Open Course preparation 2 – introduction au technologie émergentes

We have a tag – ite09

Well… things are firming up, we have a start date and confirmed courses. I’m going to be teaching a twelve week course as the leader of the french cohort of professors and administrators from universities in different parts of West Africa.(will include countries when i get them) It is going to be an open course (yay!) with all curriculum created and published on wikiversity. http://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_au_technologie_%C3%A9mergentes I’m still a little fuzzy about the zones of interaction for the course (as per openness) stay tuned for this. I’ve got alot to learn between now and then, but i must say i’m pretty excited about the adventure of it all.

Learning in a new language
The most obvious stretch here is that I’ll be teaching in French. I’m a good acadian boy from the north shore of new brunswick… I went to french school, have french relatives, but have never done academic work in French. More importantly, i didn’t (three weeks ago) have a french learning community to speak of. I’ve been working on that and have had a really positive response from the french educational community. I’ve probably posted it before, but i’m quite please to be participating in http://apprendre2point0.ning.com which is also helping get me into shape for the course.

Openness
We are going to be able to share this course with anyone who wants to join in. I’m am wary of forcing my new (and unknown) students to share openly however. It is one thing to believe in openness for yourself, it is quite something different to impose it on someone without giving them a chance to make an informed decision. So, I’m thinking now, that we’ll end up with one sponsored group location and a private location that allows for students to get accustomed to the idea and make their own choices. No decisions here yet, would need to talk to Mr. Siemens about what he wants to do, but we’ve agreed on this in the past.

I used the term ‘zones of interaction’ earlier and the term ‘sponsored’ here more recently. I’m thinking that with a course that might have 15 or 50 (or who knows) people in it, it’s important to make the lanes of communication obvious. If people wish to take the course in their own direction, copy the curriculum and cut it into fridge magnets for a local teachers party… that’s fine. They don’t need my direction anyway. For those who are looking for a little more guidance, i hope to provide some (unsupervised) locales for that to happen. People are going to like to be open in different ways.

Creating the syllabus
I settled on wikiversity for two reasons. Leigh Blackall suggested it and I’d like the course to not be ‘mine’. While the folks at the University of Manitoba have in no way infringed upon my creativity or openness in the past, i thought the suggestion of ownership by a university might be too strong. This is a rare opportunity to have an international course created, with differing viewpoints included during the creation process. While the course will, initially, be based on the course that george and i designed and taught last year, it will hopefully grow beyond that and take on a scope beyond what a couple of people could manage. So i hope this will happen.

My french will get better as i remember how to write in french, but feel free to fix the grammar, the spelling and the thoughts. We will, as always, play

Add don’t take away – for all content

Can’t wait to see the changes start to happen.

Will keep you all updated. Have not yet decided if i’m going to blog in french from this blog or not. Probably will. a little later. 😛

Author: dave

I run this site... among other things. View all posts by dave