Category Archives: CLMOOC

 

For this Make Cycle in the Making Learning Connected Massive Open Online Collaboration (MOOC), Terry Elliott and I are asking folks to explore their beliefs and credos around the principles of Connected Learning. These include the values inherent in the principles, the issues of equity and access, and participation in the networks. That’s a lot of ideas to grapple with, but Terry’s blog post — which you can read here — gives a nice “map” of how one might go about doing that.

For me, I turned to the “This I Believe” podcasting idea, writing a short essay as I thought about how what I believe in coincides with the principles of Connected Learning. I then decided to create a VoiceThread, opening up my beliefs to others to add to, comment on, or share their own beliefs and credos. I recorded the audio in Audacity, first, and then imported the file into my Voicethread (in case you are wondering). The image is a word cloud of my text. I used Word It Out to create the cloud.

I invite you, too, to add to the thread (you need an account, and then you can click on “comment” to add your voice, text and more).

And tonight (Monday), we are hosting a live “Make with Me” session on Google Hangout with Chris Lawrence, of the Mozilla Foundation, and co-MOOC facilitator Chad Sansing to talk about credos, beliefs and more. (Hangout happens from 8-9 p.m Eastern (5-6 p.m. Pacific/ 6-7 p.m. Mountain/ 7-8 p.m. Central and it will be embedded at the MOOC, along with a chat program that is open to anyone.)

Peace (in the credo),
Kevin

 

We’ve had maps on our minds at the Making Learning Connected MOOC this week. You’d be surprised (or not, if you are in the MOOC) by the range of mapping that went on — from typical geographical maps, to metaphorical maps, to maps that were flowcharts mapping out an idea. And lots more in-between.

Maps are interesting things, aren’t they? They help us shape our world. We make maps to put ideas and people and places into some semblance of order and connections. Maps are heuristics, a way to make sense of things that at first seem beyond making sense. Maps are also place markers. They document where we’ve been, and where we are going, and how we are going to get there.

In terms of the principles of Connected Learning, what makes maps so important is that they can show connections forged between ideas and between people. In the collage above, which I created early on in the week and then never posted, notice the bottom right image map. This comes from a service that will map out connections from Twitter (Mentionmap), and I’m struck by how important those people have become to my professional growth as a teacher. I turn to folks in my network a lot for help, for advice, for sounding board ears. You can’t quite see all of the smaller connections, but there are tons of folks that I orbit around on a regular basis. That’s something I know without having this map, but the map helps me see those connections from a new angle, and it documents where I am right now. (And the site allows you to click deeper into connections, moving through the nodes of people and hashtags — that’s something the static image does not show.)

The top map (via Tweetsmap) in the collage shows followers from around the world. That map is not nearly as useful and as interesting to me as the other one because I don’t “see” connections in the top one. I just see data points, and data points without context are not all that useful. In the bottom map, in the live version, you can follow the linking lines, and watch as other connections unfold, and the web that comes into play makes you realize that we are immersed in the connected educator movement. The map makes that more visible than ever.

The other day, I was thinking about maps in connection to literature because my youngest son and I were immersed in “reading” a map that is part of a book we are reading aloud (The Familiars). He was running his finger along the river crossing the world, and asking about the names of these imaginary places, and I realized how important this map was to him, the listener of this story, as we situate ourselves as readers to a magical place beyond our view. This map was a document we come back to regularly as we read, following the heroes on their journey. The same thing happens with maps in other books we read. When we start a read-aloud, we often turn to the first and last page, searching for a map to orientate us to the story.

The question of whether making maps is “writing” and interpreting maps is “reading” — and thus, part of literacy came up in a few discussions this week — and I would argue, yes. What about you?

Peace (along the terrain),
Kevin

 

(with apologies to my good friend, Gail Desler, who uses the moniker Blogwalker for her blog.)

Yesterday, one of the questions I wondered about is whether folks in the Making Learning Connected MOOC are writing and sharing in spaces beyond the typical field of vision. The answer is “yes” and one of those spaces are on their blogs. There is a Blog Hub at the main MOOC website, but I was also curious about how to collect all of those blogs together. I decided to use Jog the Web and encourage you to take a blogwalk through the field of blogs, where folks are doing sharing and reflecting.

Go to the CLMOOC Blogwalk Jog the Web site

Another view on Jog the Web is the Index view.

Go to the Index View of the CLMOOC Blogwalk

If you are in the MOOC and blogging, be sure to add yours to the Blog Hub and drop me a note here, so that I can add you into the Blogwalk, too.

Peace (in the tour),
Kevin

 

I am trying to see mapping from a few perspectives this week. One one hand, I have a collaborative map project going with the Making Learning Connected MOOC in which I have created a map with Google and opened it up to the public, inviting MOOC participants to “pin themselves” on the map and consider adding a six word memoir. It’s been nice to begin to situate where people live, putting some geographical ties to the words and sharing that has been flowing in the MOOC adventure.

And then, inspired by a fellow MOOC participant, I decided to try out the idea of something on a much smaller scale. This “learning walk” is from my front yard. I took my camera and shot a bunch of images, straight down to the ground, of my front yard and then stitched them together into a collage (I ended up downloading a free app – Picture Collage). I really love how the whole captures the essence of the yard, and how one can find elements of beauty in the small focus, too.

In both activities, I was seeking to make some sense of my world — from my connections in online spaces via the MOOC to connections to the soil and pavement of my house, and both senses of mapping have value, I think, in that they bubble up information in a way that puts things in perspective.

Finally, all these mapping activities reminded me of a poem I once wrote, in which the mapping idea went very inward.

On the Cartographer’s Map
Listen to the poem

This creeping cord
of tension slips
its knot
and moves as a snake to the heart
I’d fall apart
but the world needs
an Atlas to keep it balanced
(precarious as it is
and such a reluctant hero, burdened)
Always there is this sense of renewal
just around the bend
with outstretched hands waiting
to grab this globe and spin me free
on the cartographer’s canvas –
crisscrossed with longitude –
layered with latitude –
I am wondering all the while where the edge is
where I will fall off
and tumble into the nothingness.

Peace (in along the lines),
Kevin
 

It’s been a hectic week with our school year finally, finally coming to a close (bad winter effect) and all that entails, as well as keeping up with the activities in the Making Learning Connected MOOC project. This week, as I have shared, we did a lot of hacking of toys and exploring some new tools. As I think back to the three projects that I worked on (pigs flying, lego heads rolling and reality augmented), I realize just how many times in each of those activities things fell apart on me.

I wrote about my difficulty the other day about making an animated .gif file of a pig flying. From creating the file to hosting the file to sharing the file … every step was a hurdle, it seemed. Ack.

When I was working on my Lego Head project, the first phase of operations was fine. I took photos of the heads on the tree. It was the second phase, when I wanted to use Comic Life to create a story using the images, that gave me difficulties. After spending a good chunk of time building the comic and creating the story, the Comic Life program not only refused to save the file, it also refused to export what I had done. Double ack.

And finally, I played around with an augmented reality app called Aurasma. The making of an augmented layer was pretty straight-forward, but the sharing of it with others? Difficult. It turns out you need to create an online gallery, and I had to go through the creation of my project a second time just to make it work. Triple ack.

And yet … and yet … frustrated as I was, I did not give up. I refused to let the technology, and my understanding of the technology, get in the way of doing what I wanted. Here, what saved me was the MOOC. Let me explain.

For the Pigs Fly .gif, I was determined to finish what I started because I really wanted to share it within the MOOC community. I was motivated by the sense of the community, and I wanted to share my process out, too, in hopes that others might be motivated to try a stopmotion-ish kind of toy hacking activity. I did figure it out — using an app to create the gif and then sharing via Photobucket. And the result, at least partly from the flying pig, is an offshoot of folks now dabbling in stopmotion in the MOOC.

For the Lego Head project, the second phase of the hack was crucial because I wanted to take the first phase — the images — and think about them as a pivot point for a literacy moment. In the MOOC, our work is beginning a slow shift from “play” to meaningful “play” and considering reflection on how our activities connect to our classrooms.  I was not happy with Comic Life, to say the least, and had to step away from the computer for a stretch while I thought it through. My workaround here was to take screenshots of my comic frames, and then host them as individual shots in Flickr. I lost some resolution but at least I did not lose the entire project. But it was the MOOC that kept me going, particularly as folks responded to the initial photos with questions about what the story was. I was determined to tell the story.

And with Aurasma, most of all, I turned directly to friends in the MOOC itself, getting advice via Twitter on how to proceed and make the app work for me. Over the course of a day, I kept asking questions and folks kept responding with answers and links and advice, and eventually, I did figure it out. I think. That might not have happened without the connections within the networked community itself, and I am grateful.

This all connects to a discussion that emerged in the MOOC this week, too, about “failure” and “iteration” in online spaces, and how we need to nurture perseverance and grit within ourselves, and our students, and how we need to connect to those around us for assistance and help along the way. When I think of the principles of Connected Learning, which the MOOC is built upon, these ideas seem to align nicely, particularly around shared purpose, openly networked spaces, interest-driven activities and peer-supported communities and connections.

We can fail, and that’s OK, as long we can learn from the experience and find ways around those failures, and sometimes that learning takes place within communities that we co-construct together. The Making Learning Connected MOOC is one such place.

Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin