Tag Archives: crowdsourcing

Edtech MOOC, January 2013?

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During my sabbatical year (July 1/12 to June 30/13), I plan to focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as one of my key areas of research. To do so, I’m considering planning, organizing and facilitating a semester-long MOOC focused on educational technology starting January 2013. I am envisioning the course to be somewhat similar to my EC&I 831 course, but with the focus more explicitly on the integration of technology in teaching, learning & professional development (hands-on sessions exploring major categories of tools with a focus on pedagogy & literacy).

I’m thinking that this course would be relevant to teachers, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, librarians, parents and likely many others hoping to sharpen their understanding of emerging skills and literacies. Also, it would be great to have newbies involved (people that are fairly new to educational technology and/or those we wouldn’t normally find on Twitter). However, before I get too far along in this, I want to make sure there is interest from both those that would enroll, and those that would help develop & facilitate the experience.

So, is there a need for this sort of thing? Is there anyone willing to help plan the experience? Anyone interested in participating in a course like this? Any thoughts on what we could do to make this successful? I’d love to hear from you.

Edit #1: There seems to be some interest already, so to make sure that I don’t lose any potential collaborators due to the chaos that is Twitter, please fill out this very short form if you are interested in participating. I will contact you very soon to get things started.

Edit #2: I wanted to capture the responses of potential collaborators/participants, so I put together this Storify. I’m really excited about this, and will get back to everyone by early September at the latest.

Writing Prompts (Collaborative Document)

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In the style of previous collaborations (here and here), we’ve collaboratively written a great list of writing prompts related to technology & media in teaching & learning. These were intended for the teacher candidates I teach, but I see tremendous value for anyone who is writing or thinking about the use of technology in education.

Thanks again everyone for showing me that this form of collaboration really does work and for contributing great ideas to the document. I now have a great, growing resource for my students when they tell me ‘I have nothing to write about’.

See the collaborative document here.

Crowdsourcing Alternatives To Delicious

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Twitter was abuzz with the news that Yahoo! will be shutting down Delicious, the popular social bookmarking site. Delicious has been a very valuable tool to me for several years now, and I, like others, will be sad to see it go.

However, rather than dwell on the news, it’s better to move on, and find a viable alternative, especially one that will allow the migration of data from a Delicious account to a new host. Rather than trying to find a solution on my own, I thought I would crowdsource an alternative through the sharing of a collaborative Google Document. This crowdsourced approach was very successful back in April when Ning announced their service would no longer be free, so I thought it would be worthwhile to try it again.

I set up the shared Google Doc, shared it, sent out a tweet, and the magic began!

Tweet for Collaboration

In literally seconds, the document began to fill out as people arrived to collaborate or observe. On many occasions, people were booted out as the maximum number of editors had been reached (a number that seems to be around 50 simultaneous users). It was interesting to watch the information emerge. As well, I was fascinated to see others who focused on the formatting and readability of the document. Individuals decided what they could contribute, and worked together for a common goal.

Below is a screencast recorded by Sean Nash of the document as it was being edited minutes after it was tweeted out.

Six hours later, we have hundreds of edits, at least 40 authors (evidenced by the authors that wrote their names on the bottom of the document), and at least sixteen viable alternatives to Delicious with pros/cons listed.

This is a wonderful way to get things done. To me, it’s truly breathtaking to watch and think about what is going on here, and really to consider the geographic distribution of this effort.

However, amazed as I am by what I saw here, this and the Ning example are relatively easy-to-solve problems. I wonder – how well does this kind of crowdsourcing work with deeper, more difficult, or perhaps, more meaningful questions? Thoughts?

You can find the Delicious Alternatives document here.

Need Your Help – unKeynote/Keynode

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Graham Attwell and I have been paired together as co-keynotes at the PLE Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 8-9. The organizers have asked us to do something different than a typical keynote, so we previously asked for feedback on the format. Here are some of the ideas that emerged from that process.

Today, Graham and I met, went through all of the responses, and decided to go with format outlined below. However, to make this work, we would really love your responses. Please help!

How (We Think) the Session is Going to Work:

We have put together a a list of questions (see below) and are inviting your responses. We will put together a joint presentation based on your slides.

We will present the ‘keynote’ together but will be encouraging participants – both face to face and remotely – to contribute to the keynote as it develops.

Where We Need Help:

  1. We’d like you to respond to one or more of these ‘key questions’ found below. We suggest responding through the creation of a (PowerPoint) slide, or creating a very short video (less than 1 minute?). Or, if you can think of another way of representing your ideas, please be creative.
  2. We’d like you to provide questions for us. What did we miss? What are some of the important questions for consideration when exploring PLEs/PLNs in teaching & learning.
  3. Please send your responses to graham10@mac.com (and cc: couros@gmail.com) by July 6/10.]

Key Questions:

  1. With all of the available Web 2.0 tools, is there a need for “educational technology”?
  2. What are the implications of PLEs/PLNs on traditional modes/structures of education?
  3. What are the key attributes of a healthy PLE/PLN?
  4. What pedagogies are inspired by PLEs (e.g., networked learning, connected learning)? Give examples of where PLEs/PLNs have transformed practice.
  5. What are the implications of PLEs/PLNs beyond bringing educational technology into the classroom, and specifically toward workplace/professional learning?
  6. If PLEs/PLNs are becoming the norm, what does it mean for teachers/trainers (or the extension: what does it mean for training teachers & trainers)?
  7. As our networks continue to grow, what strategies should we have in managing our contacts, our connections, and our attention? Or, extension, how scalable are PLEs/PLNs?
  8. Can we start thinking beyond PLEs/PLNs as models? Are we simply at a transitional stage? What will be the next, new model for learning in society? (e.g., where are we headed?)

We’d love to get as many responses as possible to make this work well. It doesn’t have to be much, or anything comprehensive. Just pick up on one of the pieces and let us know what you think on the matter. Again, we need these by July 6/10.

Thanks!!!