some #oldsmooc-w1 thoughts

Really haven’t had as much time as I would have liked to engage with oldsmooc over the weekend. However, before trying to work out whether there is a project proposal I can get in on and how working on a team for that might be supported, I wanted to have a go at trying to synthesise my thoughts on some others’ thoughts and comments I came across that interested me.

Who knows what took me to these particular thoughts and why they stuck with me but they did. I’ll start with Barry Peddycord III’s “#moocmooc seems to hold that the best learning is emergent and organic. #oldsmooc believes that it should be intentional. Am I close?”. Personally, as an oldsmooc participant and designer, I’m hoping for both emergent organic and intentional and I don’t think either is better, it all depends…

I get the feeling that this emergence/intentional contrast relates to the amount of structure and guidance offered by the course, too much, too little, again depending on who you are and what you want (learner context perhaps). I’m hoping week 2 can be read at various levels and that people will feel free and able to take it, re-design and enact it to their own ends with as much or little structure as they want. Certainly that was the designers’ intention but whether the implementation will facilitate that or get in the way will again depend…

So, on to Learning Design. I like design and learning, so I like the sound of learning design but I guess I’m not very critical about the way people use words and name stuff. I can certainly see why George Roberts said “But, would I call my principles a learning-design approach? I suppose I could, if I had to.” I understand learning design as deliberately trying to influence learner context in ways that afford (possibly new) opportunities to learn, perhaps direct learners attention to these opportunities, and possibly prompt learners to act on these opportunities. Ultimately, the learning will depend on the learners, their actions, and other elements of their context that I can’t design. I also kind of like Stephen Downes’ “I’m thinking maybe they should call it ‘teaching design’, since the focus is on the teacher as, if you will, maestro”, on the The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design, which got some attention early in the oldsmooc. That is not to say I agree though, and also I haven’t yet read the LD on LD carefully yet. I can see how it may feel like learning design is all about how to teach, or create conditions for others to learn but that must also be about modelling and sharing ways of learning and learning through teaching and learning about teaching and hence learning and teaching together. Certainly I’d like to do learning design that helps learners design their learning.

I also found Lesley Shield’s learning journey cloud interesting. Not sure whether what I’m writing here is a journey or a journal. It’s probably just not well thought out and too public, but hey 🙂 What I found more interesting were her thoughts about whether MOOCs are different and if so why they’re different from a multi-user PLE (personal learning environment). I hadn’t thought about it in those terms but in the oldsmooc team design discussion I do seem to remember something like ‘hey but this is a course so it should be offering some kind of path, schedule, objectives, etc.’ (I’m likely mis-quoting this). The thing for me is that that comment did make me think it isn’t just about making some resources available, challenging people with some tasks or questions and hoping people will make their own valuable journeys through these. We should also be trying to guide/direct/steer participants through a journey we feel has (or is likely to have) value. So, I guess a design challenge for me became how do you offer that kind of structure and simultaneously encourage people not to be constrained by your path and to create their own courses (collaboratively or individually). So to return to collaborative PLE = MOOC, I don’t think so. I think of PLEs/PLNs as environments with many and varied affordances for learning trajectories, whereas courses (including MOOCs) are about trying to promote (more or less specified) trajectories through those environments (exploiting the affordances).

I’m sort of hoping people will feel they are invited to do that in week 2. Copy the page, delete, re-arrange, re-schedule, plot your own path, use as much /as little of it as you like, use different tools to do the same/to do different… and at the end of the week feel they have done something useful and relevant for their learning/teaching design practice.