Week 5 down... Week 6 here we come!

Time seems to be on fast forward these days.  Either that or I have too many things to do, and not enough time to do them in.  When did week 5 just end?  Time flies when you're having fun, and when you have a ton of your plate I guess.  The past couple of weeks on EDDE 803 have been relatively 'quiet'.  We haven't had discussion forums, and our live session was cancelled due to unforeseen events.  The internship is fast and furious with a lot of discussion forum posts, and I assume that the short gradeable assignments will start to come in at some point soon in that course.


In the internship I actually ended up partly grading the first of the papers that came in. I grade it first, and the instructor of record looks it over does the final actual grading, this way the learner gets feedback and I get feedback as well. Since I've been teaching for a few years I am approaching this as an opportunity for peer review, so I am approaching my role as an intern in a mostly-an-instructor (but not quite) way.  It took me a few weeks to settle into this role, but this is what feels comfortable at the moment.  The only thing that's still a little fuzzy is helping this cohort of learners with their ePortfolio.  I haven't quite gotten around to making heads or tails of this fuzzy directive.  There is an ePorfolio moodle 'course' (more of a community really) for AU, so why not use that? I guess, phrased differently: what is lacking in that course community that requires my intervention, and how can I best address it.  I think this will be a week 6 and 7 goal for me (answering this question), which will give me  five weeks to do something before the semester comes to an end.

In terms of EDDE 803, the next big deliverable, due in a couple of weeks, is a paper and presentation on some aspect of teaching and learning.  I decided to go back to games and gamification.  Even though Jen presented on this last year (probably around this time of year too), I thought I could expand a bit on the subject.  Starting with her presentation as a jump-off point, I decided to read through some books on games and gamification that I acquired a few months ago and not tread the same path as her.  I was thinking of gamifying the presentation itself, but with the clock ticking down, I am not sure how successfully I'll be able to do this.  I think I will go back and review some coursera videos I have on Gamification (Werbach's MOOC), and Games in Education (Steinkuhler & Squire) to see if I am forgetting something (which I probably am at this point). Inevitably things will be left out because there is only so much you can include in a 4,000 - 5,000 word paper.

I guess keep on keeping on is the motto, until the end of the semester?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Academic Facepalm (evaluation edition)

Image
Back in December, I was searching for the #tenure hashtag on twitter.   There was some discussion (probably stated by Jesse Stommel 😜) which prompted me to search for this #hashtag out of curiosity to see what was tagged.  Along with heartwarming stories of people who've just earned tenure (a nice perk right before the winter break!), there was this wonderful tweet specimen... I'm not gonna lie.  IT BUGS ME. It bugs me as a learner.   I've always completed course evaluations and I tried to give honest feedback to the professor.  If the course was easy, hard, just right, I wanted them to know.  If I was appreciative, I wanted them to know.  Yes, sometimes I've half-assed it and just completed the Likert scale with a "loved the course" comment at the end, but many times I try to be more concrete about the feedback. It bugs me as a program manager. I am the individual who sets up, collects, and often reminds students, about the course evaluations.  M
Read more

Discussion forums in MOOCs are counter-productive...well, sort of...

Image
The other day I was reading this blog post on why MOOC forums are counter-productive .  I was really thinking hard about this and my initial inclination is to agree. Forums, in MOOCs, are  counter-productive. But, as with most things in life, there is a big asterisk here. If we look at how MOOCs are setup, and by MOOC here I mean xMOOC since that's what most people think of, the discussion board is one big crazy mess. Coursera has done something interesting in crowdsourcing thread relevancy by allowing people to up-vote or down-vote threads, but at their core these discussions are setup like every other discussion forum out there in traditional education: There usually is a prompt that people will answer, and answers can be repetitive as well, so when you are the 1000th poster to a question prompt and you see that others have answered something similar to your answers, what is the motivation to wade through many, many, many similar answers in order to find the subtle contextual
Read more

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more