Watch the Footage

Anyone taking any MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses?

This year, there have been an explosion of these, and they're poised to shake up higher education.

For example, this article provides some background:

The Year of the MOOC
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/educa ... wanted=all

"The evolving form knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social networking. Unlike its antecedent, open courseware — usually written materials or videotapes of lectures that make you feel as if you’re spying on a class from the back of the room — the MOOC is a full course made with you in mind."

In fact, I recently took a MOOC on Gamification: https://www.coursera.org/#course/gamification I've only made it through about half the lectures -- a common trend in MOOCs, where a relatively small percentage of those who enroll finish the course.

That's a pattern that I think ARGs could be a solution to. By providing more adaptive, storyline-driven content, lectures, reading, and other forms of research could be drawn into the mix. In fact, between EC and TWWF, there's a good mix of those things already! It's partly a matter of how such a combination is marketed.

Thoughts on any of that? Have any of you delved into the world of MOOCs?

I wasn't familiar with MOOCs. They sound interesting, a new idea with the potential to become a significant part of our culture, depending on how they develop.

Since I have no experience with them I can't really speak to the efficacy of combining them with ARGs other than to say that I'd love to see what happens when someone tries.

Yes, MOOCs are really shaping up higher education. Many top tier schools are offering them, free, and something like 2 million people have signed up for the few hundred courses so far.

This paragraph is telling:

The Coming Age Of The Teaching Megastar
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarsha ... -megastar/
However, just as the independence of the film star loosened the iron grip of the studio system, so too the independence of the star professor will loosen the grip of the collegiate tenure system. While the roots of this transformation go back several years, the rise of the celebrity academic became clear this past fall when Stanford Professor and Google Fellow (he of the self-driving “robocar”) Sebastian Thrun opened up his Stanford class on artificial intelligence to online students the world over. The class was free, interactive, and hugely popular. 160,000 students logged into Thrun’s lectures. Ever the disruptor, Thrun realized that he could make more money and enjoy greater freedom outside the university than within it. Moreover, his students would learn more if he could escape the “lecture trap,” and develop online tools that generated greater interactivity, as well as quicker, more meaningful testing and feedback. As Thrun colorfully put it, “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again. I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”


More proof that tropes are now part of real life, and the blur between fiction and reality goes beyond TWWF. Traditionally, seeing real life as "larger than life" is often considered a delusion, or at least Wide-Eyed Idealism. It gets into that whole Sliding Scale of Cynicism and Idealism, but many people are aiming to change the world through education, and technology, including narrative technology, makes that makes things possible that have never been seen before.

One aspect of that is the explosion of mobile devices, and social media, around the world. Sebastian Thrun, for example, was partly so inspired by his interactions with students around the world, and in the process of running the course, he got both praise and criticism, and responded to it with a change in how he thought about education in general.

One of several MOOCs I'm taking is called Designing A New Learning Environment, from Stanford's Venture Lab. Just like the others I'm in, I'm not fully immersed in completing each course, but I'm picking and choosing lectures and assignments that I can weave into my own learning process. Even engaging with Mr. Administrator and Echo Chamber is, in a way, like being in a course, however unintentional, as I've learned a lot just with what I've watched so far.

This video from this course seems relevant:
DNLE Week 7: 1001 Stories Project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ocVbZQLMT8
"I loaded multimedia stories, and singalong songs, in Spanish, onto mobile devices, and gave them to the children there. Since they didn't have television or radios or any electronic devices, they didn't know what the mobile devices were for. I told them that I needed their help to figure out what the objects were. They agreed to help me figure them out. At first, they were grinding the devices on the ground, or hitting the devices with rocks. My heart was sunken, but I patiently watched them. All of a sudden, one of the children accidentally turned on the device, by pressing and holding the power button for two seconds. Since that moment, everything changed. All other children flocked to the child and asked what he did. The child explained what he did to a few others, and they exchanged their own know-hows among themselves. The spread of knowledge dissemination was incredible. In less than 20 minutes, about 35 children were able to play stories on the devices... That was my first mobile learning project, and realization of the possibility of delivering a simple pedagogical model maximizing experiential learning, and collective problem solving with mobile devices."

I that story actually makes me think of the challenge of all of us figuring out how to engage with TWWF and ARGs and MOOCs and tropes in general.

I find more and more people referencing movie scenes and tropes within their everyday lives, especially people who are looking to change how education works, to be more student-centric and better prepare people for real life. Yet so few people are familiar with the power of understanding tropes, which let people step back from simply identifying with a particular scene or character, and re-create their own story to be fuller and richer, including the stories they co-create with others in their lives, personally or professionally.