My start with MOOC, change and learning

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I am today beginning a social technology/learning adventure – joining 1300+ others in participating in a massive open online course (MOOC) called Change: Education, learning and technology. Among those joining the course are several friends and colleagues from the Master’s Program in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University.

This MOOC is impressive. Some 35 weeks of content and thought-leadership, designed (in part) to create a snapshot of the state-of-the-art of technology and learning as it stands in 2011/2012. Fair warning from the designers of this event – Dave Cormier, George Siemens and Stephen Downes – that there is simply more content than any one reasonable human being can digest. And in the orientation to the course there are several thoughtful videos from the three exploring this issue (Cormier’s below).

At this moment, what is most intriguing to me is exactly what will drive my path through the content. As an instructor in a graduate program that provides opportunity for innovation in course design, I’ve had the opportunity to explore “stewarding” students through ideas and concepts and encouraging personal discovery of how these ideas and concepts apply to their professional context. But there is definitely a level of steering still going on.

In the MOOC it is all about choosing your own path. I suspect that I’ll jump onto some topics because of some deep-seated geek-attraction instinct (squirrel!! squirrel!!). But I also know that I’ll be influenced by sharing with my friends at MSLOC (we have already connected on a Google+ circle).

Not sure how my path will be determined. It’ll be emergent for sure. But I’ll be paying attention to how this plays out because I sense it will lead to some interesting insights.

Social platforms for education

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I’m in the midst of a public sense-making expedition that I hope (fingers crossed on both hands) will lead to finding more people who believe that higher education and business enterprises as more alike than different when it comes to learning and knowledge sharing and technology.

Let me just share a few stops from my expedition:

Earlier this week I wrote a short thought-piece in Google+ commenting on Luis Suarez’s blog post: Google Plus and the enterprise – what’s the deal?. Luis’ post captured a number of themes that I’ve been sharing and thinking about as we experiment with social platforms within high education.

I also ran into Cathy N. Davidson’s excellent case story of her experimenting with standard social collaboration tools (Wikipedia, blogs, etc). in an undergraduate course she created called “This is your brain on the internet.” Davidson is a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Duke, author and clearly an educational innovator. Harold Jarche riffs off of Davidson’s piece in his blog. Both Jarche and Davidson pull on common themes related to learning in networks — and how socially unsettling this can be in top-down environments like educational institutions and businesses. Both also advocate for pushing into new ways of thinking about learners and learning.

And finally, from Marsha Connor (co-author of The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media and Fellow at The Altimeter Group) a tweet responding to a higher education blogger. The blogger wrote a post calling for less attention to generalized social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and more attention to companies that build education-specific software platforms. Connor’s tweet: My POV: We embrace social platforms, not ed-only, b/c life is NEVER ed-only.

Bingo.