CogBlogged Tagged ‘cck08’

I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as “Facebook for Academia” and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is “universities” at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then… I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and [...]

Doh! I wrote this two days ago and forgot to click publish! n00b! It’s the first week of classes for the Connectivism and Connected Knowledge course and I am already lapsing behind. As a Massively Open Online Course, maybe I cna get lost in the crowd of 2000 gazillion students. Would you believe a dog ate my homework? Despite my success at gaming the school system on high school and college (meant- learning how to take standardized tests well), I’ve become a sloppy lazy learner in my adult years. I have a lot of trouble with structured courses because… everything I have learned in my last 16 years on the ed tech field has been through what my teachers are going to call Connectivism- I learned what I needed, when I needed, from networked sources. I did miss the first emails, overlooking I had to sign up to get them. [...]