Serendipity35

Sometimes a map is not enough. What if instead of just showing roads and boundaries, it was a 3D model you could manipulate and explore? That is what Twitter's data visualization scientist Nicolas Belmonte (@philogb) did with geotagged tweets.



The mountain ranges you see below are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets —
billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from,
the troughs the fewest. 

Click here to explore different views, elevations, angles in several cities in an interactive map.

There has been a backlash against MOOCs the past year as they have made inroads into higher education. I believe a lot of that is fear - fear by professors about lost jobs and fear by colleges of lost tuitions. Project that fear to the future and it is a fear about the end of universities and degrees being the dominant form of post-secondary education.

I agree with Stephen Downes when he says that, "You can almost feel the glee in this Chronicle article as it reports on the failure of a plan to offer credit via an $89 MOOC-related exam for a course that usually costs $1050."  Is The Chronicle looking for the anti-MOOC stories now?

MOOCs were meant to be free (that's part of the Open), so when you see a price on taking one, you want to know about the return on that investment. That particular course awards "credit" but that credit that isn't transferable. You would need to apply it to a degree program at the MOOC provider, Colorado State University-Global Campus. That sounds to me more like a marketing scheme than a MOOC.

The fact that no students applied for the course is the big message of the Chronicle article, but maybe the big message should be that this is not what MOOCs are meant to be and that is why it failed.

The DOs and DON'Ts for Online Learners: An Allied Schools Infographic

The Dos and Don'ts for Online Learners - An infographic by the team at online learning dos and don'ts

I watched Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize winning talk which is both about a school in the cloud and about Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE). It made me think of so many projects I have worked on over the years, like teaching or learning on p2pu and other open networks. Schools in the cloud.

In his talk, he asks us to help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other using resources and mentoring from the cloud. This is what he calls a Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE).





He is seeking educational partners to help design and build the physical building that will house his School in the Cloud, where students will try out a range of cloud-based, scalable approaches to self-directed learning.

TED offers a SOLE toolkit that might help you contribute to a global network of educators and retired teachers who can support and engage the children through the web.

This not about credits and degree programs. Like the original idea of MOOCs, it is about engaging communities, parents, schools and afterschool programs worldwide, to transform the way kids learn.

This requires facilitators and the SOLE model relies on educators to model curiosity, prompt questions, and support the learners through the process.

Where are the typical incentives that exist for teachers? A job, a salary, personal feedback and face-to-face relationships with students? They don't exist, at least not in the form you knew in school.

Can you deal with that?