Moocaholic

rhizo14My name is Sarah and I am a MOOCaholic

Only joking, well sort of.

This post has been brewing for a while and it’s been sparked off again by some discussions in our #rhizo14 Facebook group.  I posted a link to one of Martin Weller’s blog posts and the comment that one of his graphs:

shows that if you get to 12+ weeks it’s probably just some bloke in a shack in Arkansas left

This amused me greatly, as we’re just going in to week 12 of this crazy roller coaster experience, and we’re still carrying on.  Anyway, it’s got a few of us thinking about why we sign up for MOOCs and why we drop out from some and there’ll probably be some messy* writing about it at some point.

So – why do I sign up for MOOCs?  Well, initially it was to find out about them and see how they were going to affect HE, and also to sneak a peek at the various platforms that were being used.  I’d sign up, sniff around and probably not interact at all.  And then suddenly, bang!  I got hooked.  I know who to blame.  It’s that Dave and the gang.  I’m loving being part of such an exuberant community, never knowing what we’ll be talking about next but knowing it will engage me.

So that’s why I do MOOCs. I do them because I love finding out new things and meeting new people, and MOOCS are a great way of doing that.  It’s more about the Twitter hashtags and Facebook/G+ conversations for me than the courses themselves, but I’ve finished one other MOOC (FutureEd) since starting #rhizo14 so it is the content as well, to some extent.

Talk to you soon. 🙂

* “messy” is not a derogatory term in #rhizo14

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30 Responses to Moocaholic

  1. balimaha says:

    Haha loved this Sarah! If we all blog our MOOCahloic posts i won,t need IRB approval 🙂
    I did actually introduce myself once like that “my name is Maha and I’m a MOOCaholic” – i also recently added it to my twitter profile 🙂 Will post one of these myself soon as well

  2. scottx5 says:

    So if we stay off FB and on our blogs we skip needing permissions to publish? Does that mean I need to comment only on MY dusty old half inflated platform or is here OK?
    For me it’s people in the MOOCs. Even the imaginary people in my world are boring and I desperately need evidence of intelligent life. Not all MOOCs are the same. Some seem to to want only part of you–the socially constructed you invulnerable and unreal. “Other” MOOCs (like Rhizo14) offer irresistible opportunities to embarrass yourself, regret things you said and somehow turn out alright. Somewhere we need to be ourselves–complete. Summer camp of the Soul.

    • balimaha says:

      Hey, we could all just comment here on Sarah’s blog (and increase her comment count exponentially hehe) and that’s the meat of an article all in public! All we need to do is provide a discussion and draw common threads amongst each person’s ideas. Whoever is on wordpress can just ping back to Sarah’s and the link to their blog will appear as a comment here… Sounds good? I might just be lazy and write the whole comment here,though. Tomorrow maybe.

      • scottx5 says:

        Is it possible to get too distributed and lost? I’ve felt that sometimes in courses that require blogging. I wonder how people’s voices change when commenting on other’s blogs over the more declarative posting on your own blog?

      • Haha, that sounds good. Scott – as long as it is in the public domain it’s fine. So your blog, my blog, Maha’s blog … all of our blogs. I also agree, Scott, about disliking courses where I am told to blog as a course requirement. Things like ds106 also scare me. I want to like them but the daily create is off putting.

      • VanessaVaile says:

        Use the re-blog feature, add water (comment), stir (click re-blog button) — instant blog post. When you running multiple blogs and trying for 3-4 posts a day (before you can even look at or think about blogging rhizo14), that’s not lazy. It’s survival (or madness)

    • Love that… summer camp for the soul. 🙂

  3. sensor63 says:

    I have the impression that we must worry about children who do nothing but play all day, cats who sleep all day, and apparently grown up people who waste their expensively developped intellects shed-in shady parts of the states-discussion.

    It is outrageous and you clearly didn’t learn your lessons at school. Civilization is clearly going down hill.

    1000 lines for the lot of you.

  4. I didn’t think anything could wean me off my addictions to Detective Fiction and too many TV cop shows… Then came MOOCs. My name is Danceswithcloud and I am …
    I have been so lucky to join in with the great people in #edcmooc and #rhizo14 – and the great content in the different #artmoocs that I have done.
    I love the #artmoocs – and they have stretched me to produce misshapen pieces in different media – AND – to bring great new ideas into my practice…
    But I am sustained by the people I have *met* here!

    • balimaha says:

      hey Sandra, “sustained” is such a good word. I can’t stop thinking about it. Yes, oh yes, rhizo14 has sustained me! oh yes… oh my God I can’t stop thinking about this… blog post coming up!!!

      • scottx5 says:

        Hey Maha, you can reference “Inspiring Sustainable Behaviour: 19 Ways to Ask for Change” by Oliver Payne. Used to think of sustaining something as preserving values by not using things up–a kind of maintenance thing. Sustaining as an act of nourishing the acts of wonder and curiosity is way cooler. I’ve only read a small part of the book but particularly liked the notion of asking as a form of persuasion.

  5. Pingback: What Makes this MOOCaholic Complete MOOCs | Reflecting Allowed

  6. Ronald says:

    I’m a MOOCaholic too. Not just for the people though, because of the 7 MOOCs I finishedd, only in the cMOOCs like rhizo14 and EDC the discussions survived after the end of the course.

    Many MOOCs are excellent from a content point of view. Eg. on Coursera: Gamification, SDT, Human history, Human Evolution. All more than excellent courses where I learned so much from wonderful and stimulating teachers.

    • Lenandlar says:

      Hi Ronald, every now and again we will run into a great “content” MOOC. i have done some good ones on Statistics and a few leadership things.
      We need to be “MOOC Smart” – and i think the more we jump into (and fall out of) the “smarter” we become.

  7. VanessaVaile says:

    Reblogged this on MOOC Madness and commented:
    this should ‘splain it, the madness too

  8. Just this afternoon, I went back and forth from work and you guys, the entire afternoon. And I love it. I feel like I have found my tribe. I am hooked for life. Thank you for writing this lighthearted and sincere post on…us!
    Hear, hear, Sarah! To rhizo14!

  9. Me too, Clarissa, me too 😀

  10. Lenandlar says:

    I am glad we are doing this. As an educator, i always felt like there’s much to learn from MOOCs wrt pedagogy. So one of the things i go into a MOOC looking for (yes i go in deliberately many times) is the “how” of the course – ie the way the course is done. I try to pick up things that i can use in my own teaching. And yes we can pick up many things from the bad practices too. We tend to get to see what works and what fails in reality. We may not have this luxury with our own courses. MOOCs are a big experiment that education can learn a lot from, i think.

    • VanessaVaile says:

      I’m in and on the edges of too many moocs, all kinds (already too varied to map with neat boundary lines) largely for that same purpose — looking for the how. There is the Tao of Pooh: this, the How of MOOC. I want to see how they work or not, what parts work best, how educators adapt/adopt models or just selected features.

      So what are we going to do with it? I am reminded of the very, very old joke about the Great Dane that chased sports cars. Then he caught one but didn’t know what to do with it. Add the What of MOOC to that list. I have two. One is part of my precarious academic labor advocacy gig: addressing the mooc misinformation cycle and getting my colleagues past uninformed denial. 

      The other is using OER and bits and pieces of MOOCs for self-paced community learning/enrichment/DIY How-to/PD outreach program.

      I have my own set of Hows to address about both. Fortunately, the Whys are clearer. Now back to sharing a cool looking Community Gardening Pinterest board on one of my community pages

      ________________________________

  11. jaapsoft2 says:

    Dear Sarah
    You applied for the badge.

    YOu do have a right to the badge http://badges.p2pu.org/en/badge/view/304/
    On the page http://badges.p2pu.org/en/badge/view/304/ is in the description The badge is only for student who judges to have earned the badge. You are the only one who can tell if you deserve the badge
    You may copy the badge and paste it where ever you like.

    Have the badge and be happy

    Jaap Bosman

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