book, Net Smart, to get more about attention, infotention, and how to encourage students to pay more attention to where their attention is during class (he uses attention probes rather than, e.g., banning laptops or tablets or phones in class).

I didn’t end up blogging about anything in Digital Literacy, except insofar as my blog posts could be considered part of my own digital literacy journey. I blogged about connectivist MOOCs like etmooc–what they are like (or, at least, what etmooc is like) and how they are different from xMOOCs. I also noted that most media coverage of MOOCs is NOT about cMOOCs, and hypothesized that this is because cMOOCs are rarely run by corporations, for profit. This was by far the most re-tweeted blog post I’ve ever done!

Then, as a followup, I did another blog post in which I revisited some of my earlier criticisms of MOOCs and whether they might be appropriate for courses in humanities, by considering whether cMOOCs might work for humanities.

Topic 4: The Open Movement: Open Access, OER and the Future of Education

This was the topic I was most interested in, just because I already have pretty strong feelings about “openness” in general. I know a fair bit about open access publishing, and have created a board on Learnist about it. But I was (and am) still rather a novice about other aspects of the wide world of openness.I used this opportunity to start educating myself a bit more about what “open” means, and found a couple of useful links:

The ETMOOC twitter chat for the first week of this topic was really helpful in this regard as well.

There were also some good points made about the value of being “open” with one’s work as an educator.

Bill Fitzgerald brought up an important point about sharing not just finished products, but our works-in-progress so that others can see the process of creating those things. This also helps to encourage repurposing, remixing:

The idea of sharing the process as well as the product was discussed in the first “Open Educators Panel” for ETMOOC as well. The link to this presentation is here:

Laura Hilliger talked about sharing one’s process of development, one’s works-in-progress, as did Carla Casilli. I hadn’t really thought about doing this, except in the sense of talking to people on Twitter or other social networks (like Google+) about things I’m working on and getting their thoughts. And, of course, sharing thoughts and ideas on my blog that are unfinished. Of course, any educational resource/material I create is a
work-in-progress, like a handout, a syllabus, an outline of an argument,
etc. Those things change from term to term, year to year. I think they may also have been talking about sharing of processes in the sense of explaining to others how things were done, so they can be repeated: e.g., Alan Levine’s explanation of how he put together the ETMOOC blog hub, and Alec Couros’ explanation of how the ETMOOC Lip Dub was done.

During this presentation Carla Casilli also noted how we are usually rewarded according to a model that assumes everyone makes separate, individual contributions to research, a project, a practice, etc. She suggested it is more realistic to look at many works as collaborative, and this would change our evaluation of individuals’ contributions. We might ask, then, not so much about what an individual has done him/herself, but rather how much they have contributed to a collaborative effort, to a community that has worked together on the creation of something. That’s an intriguing idea; I do tend to see most (or all?) work as building upon that which came before, and the result of connections to and with others and what they’ve done. I find it difficult to claim credit for contributions as if they are solely my own, when there is so much that has influenced me, past and present.There were two other “open educators” panels during this topic, but this first one was most interesting to me, so it’s the only one I’ll report on here.With all the talk of the value of opening up one’s work and one’s practice as an educator, I found there was not a lot on our Twitter hashtag and our Google+ group talking about the downsides of openness (not that these were entirely missing, but they weren’t terribly prominent, either). So I decided to write a blog post explaining one such downside I could imagine, but fortunately have not experienced myself: it could give people the sense that they could be evaluated at any time, by those who have control over their employment. Being a fully open educator might be like undergoing peer review of teaching continuously. And further, this could potentially lead some people to self-discipline, to avoid taking too many risks in their teaching due to fear of possible, practical repercussions.For this blog post I rehashed what, for some, has become an old, tired, and too-simplistic link of panopticism to being open on the web, but I think it’s relevant in this case.

The second week of the “open movement” topic coincided (on purpose) with Open Education Week. I found several sessions I wanted to attend, but most of them were at times that were incompatible with my waking/working times here in Australia. They were recorded and I plan to watch some of them later, but during that week I was also extremely busy putting together a conference proposal abstract for ISSOTL 13 (the 2013 meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning). I hope to watch at least a couple of the recorded presentations from open education week later, but I’m also soon to leave on a two-week trip to South Africa, which may put a damper on my ETMOOC work!During the second Twitter chat for this topic, there were significantly
fewer people participating than usual. Still, there were some Tweets and
conversations I found interesting.One of the questions in the Tweetchat was about barriers to the open movement.

I find this striking, because I don’t have this concern at all, yet I’ve
heard it from a few people (not about themselves, but about what
they’ve heard from others). To me, I see only value in sharing my
creations or content, so that they can potentially be improved. And/or,
so that they can be used by others in different contexts, which may
require changing them to better fit those contexts. I simply don’t see
how others changing what you’ve created to make it more relevant to
their own use is a threat. One’s own work can still remain one’s own, and one can have pride in it. If one fears having one’s name attached to
something that gets changed in a way that one wouldn’t agree to, there’s
always the option of NOT requiring attribution (e.g., the Creative
Commons CC0 option, which is similar to (but not the same as) granting
one’s work into the public domain). I suppose I should try to find
people who have this sort of fear to attempt to understand better where they’re
coming from.I also posted a Tweet to this chat related to something I blogged about afterwards (see below).

In response to thinking about these issues, but more in response to a chat I had with Pat Lockley on Twitter, I wrote a blog post about licensing my work with CC-BY (requiring attribution) vs. putting it into the public domain.

I’m still thinking about this, and haven’t decided for certain what I believe is best.Goodbye to ETMOOC

There was one more topic in ETMOOC: Digital Citizenship–Identity, Footprint and Social Activism. However, I left for a holiday in South Africa shortly after this topic started, and I wasn’t really able to keep up with it. I decided that since ETMOOC leaves participation open to however you want and can participate, that I would let this one go, for the most part. In addition, I also signed up for another MOOC, this time focused specifically on Open Education: Martin Weller’s course on Open Education from the Open University. So I ended up spending time trying to get up to speed on that MOOC instead of doing the last topic of ETMOOC.

My last contribution to ETMOOC was a final summary of learning, which, since I ended up just talking about how much I love ETMOOC, I called a “love letter.” It was my first vlog ever.

Ben Wilkoff posted a response to my vlog, which I have yet to respond to myself, given that I’m still on holiday. I hope to do so when I return to Australia. I expect the conversations within and around ETMOOC to continue long after it is officially finished, which, I think, is the whole point.

If you would like to see all the summaries of learning from ETMOOC so far, they are here.

That’s it for my “official” participation in ETMOOC, but I am certain my connections with others will continue…