If you’re reading this you’ve found the UBC MET ETEC523 WordPress blog. Bravo!
If you see “Howdy” followed by your name on the upper right WordPress menu bar, bravo again, you’re also now successfully registered in the blog. Welcome aboard! If you don’t see “Howdy”, go to UBC Blogs to “Login” to CWL and find the link to this course in “My Sites” there, or failing that, use the invitation link supplied by your instructor to register in the blog. If you don’t have an invitation link yet, please email your instructor at David dot Vogt at UBC dot ca.
Everything you’ll need to get underway is immediately nearby, but first some orientation to the ‘wild ride’ ahead – somehow appropriate to a course about mobility, there are lots of moving parts for you to be aware of:
- This course is not in CANVAS, UBC’s standard LMS (Learning Management System), and it pursues a deliberately advanced and experimental pedagogy based on “professional networks”, “collective content curation” and “regenerative curriculum”. More on this later, but the simple way to think about it is that the ETEC523 learning experience mirrors your broader digital existence – it is about achieving presence and purpose within a vast flow of media and information. Everything in this course, including materials, assignments, discussions, etc, consists of blog posts – a continuous, growing stream of knowledge. Your only mission is to add original value to the stream by posting new content and by rating, reviewing, and recommending existing content.
- In most courses your role is to discuss and critically evaluate prevailing ideas, with all of your work then ‘flushed away’ at the conclusion, before the next students do the same thing you did. Not here. The value you add will remain: every student improves the course and quality of the stream, building on the efforts of previous students, all of whose work is available for appreciation.
- Part of immersing you in an innovation process (which I won’t apologize for!) is to encourage you to expect failure. Failure is the most immediate way we can learn. The previous experimental implementation of ETEC523 hit a wall, hard, and this implementation was rebuilt from scratch. The new ETEC523 is more stable but far from perfect: I am trusting all of you to shout out when anything doesn’t work – we’ll try to remedy the situation quickly. I am also trusting all of you to add original value to our experiment, which means that once you get the hang of what is being attempted here, apply your wisdom and creativity toward suggestions for making this learning vehicle more effective. It might be about graphic design, user experience, features, functionality, or whatever – there are plenty of deficiencies – please reflect actively on whatever could make this learning experience better.
- A further part of the experiment this session will be a recognition that, within the last two years, the entire world has changed completely and forever with the arrival of functioning, accessible artificial intelligence (AI) engines. Before now our appreciation of AI was almost completely theoretical, much like our appreciation of alien life forms still is. But the AIs have landed, and they are among us. Given how much AI is going to transform education, and most ventures in the foreseeable future, I will be applying AI as a theme across our primary assignments.
- The only advice I will offer in terms of the success of your learning experience here is to be humble about what you think you might know about mobility, and mobile learning, and open learning. To put it bluntly, mobile technologies are so familiar to us that we too easily become complacent. We think we’re experts. The most common mistake of students in this course is assuming that because some aspect of education can occur on a mobile device it is automatically exemplary of mobile education. Our job here is to consider critically what “exemplary” is, and could be, in the context of mobile and open learning.
That’s all from me for now. Good luck!
David