The reverend – Jim Groom, is going to take his excellent digital storytelling course open and online. It’s a bit of a strange thing to announce, as I know a great deal about his course… due to his openness and onlineness… but he’s going to run another version of the open online ‘experiment’, following in some of the same footsteps that I’ve been dogging for the last few years. This is cool. For those of you wanting more info… http://bavatuesdays.com/ds106-as-an-open-and-online-experiment/
The open online thingy
I note that he calls it an experiment, and not a course, but I’m going to hope that the same rules that I’ve worked on in my own work applies. The path that I have pointed to in some of my own work is orient, declare, network, cluster and focus.
The orient part is covered by me getting my blog posted over at Jim’s site… and getting my blog hooked in. I’ll need to pay a bit more attention when the experiment starts to how it’s going to be coordinated, but time enough for this later. This post, in a sense, is me declaring myself. But the part that’s really important, that is only hinted at in the video above, is that it helps to know what you are taking the course for. The advantage of an open course, is that you don’t necessarily need to take the course for the same reason that it is given.
Why I’m going to join ds106OPEN
Storytelling is the thing that brought me to blogging the first time, in 2003 or 2004. I had started a blog with the intention of writing… not about education, but about life. Of telling stories. I always thought that I would be a writer, I wrote short stories as a young kid, poems when you’re supposed to in your teens, wrote a terribly ‘introspective’ novella while travelling in my early twenties… and then stopped.
I don’t really know why I stopped. I started sharing my ideas in other ways… in ways I suppose that are also important to me… but not in the same sense that I had hoped to do when i was 8 and 15 and 21. I tried again in my late twenties, two more chapters of a different book that I can’t seem to find right now, but most of my type type typing has gone into education over the last 5 or 6 years.
So I’m hoping that this course will be a path back to a different feeling under my fingers when I’m typing. Less about trying to make an idea work, or exploring my practice, and more about trying to work my way through the story. These things aren’t terribly different, I think, but they’re not really the same either. Maybe I’ll figure out how they are different during the event.
My goals for ds106
- Write. for storytelling
- Remember why i liked to tell stories
- Find a home for my stories online
- Develop my storytelling
- Find a community of writers to write with
- Focus on a project
Dave,
Not only is your reflection and organization of your extensive experience with MOOCs pertinent here, but as Downes points out on the OL Daily, it is absolutely seminal. And what’s more, the latest videos you have produced provided and unbelievably helpful overview of the MOOC process. Not so sure ds106 will be Massive like the courses you, George, and Stephen have done, but they probably will be big enough for me to be entirely overwhelmed.So this framweork for getting yourself ready is invaluable. I particularly like your idea about coming to a point in the semester here you focus in and choose to work on a project. It is also important that no two people will take the course for exactly the same reasons, and that being fine is huge.
Your experience with this setup is huge, and I hope I (and others, cause this is not nearly as singular as it might seem from my writing) can lean on you for soem advice and guidance. I’m not sure how you did this four differnet times over the last 2 and a half years, but I am in awe.
That said, I want to also concur with your reflection here about why you got into the web in the first place. For me it was the birth of Miles, I setup my Captain Miles blog and make mashups about him. Kinda like this:
http://planetmiles.net/files/Images/duck-coverlg.mov
Or even this:
http://planetmiles.net/files/Images/whoozit.mov
That, indeed, is why all this started, and I, like you, want to get back to that. But not alone, rather with friends, colleagues, and strangers.
Thanks Dave, you rock!
And if you didn’t already know I can’t spell worth a shit, my comments are full of typos, and I am a serial grammar killer. I also am a butcher of the English language more generally.
Just so you know.