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POT Cert Week 13: images and screenshots

Published by crumphelen on February 4, 2013

Creating Class Elements Part 1: Images and Screenshots

Semester 2 of the Programme for Online Teaching restarts (yeay) with a look at images and screenshots and reads Chapter 9: Creating Courseware and Using Web 2.0 Tools of Ko & Rossen’s Teaching Online – A Practical Guide.

It focuses on how to add interest and interaction to the online learning environment through the use of multimedia courseware and Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 technologies are endorsed because they’re “low threshold, low barrier” technologies. By this Ko and Rossen mean that they’re “easy to learn and easy to apply” tools that promote sharing and collaboration (p. 247).

Not so long ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to create quality learning objects without substantial knowledge of coding and software design. However, the obstacles that formerly impeded instructors have now largely been removed, and it seems that every year Web technologies become easier and easier to learn. Well, there’s more and more of them, that’s for sure.

To explore this topic we were tasked with uploading an image to Flickr and then annotate it. However, although Flickr might be the biggest and most well known photo sharing website, I’ve never had any joy with it, and this time was no different. I find it clunky and plain unintuitive to navigate. What’s more, this time I couldn’t find the annotate function so I used FotoTagger as an alternative instead.

The irony of it. Usually, I’m pretty good with finding my way round new Web tools as, by and large, using them becomes almost instinctual; almost, but not this time.

Image source: http://galactinus.net/vilva/retro/

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Enthusiasm and Expectancy for eLearning and Digital Cultures MOOC #edcmooc

Published by crumphelen on January 19, 2013

Anticipation for the upcoming MOOC “eLearning and Digital Cultures” is almost palpable, and it’s not just down to the massiveness of the course, which has enrolled a staggering 36,000+ up to press. It’s down to all the network-focused pre course activity that’s built up around it.

I signed up way back in September so some level of expectancy on my part is understandable, but what’s truly awesome is the level of enthusiasm that’s developed amongst expectant participants in the mean time. In mid November the course team issued a mail shot extending an “early welcome”, (this links nicely to my previous post on hospitable pedagogy!!), encouraging participants to try out some of the social media services that they anticipate using during the course. As a result, there’s been sustained activity around the course hashtag #EDCMOOC, but even more fantastic is the level of participant-led networked activity initiated in the #EDCMOOC Facebook group.

Set up at the end of November by a preparative bunch of individuals (or was it just one individual?), the group has developed a whole host of resources and initiatives, including Twitter lists, Diigo lists, YouTube playlists, feeds for blogs, technology tips, assorted discussions and a quadblogging scheme, which this post forms part of.  However, seeing as the course doesn’t start until 28th January, this post isn’t a course reflection, it’s more a statement of intent about what I hope to get out of the course.

Post Human
Post Human

“The course is about how digital cultures intersect with learning cultures online, and how our ideas about online education are shaped through “narratives”, or big stories, about the relationship between people and technology”. I’m particularly interested because the course not only takes a look at how learning (with technology) is represented in popular digital/cyber culture but also how literacy (something which I have a real passion for) is represented too. Besides considering multimodal literacies and digital media, the course also asks what it means to be “human” in a digital age. This intimates the concept of post humanism, which since reading Cyborg literacies and the posthuman text by Lesley Gourlay, is something that I’m eager to learn more about. In the article, kindly added to the e-Learning and Digital Cultures Diigo group by Chris Swift, Gourlay proposes the notion of “posthuman literacies”, which draws upon “Haraway’s cyborg (1991) and Hayles’s (1999, 2006) conceptions of emobodied virtuality – to examine practices of meaning-making in a context where the boundaries between analogue and digital, ‘human’ and ‘machine’ are ambiguous and problematic” (p.1). I’m intrigued to say the least, just as I’m intrigued by the reference to “uncanny digital literacies”  that I came across when researching the work of Sian Byrne, one of the  course tutors.

I wonder how many others registered on the course, like me, are interested in a literacies perspective. It’s interesting because I just saw this tweet (modified) from another of the course tutors, Dr. Christine Sinclair .

I can’t wait to discover just what we’ve let ourselves in for.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trantt28/6871078138/in/photostream/

References: Gourlay, L. (2011) Cyborg literacies and the posthuman text. Available at: http://blogs.ubc.ca/newliteracies/files/2011/12/Gourlay.pdf

Hospitality: a promising philosophy for designing online courses & fostering critical digital literacies #moocmooc

Published by crumphelen on January 13, 2013

In addition to POT Cert, I’ve enrolled on a few other MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The first of which, entitled MOOC MOOC, takes a look at the phenomenon of MOOCs themselves…, naturally.

And it was here, within the customary introduction stage of the course a reference by Kate Bowles @KateMfD  to “hospitable pedagogy” immediately caught my eye. The reason being that only last week I read “Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis” where, in the chapter by Anna Smith and Glynda Hull, I came across the concept of hospitality as an aspect of Cosmopolitanism (p.63-66).

On first encounter, the notion of hospitality really resonated with me (see why), and it did so again when it emerged in a #moocmooc Twitter chat as an associated concept of Internationalism. Ironically though, I missed the chat itself because of what might be considered the inhospitable pedagogical design of the MOOC MOOC course (time-zone grief!!).

Get a snapshot in Storify.

Hospitality forms a crucial part of cosmopolitan philosophy as it foregrounds our relationships with guests, outsiders, foreigners and others, and as such is significant for online participants in a global and digital age. As Kate points out, every online host is sometime a guest and every guest can be a host somewhere too. Furthermore, there are increasing opportunities for people of diverse ages, nationalities and socio-economic positions to engage with new kinds of texts in the digital sphere and make comment on social issues, provide entertainment, produce news or engage in learning activities. Increasing reciprocity between authors and readers and the fact that texts are virally distributed through the web and across networks gives increased possibilities to encounter “distant, unknown, imagined others” (p.64).

In a media sense, hospitality translates to an obligation to listen, which in turn translates to thoughtful openness towards pluralist meanings and to the inhibition of  prior assumptions. Consequently, in order to anticipate and accommodate not just issues of global housekeeping but also diverse cultural interpretations we must adopt not only new creative learning designs but new dispositions too, cosmopolitan practice in fact.

That’s what I’ve learned from my MOOC MOOC experience. Plus, I’m coming to think that it’s not so much the massiveness of the MOOC that’s important just as long as it’s open and online, and that a community may be preferable to a course. That’s why I’ll continue to call by and say “hello” to the good folks of the Hybrid Pedagogy community from time to time.

References:

Smith A. and Hull G. Critical literacies and social media: fostering ethical engagement with global youth. In: Avila, JA and Pandya JZ eds. (2012)  Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis, Peter Lang Publishing, New York

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