cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Felipe Skroski

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.
– Spinoza

Lately I’ve been tuned into how often people, especially those who perhaps have more treelines, tell themselves they cannot do something– without having really tried. It is in many ways, the marker of those who buy into the energy of ds106 versus those who wrinkle their nose at it like some foul piece of rotten fruit.

It’s what I saw in my University of Mary Washington students, who took on 16 weeks of many such challenges (of course they have to for the grade). One of my last semester students knew others taking the same course taught by the dude who does it the non ds106 way- it is much “easier”, they read a textbook and only have to make one video, but my student said she preferred the ds106 version even though it was way more work.

A difference is the way people who will not say “no” before they step into the unknown.

It came up recently when I did the True Stories of Openness presentation at Yavapai College — I pulled out the capture of the whiteboard contributions when I did the same session for ETMOOC, and asked participants to share barriers to sharing:

Almost every item on the board was a self judgement of a low esteem of the value of what they had to share. And labeling it “imposter syndrome” like it is a DSM-IV diagnosis does not address the issue. I’ve seen this for 20 years in education- people value and welcome resources shared by others, but feel intimidated about sharing back.

Part of it is, to me, some confusion about what it is we share. Most think it is just “stuff” – documents, media, publications. Those are excellent sharables, but I’m more interested in the sharing of ideas, of processes, of strategies, of arguments, of rough drafts and alpha code. From Everything is a Remix to Where Good Ideas Come From it’s obvious (at least to me) that the potential for a society, organization, institution, country, culture, world to be a better place and innovate for progress, it happens better when there are more raw ideas materials swirling in the open space.

Innovation abhors a vacuum.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by kevin dooley

Now lest I be targeted about being holier than thou or thee, I find myself doing it all the time. More than a few times I have found my self looking at a new programming language or API or someone else’s elegant code and thinking “I cannot do that”. On the train ride recently a group of us at the dining table where talking about the friends of one woman’s who are regular climbers of Half Dome, and how they sleep in those bags tied to a rope hanging thousands of feet in the air.

We all said, “I cannot do that”.

Has anyone of us tried?

So if you find yourself saying/thinking “I cannot do that” ask yourself- “have I really ever tried?”

I once said I could never run a half marathon. I ran 5 and 1 full marathon (and I hated it but I did it). I still hate running.

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by dare6

And there is a direct connection to learning, because I feel quite often, in higher education, we are so concerned about students not succeeding (or faculty in technology workshops) that we err on the side of trying to make things “easy” – full of detailed instructions and screencasts…

Yet it’s been one of my loves of teaching ds106 how often we do not provide students explicit instructions on how to create their media. We do not provide many software tutorials, if anything they are technique ones, and it usually other ds106 participants who create them. That was the thinking that Martha Burtis and I had for the end of our two week ds106 Bootcamp (first 2 weeks of the semester) is to give them a challenge to create an animated GIF. And purposefully we do not tell them how.

The point is not to create the GIF (well not the primary objective), but to learn how to figure things out, to learn how to learn the ds106 way. And they get less dependent on me as the teacher to be the font of technical expertise (which I am not, I just know how to look stuff up).

And this is the Stretch, the place where learning happens, when we go beyond the boundaries of what we know how to do. It is why the ds106 Daily Create is so valuable because it encourages people to try these things in a low or no stakes game. Their achievements are not graded (UMW students are graded for trying and writing up their process). That was the magic I found in its predecessor, the Daily Shoot- which gave me each day a photographic challenge, and made my try techniques or subjects I would not have normally done on my own.

It is also what see almost every semester when we start the audio units. I hear comments like “I dread audio” or “I hate audio” from students who have actually not really listened to a well produced radio show or every tried to create an audio mix themselves. It always turns around 3 weeks later, after they have fund the creating audio material is no different from manipulating text, cut and paste and combining.

So what are we providing in an environment of learning, when we make it easy, when the answers are google-able, or the assessment is a stupid multiple choice, or just where the work is not challenging? This feels painfully true for me the way we work with faculty on using technology, where so many of them have absorbed a sense of learned helplessness.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by TheWanderingAmerican

“Oh I cannot blog, I dont have time for that.”

“I stick to Powerpoint because I know how to use it.”

“I am not a computer person” (one of my favorites to shoot down- there is no such thing as a COmputer Person, I have never met a Computer Person. We are humans, damnit).

I am not suggesting everything needs to ba hard and challenging, we do need a system of scaffolding, a place to provide foundations. But frankly, if we are not making learning challenging, we are not providing learning. If it becomes a system to mass generate degrees and badges, we are not building a society that can take on our real challenges (financial, environmental, etc).

That was one of the aspects of my graduate program I liked- most of the classes, the seminars, the research, was open ended. We were not just jumping over a bar because it was set there, we had to define what the bar was, and where it was, and how to jump it.

I also was thinking about this during the April 2013 TCC Online Conference during Terry Anderson’s session Getting the Right Mix: Open Content, Quality Teaching and Supportive Community. I really enjoyed Terry’s ideas, frameworks, and big concepts. And he paid ds106 a large sized compliment as an open community of learning.

But he also referred to ds106 as “a bit manic”.

Manic.

I know what that means- chaotic. Not neatly laid out. Short on re-iterated objectives and crisp assignments.

Do you know of another space like it? It’s right outside the doors of your university. If we are not preparing students for the manic mess of the outside world, where they will not do their work in a password protected LMS, where things are not clearly laid out, then we are not doing our duty as educators.

Jim Groom reiterated that as he does so well in the session he did here for the College of Wooster; about how people can look at ds106 as “that wild crazy course” but then back of distancing saying, that approach would never work for what I teach.

It’s not about teaching your class like ds106, it’s about teaching your class in a way the world and the web really works.

And it’s about making a space where people learn to try things before saying they cannot do them.

But do me a favor, pay closer attention to the times people around you or even yourself are uttering that “I cannot do X” phrase. It is totally open to query. You do not know the answer until you have sincerely tried (several times).

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by gaptone

In education we should not be in the saying “no” business.

I might be the last one left still using Google Reader. Why not? Although banished from the menus, it will work through July, 2013. I’m in no hurry to join the Mad Rush To Find The Perfect Reader Replacement That Does Not Exist.

But I was surprised when tonight reader announced that a newer version was available, to refresh my browser to update.

Could it be? Might there be a change of heart?

Nah, I then got the Google Reader Death Note Reminder.

It sure seems like Google has a bit of personality disorder.

And we are seeing the externalization of a struggle between different personalities? Will RSS survive once Google pulls the reser plug (and likely Feedburner)? Or will Reader revive as a new force? Or shall the Do Not Eve face of Google Plus pulls dominant?

Google, she has many faces.

I’m bored of cows as a MOOCy metaphor; I found a new one:

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Another Seb

Isn’t he cute?

The inspiration comes from a wise one — Neil Young — in The Donkey and Digital Music: The Full Dive Into Media Interview. Neil was on his stump, in grand ripping form, about how the digital music format that most people listen to, the mp3, is decrepit because it contains only 5% of the original sound quality of the high end masters.

Out trots the donkey:

Neil Explains the Donkey

Somewhat paraphrased:

We can’t control the back end of the donkey… but that’s where all the products are focused. There’s no one talking about the front end of the donkey. That’s what I’m talking about.

He’s saying that our music consumption is happy to be focused on the back end of the donkey. Like we do not know there is a front end.

But I am going to reverse Neil’s donkey for it’s relationship to MOOCs.

Everyone is looking on the front end, the massive gorging of the MOOC Donkey. The lightning rod, the force generating the so called tsunami – is the massive course size. The measure that gets mentioned again and again, is 140,000 students registered for this course, 300,000 for that one. That is the thing that is making some people claim the tree is dead.

For the most part, MOOCs are doing little to leverage that capability of the masses. The virtue of a massive course is the hand rubbing glee (and the supposed doing a favor for the world), is the idea of broadcasting an education to hundreds of thousands, or millions.

That is all going in the front end of the donkey. Don’t worry, the back end is not what you think. Stay with me.

What ever happened to Collective Intelligence? Did that just go thud falling off the Hype-Curve-Horizon-Report? What happened to the Everybody that was coming Here? “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is that de-shirked? Are MOOCs deploying massive numbers for anything beyond inflating their own hype?

As a sideshow, it’s a bit of a quicksand situation to talk about c and x Donkeys as all having the same virtues. The Coursera course, by its association a cMOOC, E-learning and Digital Cultures (#etcmooc) is actually, from what I can see, using their scale, and acting more cMOOC like than any other xMOOC.

Be careful with those generalizations.

But let’s look again at the back end of the MOOC Donkey.

Watch where you step.

The usual approach, one I have done myself, is to look at the single digit percentage of completion rates.

I still maintain that the Big Money MOOCs need to own those numbers as much as their front end boasts. If they are going to cite as a mark of success how many people are signing up for open courses, they ought to be held somewhat accountable or at least in the spotlight for what comes out their back end. Typically it’s tiny pellets. Oh they will make hay when some sheep farmer in Mongolia passes a physics class or a teen girl in a remote Indian village aces Calculus. Those are commendable stories. But there’s a whole lot more that is not even getting in the digestive tract of the donkey.

The usual response, and in many cases valid, is that a lot of people sign up for MOOCs without the intent to complete. They just want to partake a little bit. I agree that happens. At least for Jon Becker.

The word “dropout” has zero relevance in this space. I suggest flogging with old celery anyone who uses that term for MOOCs

The use of the term”dropout” in an open course is a signal of a major lack of understanding of open learning.

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) July 25, 2012

We ought to not be looking at one poop stream at the back end. If I was in the Big MOOC business, and getting 50,000 clams (or is it 250,000?) per course, I’d be really putting those learning analytics to work. Actually maybe one does not need the full Monty data package. A survey might do.

I signed up for a MOOC in Film. I watched 50% of the first week’s lectures and I watched one film. And I never went back. If Coursera cared about anything but the front end of the donkey, they would be doing something to understand why I was not coming out the back end of its donkey.

If people entering the front end of the MOOC Donkey were asked and tracked based on their intent in the course, then the numbers at the back end might be more meaningful. Who knows, maybe that is happening. We likely will never know, because Coursera, Udacity, EdX all have a lot to gain, just like all the other web giants (google, facebook, twitter, yadda, badda, bing) from hording the data patterns of their users. It’s gold. The only “Open” in the acronym is open as walking in the front end of the donkey’s mouth. These folks are not going to be transparent about their inner workings.

Check this out.

My colleague Donna Gaudet is teaching a MOOC on Canvas in Basic Arithmetic, a developmental level class she has taught in person and online for community college audience. In a talk last month about MOOCs and hers (it is well worth a watch, she gets her facts better than mainstream journalists), she shared results of a survey she did on the 500 people who enrolled.

The largest percentage were aged 30-50 and had graduate degrees. Why are they in a basic arithmetic class?

Donna is smart. She is tracing what goes into the front end of the donkey. If you are not doing that, then all you get on the back end is…. well you know.

I guess the difference will be when people are paying for MOOCs, maybe it’s their 10k degree or their Californicated McDegree. But that to me, is a step off of the ideal of educating millions around the world for free. Then it is just another online degree program. At a discount.

Who cares what goes in the donkey’s mouth? Look at the other end.

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by magnusfranklin

We can’t control who goes in the front end of the donkey… but that’s where all the journalists and fad monkeys are focused. There’s no one talking about the back end of the donkey. That’s what I’m talking about.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Johan Rd

When will that MOOC[cow] finally hump over the Gartner peak and slide down to its valley of disillusionment? Is it after the last article published the cites the birth of MOOCism to the Stanford AI class? Might there actually be something out there beyond the EdXCourseraUdacity complex?

Continuing the MOOC Mythology is a media created idea that it represents some sort of single entity answer, a fix for something allegedly broken. What is missing is the realization that open courses are experiments, and as Steven Johnson points out in Where Good Ideas Come From, that said ideas come from making mistakes:

… error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path thatr leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. [Lee] de Forest was wrong about the utility of a gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hot upon something that was genuinely useful Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

And there might be a bit much too glee and cluck-cluck I told you so over Coursera’s wobbles with a course that an instructor quit over frustrations with lack of student engagement or the Georgia Tech Fundamentals of Online Education (FOE) that failed to deal with a fundamental of online education (which became a foe).

These are no more marks of failure for online education than over countless courses that fail and fumble that we never hear about because they fizzle inside walls we do not see.

This is a failure to see MOOCs as a space to experiment and as some sort of cheap answer to how education works (or doesn’t depending on your press card). At the same time, just folding up the FOE course and not rolling with it, using it as an opportunity to learn from a mistake, that is a fatal choice. What better a way to show that technology is not infallible, that as teachers, creators we can rise above a bad experience? What is the lesson taught in giving up? (that is an optional essay left for the reader)

Last year when Jim and I were teaching ds106, in te first week, nearly all of our student’s blogs were hacked. Did we fold? Did we sweep it under the carpet? No, we made it part of the course.

Somewhere out here, the Coursera Film class I enrolled in is maybe into week 3. I’ve not checked in since the first week, and am well on my way to be among the 98% who Sign Up But Don’t Last a Week. And yes, I am responsible for my own not learning. But for a course design not to be doing much deal with this effect, is a serious flaw.

In any “real” course, the instructor, the institution has a stake in students succeeding, and are proactive in reaching out to students who stop coming to class. Right? For all of their humping of Big Data and touting Just The Enrollment Numbers, the Big Three are missing out seriously on using their own data to be smarter about supporting learners, even if it is an automated email bot. But right now, the model is totally a Field of Dreams approach. And the ending here has no Hollywood Magic.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Stuck in Customs

Beyond the reach of the Times, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, beyond the bright lights of the TED stage, out where venture capital funders and Friedman do not dirty their oxford shoes, are places where the real experimentation and groundbreaking is happening. This is being done by people motivated by making learning happen better, not more cheaply or more massively, or more trendily. These are just few I know of.

I am sure there are more out there.

Pedagogy First

http://pedagogyfirst.org/wppf12/

Lisa Lane is a tireless leader for this effort to help teachers become versatile in online teaching. The platform is not funded by gobs of Gates Money or some custom software, Lisa and her crew keep a wordpress site running with her own roll of scotch tape, and use a variety of web based tools to facilitate the class (It is one thing I do glance at in Facebook).

The Program for Online Teaching Certificate Class, an open online class, will begin again in September 2013.. The class is free, offered by the Program for Online Teaching (not an accredited institution), run by volunteer faculty and participants, and open to everyone. We offer a certificate for those who fulfill the syllabus requirements, and open participation for anyone not interested in the certificate…

Our in-house program differs considerably from other certification programs in that it emphasizes pedagogy over tool use. Our philosophy is that technology tools should always be at the command of the instructor’s pedagogy, and not the other way around. It is similar to other programs in that it requires significant time spent working in the online environment itself.

PHUBU: Phonar For Us By Us

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102809428854478622002
I wrote last summer about Jonathan Worth’s open photography course efforts at Coventry University, both phonar and picbod being examples closes to ds106 in being rooted with a class but extending their reach far via the invitation for people around he world to participate in the classes projects, and partaking of the impressive list of professional photographers Jonathan taps into.

An amazing and perhaps in hindsight, not unsurprising thing happened, the Coventry students who had experienced this form of class demanded a similar format for their final program requirement:

Phonar ended 2012 like a supertanker trying to stop at traffic lights. Messily and with significant momentum. So much momentum in fact that the same students who you’ve seen submit to the will-of-open in both phonar2012 and picbod have demanded that their next class be open too. But better; designed by them, for them and supported by those people formally referred to as ‘teachers’.

So what does this mean? It means that most of the projects you’ve seen grow in #phonar2012 will evolve (in some cases mutate) into Final Major Projects in 2013…

Phonar for Us By Us (#Phubu) will run in Google communities and has been designed by the students. The program is structured to be a live and open workshop which everyone can take part in. They’ve ditched one onsite member of staff in favour of re-allocating those resources to hire three off-site mentors and a series of guest speakers (which you can book one-on-one time with). The Google community/website is to act as a pinboard and support network for us all – which means we’d love for you to come along with us on this next leg of the journey.

Is this not astounding? In your garden variety MegaBuck MOOC, 98% of the people are never heard from again; here the students not only finished, they said, we want more. They demanded an open course. If I was in some sort of media business, I’d be all over this story.

But can anything exemplify more the experimental spirit than the crew at Coventry has done here? Did they say, “Sorry that is not in our business plan?” No they picked up and said, “Yeah man, let’s do it.”

ETMOOC

http://etmooc.org/

The Educational Technology and Media MOOC being steered by Alec Couros is way on the edge of the spectrum of being a “course” it is way more community. Forging the usual “This is the Way Courses Have Been Done Since The Plow Was Invented” pace of a new topic a week, the structure is topics being spread over a 2 week period. Participants tap in to different parts of it, via twitter, a Google Community, and their own blogs that are syndicated into the main site.

The course is developed with a weak ‘centre’. While etmooc.org will provide a level of aggregation, detail, and direction, the majority of interactions are likely to occur within groups & networks, facilitated through various online spaces & services.

Participants are strongly encouraged to develop their own reflective, learning spaces. We’re hoping that every learner in #etmooc creates and maintains their own blog for continuous reflection, creativity, and resource sharing.

Sharing and network participation are essential for the success of all learners in #etmooc. Thus, we’ll be needing you to share your knowledge, to support and encourage others, and to participate in meaningful conversations.

Together, we”ll make #etmooc a valuable learning experience for all participants.

The reach of the class has been impressive, both in numbers and geography, but mostly in that a good number, maybe even the majority, are people who are not the usual bunch of ed tech heat seekers; there a many practicing teachers taking their first steps into being part of an online networked experience.

Oh, and pretty much all of the teaching is done by volunteers for each section, not some single YaleHarvardMITStanford prof with a video camera. Nor did this cost 50 thousand clams to create.

And you cannot feel like you dropped out of ETMOOC since you can drop in anywhere. The spirit of welcome, inclusiveness here is infectious.

Introduction to Guitar

http://talonsrockband.wordpress.com/

Bryan Jackson has already run an open high school class in philosophy, and now he is opening up his guitar class at Gleneagle Secondary school in Vancouver. In a basic hosted WordPress web site, he has a place for his high school students and anyone else interested to post their recordings, videos, and writings about elearning to play guitar. There is a loose curriculum, but open participants can jump in and out easily.

And a semantic distinction, it is not a class that teaches guitar but one where you can learn guitar.

If you’re a guitar player who’s just starting out, or a seasoned six string slinger who is looking to document and share what they’ve come to know about their instrument and making music, we’d love to have just a bit of information to start out.

Interested non-credit online participants are welcome to register as authors on the blog by filling out the form below; from there you can comment on existing posts, or submit an artifact of your own learning (or instruction) as your own assignment. There are no minimums, and no apologies for open-online learners in Introduction to Guitar: do as much or as little as you like.

Already people are sharing stories of their guitars, taking tracks recorded by one participant and layering their accompaniment on top.

How much easier could it be to open up a course? A free hosted platform, invite people in? Who needs $6,000,000?

Leuphana Digital School

http://digital.leuphana.de/

I know of almsot nothing about this except having stumbled on it via a mention in twitter. Just look at the tagline “global learning in teams”.

This new program introduces a fresh, unique approach to collaborative learning – a university project open to participants from all over the world, regardless of where they live and what they do. Participants are working in multi-disciplinary teams. Leading scholars and experts guide and support teams in creating their own vision of an ‘Ideal City of the 21st Century’.

Our first online course has started. More participants than ever expected are working on their concepts for an Ideal City. You still have the chance to register as a Supporter for our first open online course. Supporters have access to the content in our Library and can participate in all forum discussions, but are not part of the assignment cycles. Join peers from more than 100 countries and support them in their project to plan and conceive their own Ideal City.

Again, I have no idea what is happening in this class, but the idea that they are not just in an open class, but working on real projects, says to me this is of interest.

Anyone got some inside info on this class?

ds106

http://ds106.us/

Did you think I would really forget to mention maybe the most important example (to me)?

I tried to write about in EDUCUASE the key feature of ds106, unlike every other MOOC on the block, is that there is no single ds106 experience. It is not a single course. There is the class taught at UMW (mine), but others at University of Michigan, Kansas State University, and York College/CUNY plus the open participants who pick and choose what they want to do within ds106.

In my mind, this is a networked structure that is of the same stuff the web is made of, and more web like way of growing than duplication/replication. I’ve not really heard anyone else that seems to think that is important, ds106 is barely mentioned by our colleagues writing the Big Book o’ MOOC.

I guess ds106 just some sort of corner freak show. It is certainly not fodder for Serious Thought.

And I like that.

Because I know my students this semester and others in ds106 are kicking some creative butt. They are making the web, not just slurping it.

All of the examples I pulled above seem to be more questions of the form of online learning, not magic bullet answers, that is the place of experiments. And that’s where the big ideas will come from.

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by concretecandy

The web is a fabric we weave and wear together or tear apart.

Posterous yesterday announced a new feature- the web they wove back in 2008? Thrown away in 2013.

To you read URLs? I bet they changed the title of the post from the first draft http://blog.posterous.com/thanks-from-posterous where “Thanks From Posterous” becomes “Posterous will turn off on April 30″.

And the reason why? It is explained very clwarly:

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Here is a rough translation:

All you people who used our service for free years? Yeah we got big enough to be bought by twitter. So we dont need you and your posts any more. Flush. We got our money and we are doing other stuff. You can’t even have what you wrote. Well you can have this little download.

D’Arcy Norman takes this is the reason who need to roll and host your own web making spaces. And it is, and it isn’t. I await the smack down reply from Calgary, but I don’t think it’s a simple self hosted good / hosted elsewhere bad decision

@doingitwrong @audreywatters @dlnorman Deyond host/be hosted more important is ability + know how to move yer stuff

— Alan Levine (@cogdog) February 16, 2013

And one could say that posterous is being “nice” by allowing people to move their stuff. Free is free. You get what you paid for. Etc.

But here is the thing. When you take things off of the public web, you break the web. You may think, “well it’s my stuff, and no one will notice or care if I just put it away in the bottom drawer.” But the strength and power of the web are its connections. When posterous says Thanks for All the Fish and shuts its servers off on April 30, it leaves a swatch of frayed web fabric.

Broken links.

How much?

If I did my search correctly, Posterous’s decision will break over four million links

This might not matter to you if you never used posterous or linked to it, and 4,000,000 links are probably insigificant considering there are an estimated more than 14 billion web pages out there.

It’s the principle. The web is an open space we share, and when you rip your threads out of the fabric, its not the size of the hole that matters- its the idea that holes are bad.

I’m maybe the last kid on the edtech block to be reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, but am underlining stuff like mad. In writing about The Slow Hunch, he highlights how the ideas typically told as tales of “Eureka” moments almost never truly happen that way. He writes of a small boy in the U.K. who has a fascination with a Victorian book of encyclopedic every day knowledge titled Enquire Within Upon Everything (ironic note- this book is available as a free hyperlinked web fabric from Project Gutenburg or you can buy it for $20 on Amazon.)

The boy “was drawn to the ‘suggestion of magic’ in the book’s title, and who spent hours exploring this ‘portal to the world of information.’ The title stuck in the back of his mind, along with that wondrous feeling of exploring an immense trove of data.”

Yes, of course the boy went on to make something rather useful:

The World Wide Web (known as “WWW’, “Web” or “W3″) is the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge… The Web has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions. Through the use hypertext and multimedia techniques, the web is easy for anyone to roam, browse, and contribute to.

It is easy until some entity decides it does not need that portions it contributed to.

Berners-Lee described the idea evolved from:

my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an uncomstrained, weblike way. And the awareness came to me through precisely that kind of process. The Web arose as the answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, and realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of a human mind, a new concept jelled.

The web, much like the mind, is a terrible thing to put to waste.

I don’t know what posterous is doing inside the big twitter bird, nor any ideas how they are making “features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.”

But I cannot think of a plausible reason why they cannot leave the part of the web they created in-tact.

There is a principle here that seems to not matter much. But I always have and always will do everything I can never break a piece of the web I created previously, no matter how arcane or outdated it is. It’s not always possible, but as individuals we do out part, but I expect larger entities, ones that make their success on the web from the efforts as others, should do a lot more to keep the web from getting torn and frayed.

Will you join me in taking that as a solemn oath? DON’T BREAK THE WEB!

I call on Posterous to take a more proactive stand. They made success for themselves on the web; they should do more than a token effort to keep it from breaking.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by ipasha

We need web makers, the web does need web breakers.

When the world is full of things that don’t make sense, make a GIF. When you get tired of all the repeated echoes off the chamber walls put down that copy of The Chronicle, and make a GIF. When twitter is full of bird crap, make a GIF.

Well… it’s a strategy that works for me, whatever “work” means (here as I sit at O’Hare trying to pass a night of missed plane connections, I think I should make a GIF).

I was thinking some back on yesterdays GIF filled riff on the film class I signed up for form Coursera. The design is one that takes almost no advantage of the very thing that is supposed to be the power of MOOCs, the bringing together of people for a learning experience. The model (so far) is one that puts the network capability of the internet aside in lieu of just using it to transmit content.

There’s nothing horrific about that, but there is also nothing interesting, nothing new. People in the course will foster their own connections, independent of it (like the kind person that uploaded the rare video to YouTube), but networking in forums is strictly a sideshow of Coursera courses. It’s where people are sent because the teacher cannot of course give you any attention.

And this would still be okay, if the course were designed to leverage that experience.

It is not.

In a similar vein, reading Giulia’s post about EDCMOOC and in our conversations, could not make for a course more radically different in design from my film one. It is leveraging what the internet is good at, having people create and contribute in a networked fashion, it is deploying reams of open content materials, and has from what I can see, forgoes the lecture model centrality of my course. They have a Feedwordpress syndication model going. .

And out conversation was– why did the University of Edinburgh even need Coursera?

And so I have this tic in my brain when people seem to talk of a MOOC as having some characteristic traits simply by its being called a MOOC. Its MOOCness comes with the name. But here are two MOOCs, even in the same platform, that could not be farther apart in design or experience.

And to me the difference is- how much they emulate in design the very fabric and cloth of the internet itself– I really cannot see how anything can “scale” to the numbers the cow heads are nodding to without doing so in something that acts like the internet itself.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by Ryan Opaz

or

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by CmdrCord

But I don’t know, and frankly, I’m happy to muddle in my own little corner while all of the big thinkers and DAVOS sippers figure things out.

All I want to do is GIF.

I get tired of those emails form people asking to blog about their product, or to include their infographic, or to buy ad space (for the latter I sometimes reply that my starting price is $10,000 per url per month, they usually do not reply).

The best are people who gush on how they love this blog, but they somehow miss this front page key warning:

Lately though, it’s not even worth my time bothering with a reply. That is my time. I would like to assume that a non reply is a message, “I am not interested.”

Apparently not.

Some days ago I sent you my proposal for blog post deal but may be due to busy in other works or some other reason you did not replied me on blog post deal at $30.

So i am offer you again if you want then we can continue our negotiation. And this time i am sure we will done deal successfully.

You can view our article sample at here: http://www.simplybudgeted.com/2012/09/all-about-cisco-ccie-rs-certification/

Let me about your reply

This one I don’t even need to mock. It comes self-mocked.

Now I know my spelling is bad, but this message is almost un-intelliglble, and if this is your best foot forward, you’ve got a long way to go in this blogging business.

Of course, what do I know.

I’m not getting $30 per post.

Who’s next? Who wants to step past the sign?

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by obscene_pickle

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by desmorider

For as vast and accurate as Google Searches can be, I cannot help but raise a curiosity flag when it fails elsewhere. It still frustrates me how many clicks deep you have to go to the advanced search settings to have google search for images “licensed for re-use”.

In a blog post from April 2012, Martin Hawksey pointed out something I had not known of before; inside of Google Docs, when you go to embed an image, and you use thee search, the default is actually for media licensed for re-use.

This is pretty cool, so if I am writing about being tired, perhaps I want to use an image of a sleeping dog; within the Google Docs image search, I see 60 results for a search on “sleeping dog”. Wow, maybe Google does care about promoting licensed media.

Stop for a second.

On the main google image search, the default criteria is all media- to search for media licensed for reuse, you have to nose around the advanced search terms. Why on Google Docs is the default different?

Note also the curious rights statement it lists for the search:

Results shown are labeled for commercial reuse with modification

Nowhere in any of the Google sites nor its documentation will you see the words “creative commons” (nor “public domain”). What then is “labeled for commercial reuse with modification”? That would see Creative Commons By Attribution, right?

The explanation of this kind of search reads:

Anyone can find images on the Web, but usage rights come into play if you’re looking for content that you can take and use above and beyond fair use. Site owners can use licenses to indicate if and how others can reuse content on their sites.

When using the Google Image Search feature in Google Docs, your results will be filtered to include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy the image for commercial purposes and modify it in ways specified in the license. Only select images that you have confirmed you can use legally in your intended context, including with appropriate attribution if necessary. If you find images with the wrong usage rights in the search results, please report them in the help forum.

I guess usage rights do not come into play on images.google.com??

And this is followed by the yellow block that martin called out:

Before reusing content that you’ve found, you should verify that its license is legitimate, and check the exact terms of reuse stated in the license. For example, most licenses require that you give credit to the image creator when reusing an image. Google has no way of knowing whether the license is legitimate, so we aren’t making any representation that the content is actually lawfully licensed.

While this seems helpful, Google is saying, it’s up to you, search user, to figure out the license, despite the fact that many times this information is included in the page, or within the markup of the page as metadata.

And as Martin pointed out, for many images the icons in the search results do not even match the image it links to. Look at this icon for 2 waterfowl:

The google icon is for 2 birds, but the link leads to a photo of wolves!

Indeed, the credit for this image http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/4950032287/ takes you to this image:

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by jurvetson

Nice. Search for sleeping dogs, search results show bird, and then I get active wolves.

So my curiosity is at how lame this image search in Google Docs is. The results are paltry and as shown above, just plain wrong. When I run a search on “sleeping dog” in the Google Docs Image search, I get a whopping 60 results.

60 results.

Is that all you got, Goog?

If I do a normal Google image search, using the same search terms (“Labeled for commericial use with modifications), I get over 200 results.

Better.

But…

Why the difference? Is Google tired too?

Let’s not end there.

Next, go to the flickr creative commons search for the same search in the license for By Attribution.

I found over 3100 images of sleeping dogs in flickr. Google docs image search gives me 60.

It is bizarre that Google would make an arm wave at open content, then deliver it via crippled, broken search feature.

I am baffled.

And sleepy.

cc licensed ( BY ND ) flickr photo shared by °Cisla°

cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by 2493™

With no sign of any waning of MOOC Hysteria, it seems like a “course” is of course the only way of convening educators online. There is some stampeded going to create more MOOCs or various anagram soups of MOONs OOs, MOOS, whatever.

Alec Couros has been floating the idea of a new one, ETMOOC:

This space will act as a major information hub for #etmooc, a massively open online course focused on the use of educational technology (#edtech) and media in education. While the field of educational technology is vast, this particular course will focus on some of the recently popularized technologies, literacies and related topics such as social/participatory media, blended/online learning environments, digital literacies, open education, digital citizenship/identity, copyright/copyleft, and multimedia in education.

I’m a big @coursa fan. Few in our field gather people online as quickly as when he summons to work on a collaboratively doc. He’s a voracious twitter sharer of cool and useful liunks. There is speculation that one MOOC provider is his anagram if not, doppleganger. Heck, he is even blogging these days.

But seriously, it was his EC&I 831 that pioneered an open class, even before Siemens, Cormier, and Downes came up with the Grand Idea with a Goofy Acronym. And my current infection with ds106, mirrors more Alec’s open course, where his in person class at the University of Regina was opened up to outside participants.

So when Alec puts out a call for ideas, I’m interested, both for what he brings and what the people he brings, brings. That’s happening already, with an open Google Doc that always seems to have 5+ people in it.

In a few discussions in one of those webinar spaces, I’ve been pushing Alec to think a bit beyond the “course” as a structure. He does not have the base of a core of registered students (yes, not strictly necessary, but I think highly influential for effective cMOOOiness). I wonder really what is the motivator for open participants. People seem married to a structure of video lectures. And badges/certifications.

But more, as I did this week, why te heck does it have to be a “course” to gather interested and motivated people. What is so magical about a course, (of course… unless it is the famous talking course…. hum along).

The more I think about it, it seems more like a massive graduate seminar.

But I think it can go even farther from that.

It’s that weekly ramming speed pace that bugs me.

Just as a topic opens in this pace, the course zooms on to other topics. If you do not row along, you either go your own, or just give up. When not let people join the boat they want to be on, and decided where to go, how fast to row there? WHY THE BLEEP DOES IT HAVE TO BE A NEW TOPIC A WEEK? is that an educational commandment?

Rather than making everyone go on the same boat going at the same speed, why not launch a fleet of boats, ones that regularly communicate, sharing the stories and charts of places they have been, or allowing me to visit from time to time and hang out? I may be interested in some general outcomes of “Citizenship, Identity, Footprint (Overview & Implementation)” or “Literacy: Media, Information, Attention, Memes” but not enough to devote the same amount of energy. I wan to be in the same space as people who care as much about those topics as I care about web development or digital storyteling, but we are we put into one container?

Why a course?

The very outlining a course says, “We have people who something about this, whats important, they will guide you” – why not something more like an unconference (maybe an unMOOC, and Alec as smart and grabbed some cool domains) where the topics are laid out, but the questions, interests, and expertise are shaped by those who come to it?

I’m not against some amount of framing structure, as was suggested well in the webinar by Pete Rorabaugh, and I liked what the MOOCMOOC crew did by having participants actually work on creating things. This is just top of the dog’s head noodling, but what if the topics listed in the Google doc were ships launched once a week or 10 days or fortnight or…), each one has:

• An intro video that is a trailer, it asks questions, grabs attention. It’s an invitation, not the content.
• An online space to communicate, maybe Googl+ communities, maybe twitter hash tag, no matter.
• A place to declare your interest.
• A place to list your questions about the topic, what you would like to know, what the issues are.
• A place for people to list and describe and volunteer their expertise to contribute.
• A place to collect resources related to it.
• A place to propose ideas of “things we can do” to make issue “X better, more understandable, etc.
• Place(s0 to convene around this -maybe a web site, maybe a wiki, maybe a google doc, maybe synchronous sessions, maybe a webinar, maybe many of these.

Okay this is messy, so we need roles Conveners, researchers, and most importantly summarizers. We should have a core group that regularly tracks what is going on, summarizing it in a usable and networkable form (blogs? storify?) From here is something to report back to people in other “ships”.

There can still be a schedule to start these groups, but why must a schedule end them as well? Are not these topics important enough to go on? To draw in new people while have something to learn or contribute?

It’s not really radical. It’s almost, in some ways, a structure I was part of in my first job, something with a desert plant metaphor. It was not rigidly structures, and was designed to be organic, with its growth dependent on who chose to be part of it.

I am not saying that is the whole model, and I had forgotten it until madly typing this out. This is less than half baked, and totally brain spill.

Bottom line, Alec, I will be part of this no matter what shape it takes. Cause you are there.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Wetsun

But seriously, let’s bust out of the course box. It is comfortable, but hardly necessary.

I listen, and read, and listen, and try to make sense of what they are talking ’bout.

But those cows just go on and on and on about their MOOcing and making cheese.

On and on they go.

And go.

“…placental, emergent, alienating, enveloping, sometimes thriving, sometimes dead, sometimes reborn…”

Whatever.

Yawn.

Anyone want to play around here?

Anyone?

I have a gane.

Watch that bone, MOOcow.

Silly cow.

Tricks are for dogs.

(I GIFfed up the wild dog and poor cow — the verb in the word of the year sense).

Silly cow.