Serendipity35

I saw last month that Canvas announced a new platform called Canvas Commons which is a learning object repository (LOR). I haven't as much about LORs the past few years as I did ten years ago.

A learning object repository is a kind of digital library that enables educators to share, manage and use educational resources. They require objects to be tagged in order to be searchable. That taxonomy (really more of a folksonomy) of metadata means that users can find and then additionally tag objects (such as a document, slides, a video) as they find additional uses for the object.

The LOR was often part of a CMS. The abbreviations got confusing since the last century of edtech. I used to label things like WebCT as a learning content management system (LCMS) and then they became a CMS meaning course management system, but some people called the same platforms an LMS focusing on the learning side of management. Nevertheless, all of them are environments where teachers and designers can create, store, reuse, manage and deliver learning content.

I have worked in WebCT, Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, and a few others that have disappeared or been absorbed. Most of them have offered some kind of centralized object repository, usually a database. In some it was an extra feature that needed to be purchased. The LCMS lable generally was used for platforms that work with content based on a learning object model.

I received an email that InsideHigherEd is hosting a free webinar on October 22 for Canvas users to discuss Canvas Commons. The email says that it will cover how it can help you to: "Create Your Very Own Personal Learning Object Repository; Create A Course From Scratch Without, Well, Starting From Scratch; Share Selectively—Be As Elitist Or Open As You Want; Make A Name For Yourself (And Your Institution)"

It caught my attention that the email also asked users to consider whether or not MOOCs are OERs and where MOOCs (and the organizations that host them and the people who teach them) fit into the OER movement.

 

Many months ago, Brother Tim, Serendipity35 IT guy and very occasional blogger here, started this post. It has been staring at me in the drafts queue and today I decided to dust it off a bit and send it out into the cloud.

So, there I was at Miller Air Park fueling the Piper Archer airplane I had rented for a flight down to Cape May County airport.  It was a busy morning for the airport and several planes were in  pre-flight, being taxied to the northeast end of the runway, or were already cocked into the wind, holding-short of runway 24 doing their pre-takeoff run-up.  Each pilot in turn completed the safety checklist, pivoted onto the runway, firewalled the throttle and lifted the aircraft into the smooth gray sky.

In the 30 minutes or so that I had spent pre-flighting and fueling my own plane there were 7 departures but, except for a pre-solo student and instructor locked into the never ending left turns of take-off and landing pattern practice, no other aircraft arrived at MJX.

Ken and I are sometimes like the FBO staff at Miller Air Park.  We send post after post off into the Internet clouds and, every once in a while, we receive an arrival. A returned comment here and there lets us know that the posts we roll off our Internet tarmac aren't falling off the edge of our flat earth.
Ken builds almost all of the wordcraft we launch and I spend most of my time clearing turkey buzzards and deer off our virtual runway, but once in a while, I get to fly a post of my own. And on that Saturday morning in Whiting, NJ, I held the nose on the centerline and rotated that Piper into the air. 

I climbed to 400 ft and turned left toward the coastline. Over my shoulder, as I approached 1000 ft, I could see the massive airship hangars of Lakehurst Naval Air Station and the abandoned, but standing, stall of the Hindenburg, unoccupied since May of 1937 when the dirigible burned at her mooring.  When it departed Frankfurt, Germany on May 3rd that year, the crew that launched her expected a return, too. Though it was scheduled to fly back from North America to Europe with a full manifest of transatlantic passengers en route to the coronation of King George VI of England, its final destination remained in New Jersey.
Fifty years after the famous crash, long after it was branded a mystery and pursued only by academic enterprise, the actual cause of the craft's incineration was discovered. The paint that protected its outer skin from the harsh ocean crossing, burned like a magnesium fuse when lit by lightning over land.

I quickly flew through Atlantic City's airspace and continued inbound to the Sea Isle City VOR. My checkpoints, spaced on my chart at 10 minute intervals, rolled underneath my right wing at 8, then 7, minutes.  I was ahead of schedule and soon I'd arrive at WWD 10 minutes before my flight plan had estimated.
Traffic was light at Cape May County. I radioed the airport's CTAF for the active runway and entered the downwind pattern for 28.  There were no other aircraft in the pattern (or rolling on the ground) and I touched down just past the threshold markers and turned off at the first taxi-way. Not stopping to visit, I headed back to the east end of runway 28, throttled back up and, five minutes after I had first touched down, was airborne again and heading home.
I flew back to Miller through the same airspace that the Hindenburg traveled on its last day.  I landed, safely, just a few miles from where the dirigible fell to the ground.  It had only taken a couple of hours but I returned to the airport from which I'd departed -- a luxury the Hindenburg pilot never had.
Maybe fifty years from now, like the paint on an unburned scrap of the Hindenburg, some word, sentence or phrase from Serendipity35 (or some other Internet archived version of it *) will drop out of the clouds and reveal some small unintended truth about the technology and learning lives we live today.

Although the Wayback machine at archive.org only began to archive Serendipity35 pages back in 2009, at least there is some other record of our time here on the Net.


 

Having just submitted the final version of a chapter for a book on MOOCs, I was pleased to see an article headlined "MOOC U: The Revolution Isn't Over" (excerpted from a book by Jeff Selingo). The article recalls a 2011 piece in The New York Times titled "Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course" about the artificial-intelligence class at Stanford University that got all the attention when 160,000 students in 190 countries took the Massive Open Online Course. That wasn't the first MOOC, but it was the one that got the mainstream media's attention. And the year of the MOOC and the MOOC-madness began.

In 2011-2013, I wrote a lot about MOOCs, taught in a MOOC environment, and did a good number of presentations to educators about the revolution. And I watched the rise and fall of the hype cycle for the phenomenon. That was what led my wife and I to collaborate on a chapter we titled "MOOCs: Evolution and Revolution." We don't believe the revolution is still on, but the evolution is certainly still with us.

Reading another article with the teaser headline, "The MOOC Where Everybody Learned", I continue to see that the skeptics still believe that students who succeed in MOOCs tend to have similar profiles. For one thing, they are students who are already well educated (holding degrees). Another common belief is that other students need coaching and academic support, possibly more of a hybrid course with face-to-face support.

But researchers MIT looked at a physics course (offered on the edX) in 2013 found that students who had spent significant time on the course showed evidence of learning no matter what their educational background.

What really surprised the researchers was that the MOOC students learned at a similar rate as did MIT students who had taken the on-campus version of a similar course. Yes, students who were not well-prepared students scored lower than those with more schooling, but all of them came away knowing more than they did before the MOOC.

Keep in mind that many MOOC participants don't enroll in a MOOC to get grades or credits. They are interested in learning.



 

I have been hearing about badges for showing learning progress for years, but I don't think they have yet to make significant inroads in education.They are often included in discussions of lifelong learning, MOOCs and alternative education. It is not surprising that they are part of discussion on the gamification of courses and education.

When I first heard about them at a conference, they were compared to the badges in Boy and Girl Scouting. You earn badges by mastering a specific set of skills. But the better comparison is to video gaming where they have long been used as a way to mark achievement. Called a badge or trophy, badge, stamp, medal or challenge, in many games they mark the achievement of a "meta-goal" that is outside the confines of the game environment and architecture. You may "unlock" an achievement, but that guarantee winning the game or even future achievement.

In education, or more accurately "learning," badges are being seen as one way to open up new pathways for learning. For MOOCs and other lifelong learning opportunities, badges are a way for learner who are not necessarily going to college to show achievement, competence and progress.

This year the MacArthur Foundation showcased winners of its Badges for Lifelong Learning competition who had been awarded $2 million worth of development grants last year.

This summer the city of Chicago announced that badging would be a key component of its Summer of Learning program, which is being called the largest citywide learning campaign in the country.

The Mozilla Foundation has been developing and testing its Open Badges Infrastructure for about two years. We know the Mozilla Foundation more as the maker of the Firefox web browser, but their efforts are often pointed to as something that could have a big impact on the acceptance of digital badging. They have focused a lot of their efforts at K-12 education because educators at that level have proved to be open to badging.

HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) administered the MacArthur competition which focused on digital badges which was cosponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation. Almost a hundred competitors entered and they were given resources for the development of badge-related content by Intel, Microsoft, NASA, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, and the 4-H Council, among others.
Employers are interested in badges as a way to rate potential employees and a way to mark professional learning/development for active employees.

As with MOOCs, the key to badge success will be the acceptance of a standardized, certified badge system by employers and schools as a credentials for advancement.

We're not there yet, but Dr. Bernard Bull blogged this month about an online master’s degree in educational technology that is built around competency-based digital badges. He writes about the degree that:

"As of August 2014, Concordia University Wisconsin is offering the first (to the best of my knowledge). That means that you earn your master’s degree along with a series of digital badges, each of which represent new knowledge and skill that you are developing as you work through the courses and program. This also means that you are gaining new micro-credentials (digital badges) even before you finish a full course. These are credentials that you can display online as evidence of your growing competence and perhaps your qualification for a new position for your current employer, or evidence of your skill for that future dream job."