Serendipity35

Join ETS and the Chronicle of Higher Education for a free webinar on Wednesday, October 16, 2013 at 2–3 p.m. USA New York City ET


Student Learning Outcomes: The Seismic Shift Beyond Accreditation Support to Multiple Stakeholder Accountability

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are growing in popularity at colleges and universities across the country at a phenomenal pace.  They are the newest type of online learning experience open to people around the world.

Find out more by attending a panel discussion at William Paterson University offered by the Technology Across the Curriculum (Tac) and Instructional Research Technology group and Co-Sponsored by the NJEDge Academic Technology Group.

The MOOC Experience: Faculty Reflections
October 29, 2013
What is a MOOC?  How is a MOOC organized?   What is it like to teach a MOOC?

Panelists:
Ken Ronkowitz, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT)
Mary Zedeck, Seton Hall University
Sandra Miller, William Paterson University
Mung Chiang, Princeton University
Chris Brinton, Princeton University

After light refreshment at noon, the panel discussion will start at 12:30 (Lobby)

Following the discussion, the NJEDge Academic Technology Group will have its first meeting of the academic year from 1:45 - 3:30.

Location: William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Library Auditorium, Building 10, Wayne, New Jersey 07470

The event will also be streamed and archived - details at NJEDge.Net

For registration information: http://njedge.net/events/

I am a bit surprised that so many educators still view social media (like Twitter and LinkedIn) and blogging as technocentric or even narcissistic endeavors. It points to the criticism I often hear that education is a field that is slow to change and resistant to change. I'm not sure how true that is - the speed with which MOOCs have become part of the mix in higher ed has been rather fast - but I would agree that there is still resistance to new technologies. For example, online learning, even after about twenty years of it being a part of higher education, is still controversial at some schools.

Personal Learning Networks (PLN) are informal learning networks that consists of the people a learner interacts with and derives knowledge from in a personal environment. It is all about the connection you make to others with similar interests and social networks have become the way that most often occurs. When I add people to my list of education and technology people in Twitter, it is because I have the idea that some type of learning will occur because of that connection.

The research on this fairly new approach to learning outside of school is generally labeled "connectivism" and much of was developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The idea is that learners create connections and develop a network that contributes to their own professional development and knowledge. You don't have to know these people personally or ever meet them in person. Remember in the early days of Facebook how people scoffed at the idea that someone had 1000 "friends"?  Not as many jokes these days.

In  The New Learning Revolution by Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos, the authors say "For the first time in history, we know now how to store virtually all humanity's most important information and make it available, almost instantly, in almost any form, to almost anyone on earth. We also know how to do that in great new ways so that people can interact with it and learn from it."

Before I had heard of PLN, I was reading about PLE - Personal Learning Environments. In 2010, a PLE was defined in Emerging Technologies in Distance Educationas a "manifestation of a learner’s informal learning processes via the Web."

How does an educator start their own PLE or PLN? It's not that difficult. Get the basic social media accounts: Twitter, LinkedIn and even Facebook are easy places to begin. The important work on your part will be finding the people who have similar interests to your own. When I find someone I want to follow, I add them to one of my own interest lists. In twitter, one of my lists is for education + technology. You can look at that list and see if anyone catches your interest. I always check the public lists of people who I follow to see who they are following. 

Of course, most of the really good content goes beyond a tweet of 140 characters. Most good tweets contain a link, and many of those links are to articles or blog posts. Reading blogs and eventually writing your own blog is also part of creating a PLN.

Finding interesting bloggers is much like find people to follow in any social network. What's great about blogs (as opposed to trying to follow writers or journalists is that you can subscribe to their posts using a reader application like Feedly. Their posts all show up in brief on one page and you can select which ones you want to read. Feedly also allows you to post your own links to good articles to your own Twitter, Facebook and other accounts or email it to someone in your PLN.

Soon, you will become someone that others add to their own PLN.

Writing your own blog means that you are at a point where you want to move out of Social Web 1.0 to Social Web 2.0 where you create your own content to share rather than just passing on other people's content.  You can use Blogger (from Google) or WordPress to create a good blog platform. Both are free and pretty easy to use. You might want to start with the "micro-blogging" tool, Tumblr, that is popular for short posts and for reposting others content easily. 

I feel that PLNs are part of professional development these days. (You could make the P in PLN stand for "professional" if that makes it seem more accurate.)  That's true beyond education, as some businesses are already creating their own e-learning content and PLEs for their employees. The European Union Lifelong Learning Programmehas recognized the potential for PLNs by funding the aPLaNet project (Autonomous Personal Learning Networks for Language Teachers).

In a post by Will Richardson, he wrote that rather than asking first "How do we change our schools?”, we should first ask “How do we change ourselves?”

 

 

Inside Higher Ed’s 2013 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology -- conducted with Gallup -- aims to understand how college and university faculty members and campus leaders in educational technology perceive and pursue online learning and other emerging opportunities for delivering course content. Highlights of the survey findings include:

• Few faculty believe that  online courses can achieve student learning outcomes as well as in-person courses.
• Whether an online program is offered by an accredited institution tops the list of factors that contribute to quality in online education according to faculty members. Technology administrators are far likelier to associate quality with academic credit.
• Faculty members feel strongly that institutions should start MOOCs only with faculty approval, and that MOOCs should be evaluated by accrediting agencies.
• Of faculty who have never taught an online course, 30 percent say the main reason they haven’t is because they’ve never been asked.
• Faculty members and technology officers alike agree that their institutions fail to reward teaching with technology in tenure and promotion decisions.

Inside Higher Ed's 2013 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology explored the perspectives of more than 2,000 college professors on topics such as how to measure quality in online education and the potential impact of massive open online courses. The survey was conducted in conjunction with researchers from Gallup. A copy of the
survey report can be downloaded here.  Inside Higher Ed regularly surveys key higher ed professionals on a range of topics.

The webinar to discuss the results of the survey will be hosted by Editors Scott Jaschik and Doug Lederman who will share and analyze the findings and answer readers'
questions. To register for the webinar, please click here.