Change11 MOOC – First six weeks of 2012

Ah… the ever increasingly misnamed change11. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a journey that i’ve been less prepared for… and still gotten so much out of. It’s been a season of change for me, I’ve moved houses, spent two months involved in our schools future discussion as an informal consultant, and have tried to dig a little deeper into my own thinking. (see previous blog post)

So… here I am weeks into Change11(12) and no post to show for it. The truth is… I’ve had some pretty critical learning and some excellent conversations throughout, with my house now mostly settled, here’s a review of the first six weeks. I had the pleasure of doing two discussions with Howard Reingold, one with Valerie Irvine and Jillian Code, one with Dave Snowden, I missed much of week 20 and have had a very… interesting discussion with Pierre Levy during his week. So here goes…

Week 17: Howard Rheingold
Howard’s week focused on his idea that there are “five essential literacies for a world of mobile, social, and always-on media: attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network know-how.” Howard has been around the technology/communications field for a long while, and he’s done some very interesting work (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Rheingold) so what he thinks it all comes down to is well worth paying attention to. It’s a practical list, and one that you could take into many situations. I also think it turns out to be a very deep list, as the more you dig into each one, the more richness you will find there.

Links

Week 18: Valerie Irvine and Jillianne Code
Flexibility seems to have become a theme all through higher ed these days. I was at a meeting recently where plans were being concocted for rolling continuous entry for courses. Enter Valerie and Jillianne, who gave us a very candid look into how their systems deal with the technical realities of that new frontier. How do people get registered? How do we synch local and distance students to classes?

Links

Week 19: Dave Snowden
Well… the Cynefin framework. How do we deal with complexity? How do we separate complexity from the simply complicated? How do we use this information to make decisions about what we are going to do, or how we are going to handle situations? The one hour session i facilitated with Dave is easily one of the most challenging i’ve had the privilege of participating in, but I found it hugely enlightening. Actually… I liked it so much, i’m trying to use it for decision making in my work at UPEI.

links

Week 20: Richard DeMillo, Ashwim Ram, Preetha Ram, and Hua Ali
I won’t lie to you, I was underground for this week. My good friend Dr. Jennifer Maddrell filled in to facilitate, and I missed most of the chatter. I have, however, chatted with some of the Georgia Tech MOOC folks before, and have found their take on the subject to be enlightening. Check out The Center for 21st Century Universities and get a sense of how one university is preparing itself for the future.

links

Week 21: Break
On this week… i moved. and unpacked.

Week 22: Pierre Levy

IEML. Information Economy Meta Language. As I just received the following tweet from the professor, you should take my opinion with a grain of salt


(You try to understand before you have learned, IEML is not for you.)

But I still find it fascinating. Trying to build a semantic underpinning that will allow for all information to run together through a single system. It’s a huge vision… and one that everyone interested in learning and knowing should at least take a look at. ” So my research in the past 15 years has been devoted to the invention of a symbolic system able to exploit the computational power, the capacity of memory and the ubiquity of the digital medium.” Isn’t that worth a few minutes of your time?

links

My first six weeks
As always, I’m fighting the guilt of not having done enough work, but lets put that aside for a second. Each of the four weeks i participated in (sorry Georgia Tech!) has impacted my work in a different way.

  • Howard’s week brought me back to ideas of digital literacies, of thinking about what we need to offer people as structure so that they can come to understand digital spaces
  • Jillian and Valerie’s week impacted a work discussion that I had last week quite directly when the issues that they covered came up almost word for word
  • Dave Snowden may have changed the way that I structure my professional work. So far… Cynefin is really useful to me
  • Pierre Levy has left me humbled. I never studied the math I would need to completely understand the work he’s talking about. He was friends with the philosophers that you’ve heard me babble about here for years. I’m trying to see his comments as the encouragement that I need to continue to take my own thinking more seriously – more rigorously.

Well. Seems like a worthwhile adventure so far for 2012.

This, my friends, is learning.

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