A librarian lurking in a MOOC

I'm paying attention to the discussion fora on Duke's English Composition I course taught by Denise Comer and offered through Coursera. I'm looking for places that an embedded librarian might intervene. Why? I'm interested in the role that information literacy plays in MOOCs in general. More specifically I'm on board as staff librarian with writingcommons.org (http://writingcommons.org)which is being used as one of the resources for the Duke course. What other information could writingcommons.org include in order to help students taking MOOCs? Here's a few things that I've answered:

How do I copyright my work? This was not the "how do I cite work and avoid plagiarizing" - but "how do I copyright works of fiction that I myself have written?" I explained how it's done in the U.S, but I'm not certain this student was a U.S. citizen.

There was a question about how to search for open access resources. Another student helped out with that and I chimed in as well with some ideas.

How do I find recent research on child development? I explained how to find some research using open access services - and made some suggestions about finding recent articles if you are affiliated or near a library.

How can I find glossaries for various academic disciplines - specifically social work? (In the case the student is a non-native English speaker.) I listed some sites and explained how I identified them.

What about political correctness and academic writing? I turned up an interesting web site from University of Leicester and asked the students to take a look to see what they thought about it.

I'll try to keep track of whatever else gets "librarian" answer from me.

I've let the Duke librarians know that I'm in there being nosy. Any other librarians embedded in their MOOCs and answering questions wearing their librarian hat?

A MOOC - Oprah's Lifeclass

A MOOC: Oprah Lifeclass is starting this evening on the OWN television station. It will be on Monday evenings 8pm ET http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/oprahs-lifeclass.html Oprah is teaching life lessons based on her 25 years broadcasting the Oprah show. The first session has to do with ego. The course includes the following components: Broadcast content (supported by commercial advertising); a live question and answer session after the broadcast; an interactive web site; questionnaires; a guided workbook for daily work; a space on the web site for My Notes; a Facebook page 14213 people had checked in to today's class (when I checked about 8pm) 9537 people had signed in for the interactive session. 2000+ people had already logged in 38 minutes before the Q&A is to start. 11 million people around the world took Oprah's first course. It will be interesting to see how this course shapes up. Will the reviewers like it? Will the students stick with the course?

I plan to join the eduMOOC 2011 live session 2pm Eastern http://goo.gl/cjXFR so I've been trying to catch up on some Google Group discussion. Wayne Macintosh and others are talking about MOOCs in relation to the OER University which includes granting credit for learning... wherever. eduMOOC "“Online Learning Today...and Tomorrow" has no learning objectives/outcomes... It has a name, a list of topics, and a gaggle of means of tracking what others are up to. We're all inventing our own reasons for being there. (A couple of people have talking about their own learning objectives.) That means if we wanted credit, we would have to... write our own? So... if I decided I wanted to go get an education degree, how would I document the work that I might do as part of eduMOOC? Are there any ways to assist students in figuring out how to present the work done in eduMOOC? I guess I'm talking about learning to make an e-portfolio... ?
https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/ #eduMOOC

P.S. I did get to the session and the portfolio question came up among the twitterers and it's going to be discussed.

Self-directed learning or networked-learning?

George Siemens in Moving beyond self-directred learning: Network-directed learning (http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=307) considers participants in MOOCs. Participants need to be self-directed - i.e. self-reliant. However acting along results in some partipants getting overwhelmed by a sea of postings and a wealth of information. Siemens suggests that networked-learning might be a better concept though I'm not sure he explains how that might be accomplished in a massive online course. Siemens mentions Wendy Drexler's Networked Student video which describes a student working on his own - who might get some comments from others, but it doesn't look like he's getting much help from anyone - though the teacher is finally mentioned at the end of the video. The teacher helps the student search for information, evaluate the information he finds, teaches the student how to approach experts, etc. Is that "networked learning"? (Speaking of course set-up: I'm enjoying MobiMOOC because there's enough traffic on the Google Group that I can track of the conversation of some very active participants. Going from blog to blog AND checking out discussion forums AND Facebook AND Twitter AND...and, and, and... doesn't feel much like a conversation. I'm sorry but blogs just don't feel like a discussion to me. In any case it gets to be a lot of work to track down all the places that participants are contributing. It's user choice, but makes it difficult to find out who's doing what. I'm doing my usual mostly-a-lurker routine in MobiMOOC, but I'm getting a lot out of it because there's a lot of discussion going on in one space - the Google Group.)

MobiMOOC April 2-14, 2011

Let's just jump around and participate in lots of things and get distracted... I signed up for mobiMOOC - an open course on mobile learning. Some participants have already mentioned using mobile devices for knowledge creation (sending messages between class members, taking photos, videos, etc.) as well as information access. There was mention of using open standards. (I understand the rationale, but if you can do a project with iPhones and there's an app for that... If you get a set of iPads for your students, refuse to use them?) This course is worth a look!

mobiMOOC April 2 +, 2011
http://mobimooc.wikispaces.com/a+MobiMOOC+hello!
MobiMOOC Google Group
Contents:
- Week 1 - introduction to mLearning
- Week 2 - planning an mLearning project
- Week 3 - m4d mobile for development
- Week 4 - Leading edge innovations
- Week 5 - Interaction between mLearning and a mobile connected society
- Week 6 - mLearning in k12

The CCK11 MOOC responsibilities

Ed Techie Martin Weller writes What is the learner responsibility in open education? about giving a presentation for CCK11. He sounds disappointed that some participants asked "how does this relate to the course?" He points out that since he was giving the session for free, he did not feel compelled to tweek his presentation to make a perfect fit with CCK11 objectives. That's a plausible attitude for a volunteer presenter, but he seems to have expected the participants to accept the material without questioning its utility since it was free. A "this is good enough because the course is free" attitude... That would doom open courses to the trash heap for sure. Don't the course organizers and presenters have a responsibility to create a coherent set of experiences? I think the CCK creators DO present an excellent group of materials even though the course is free to those of us who want to drop in and out - though,... there's certainly a lot of criticism of those participants who don't "give back." (Another possibility about those tweets: Some of the "how does it fit in?" tweets might have really been reflective and not critical of the presentation.) The comments to Weller's post are interesting.

(Presentations for CCK11 at http://cck11.mooc.ca/recordings.htm)

P.S. I like the layout of the CCK11 site a lot better than the last go-around!

PLEK 12 Personal Learning Environments for Inquiry in K-12

Another MOOC: Wendy Drexler gave such an interesting presentation for PLENK2010, that I may have to drop in on her course PLEK12 "EDG6931 Personal Learning Environments for Inquiry in K12" that's running from February 7 through the end of March.
Weekly Content; Syllabus; her blog; Teach Web 2.0 Wiki. Christopher Sessums is a teaching partner for the course. (One reason I'm already impressed: They talked University of Florida into letting them run an open course!)

What's wrong with MOOCs?

George Siemens asks "what's wrong with MOOCs?" The premise is that MOOCs are so intrinsically interesting/enjoyable/fascinating that all participants will push aside all other activities and responsibilities and devote themselves to the MOOC. MOOCs by nature of their openness and willingness to embrace technology are more engaging. However it seems that isn't true for everyone. There is a high dropout rate. The plethora of tools used can be confusing. Even though making social connections is key, many participants feel lost, disconnected, uneasy about having their say. Comments on this piece mentioned language barriers and time zone issues. In some cases the MOOC may be achieving results that can't be tracked. Some posters indicate that at least some participants are using lessons learned. George is concerned that there is over-reliance on the instructors as experts. Hmmm...What if it turns out that "course" with a start/stop date, some specified software, some content (readings/media) experienced by the entire group - with students providing some artifacts (i.e. papers, discussion threads, blog postings, videos, etc.) that are indicative of learning is like...an OK structure?

a MOOC flunkie

Not a "flunkie" as in "a lowly assistant" - more like a dropout, Matt Crosslin posts that he has never completed a single MOOC. He finds them complicated to follow and questions the reliance on peers who might not be subject experts. He wonders how you know if you've connected with a good group or not? He says "I think I also just see the MOOC as the technology-driven, socially-networked version of the cattle-herd lecture hall courses so prevalent on college campuses today." Stephen Downes comments that Cousslin's objections to confusion over the structure of MOOCs are "a bit silly - after all, you have to learn to read to take just about any course, and that's a lot more preparation than watching a four-minute video. Perhaps it's difficult for Crosslin because there's so much unlearning to do." Hmmm... Maybe... but that just blames the learner and it's just a way to shuffle off criticism: If students find your course confusing, perhaps there's some ways to make less confusing. At the very least, acknowledge that the course IS confusing!