I was reading a post that I came across on Change MOOC this last week, the title was Can Educational Research be both Rigorous and Relevant? This article was an interesting read for both people who are researchers and people who are practitioners. The main theme of the article is that research articles have been rigorous enough to pass peer-review but they haven't necessarily had an impact; and at the end of the day impact is what matters.

In general, I agree with the overall tones of the article. We do see a lot of research published these days - the article cites something like 1300 (approx.) education related journals in existence, and even if they had just one issue per year (which most don't) that's a lot of reading. The other figure that really stuck with me was that only 40% of those articles tend to get cited in other subsequent publications.

Two things come to mind here. While it is true that not all articles don't get cited, at least not right away, that doesn't mean that they aren't valuable to someone. Looking at my own citation index on Google Scholar I can see a big fat zero in terms of who's cited my articles. At the same time, I know that there are people who have used my articles, but their work doesn't require citation (at least in any way that citation counting services measure). I am also a young scholar, which means that I probably won't have much (if any) citations anytime soon. That doesn't discourage me from research and publishing on my own, and with the MRT.

The other thing that comes to mind is teacher, and professional preparation. It has been my experience that teacher prep, and even professional instructional designer preparation has been mostly a review of selected works that count as canon for that profession. Students aren't always encouraged to think outside the box (at least as far as the literature goes) and aren't encouraged to critique and think about the literature in a critical fashion. Once people graduate that also tends to be the end of their learning from research and access to research in many cases.

If we want research to have impact we ought to encourage our educational professionals to not just attend trainings and workshops for professional development points, but also encourage them to start looking at the research literature on their own and seeing what can apply to their own classrooms and environments. It's only through this that we will get more impact from our research literature. Our current model of waiting for certain gate-keepers (i.e. the people that train educational professionals in workshops and higher education classrooms) isn't working.

I don't follow the main presenters much on Change11 any more, partly because of the gaps in the schedule, and partly because some things seem like repetitions of previous topics...and partly because I started a new job and have little time.  I do however follow the daily newsletter and when I see posts from people that I've interacted with in the past, like Jenny, Jupidu, Jaap and Serena I put them on my reading list.  This week Jupidu's and Serena's posts piqued my interest in IEML.

I had come across Jupidu's post on Sensemaking in a MOOC a while back, but I haven't had much time to respond to it just yet (until now I guess ;-)  ).  I was actually thinking of my participation in MOOCs in general; as well as the two MOOCs I am now participating in - those being Change11 and DS106.  I was actually thinking of points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in specifically and I thought I would do a bit of compare and contrast between the two:

• Sensemaking works around identity creation – in every environment f2f or virtual I’m building my identity and this “self” is in continuous interaction with the environment and with the other learners as well.
• Sensemaking works retrospective – I’m making sense out of experiences reflecting about them, as I’m doing it now with this article I want to write. And therefore sensemaking is influenced by my memory of situations.
• Sensemaking is social – of course it is in the Mooc! I’m a kind of aware of some the learners who participate in the Mooc, who write in their blogs, twitter, discuss, think about the questions of the experts, reflect the online sessions, relate the inputs to their daily work, comment their ideas, …
• Sensemaking is ongoing - yes, of course, we are in the middle of something, reinventing learning, cooperating … and at the moment we don’t know how this Mooc actually works – and we, all the Mooc participants try to make their individuell “sense” out of the Mooc

Even though DS106 does have a wonderful WordPress based community, I tend to not go on there as much to see what my fellow students are up to.  Part of this is a function of time - I don't have a lot of it, and the daily email recap that I get from Change11 does give me the headlines and I can pursue things in depth from there if I wish (this is in-fact how I found jupidu's post).  This mechanic influences how social I am.  While the DS106 tag does make my post harvestable by the DS106 elves that work in the background, it doesn't necessarily mean that I will be going to the site as often, which means I tend to be less social (than I should).  This means that, for me, DS106, sense-making is less social and more of a solitary activity.  Sure, there is some social element, but not as much as MobiMOOC, Change11, and CCK11 for example.

Sense-making is retrospective indeed, in more ways than one!  For example, looking at DS106 assignments, I find that there are quite a few of them that I've done in the past just by experimenting, but I didn't know that it was digital storytelling at that point.  It's a great opportunity to go back, pull some of those projects (or candid shots) and tell a story around them - a "making of" type of thing and perhaps how I've grown and learned more since then.

I guess, in the end, my sense-making in a MOOC works on a MOOC-by-MOOC basis.  While the underlying mechanisms may be the same, they act differently depending on what sort of situation I am in :-)

My video introduction to the research methods course (for instructional designers) that I am teaching this semester came in.  Yay!  Even though I think I could have benefited from some make-up, the video came out pretty good.  (if the embedded player isn't working, here is the direct link to the video introduction)

While I am not the biggest of Blackboard cheerleaders, using Blackboard Coursesites (with Mobile Learn enabled!) has really had a big influence in changing my perceptions of how good blackboard can be. Our evaluation instance this past summer, due in large part to our migrated courses looking like a truck ran over them, didn't inspire confidence, but my usage of coursesites over the past nine months makes videos like these give me a warm and fuzzy feeling (as both an instructional designer and an instructor).

This is my first semester teaching (yay!) and since we're eventually migrating to Blackboard Lean 9 on my campus I've decided to be part of a pre-pilot using Coursesites (fantastic and free service, by the way, if you are looking for a free LMS).

One of the perks of coursesites, that briefly was taken away from us last year but is now back, is access to Blackboard Mobile on iOS, Android and Blackberry (hopefully a windows phone version soon?).  In any case, since I don't have a computer at home that I regularly have access to, I tend to use my iPad and Blackboard Mobile to keep on top of things.  While Bb Mobile is a great app, it does have a few shortcomings that I hope Blackboard addresses in the near future.  Some of it is (or should be) easy to implement, while other things might need a little more work on the back end to make feasible.  So here is my laundry list:

What's New and Due
This is a great feature of Bb Learn - it essentially gives you (student and instructors) the ability to see what's new in the course you are taking (or teaching).  Announcements, calendar items, tasks to-do, as well as new discussion board forums, new assignments, and new content are easily available in a new dashboard format.  In Bb Learn however you are just given a "view in browser" link.  Now while the iPad may be OK the iPhone and other narrow screen devices are not.  It should be easy for Blackboard (Bb from here on out) to make this data easily accessible and format it for the appropriate display. It shouldn't be a "view in browser" feature, but rather should be integrated into the app.

Attachments (dropbox integration):
The nice thing (at least on iOS) is that in discussion posts (and I assume blogs and journals) you're able to add attachments to your posts.  The only problem is that the only type of attachment you can have up to now is a photo, which is pretty limiting.  If I had dropbox integration I'd be able to attach documents that I have on my dropbox into my blackboard course so that my students could use them.  Or, if I were a student, I could submit a paper that I have stored on dropbox for a course assignment.

Course wiki, Messages & Live Classroom:
Nice features, but they suffer from the "view in browser" issue that What's New and Due suffers from.  This needs to be addressed.  In addition, Live classroom is based on Blackboard connect (formerly Elluminate) which means that you need Java to run things. There needs to be some sort of iOS client for these types of synchronous conferencing tools.


Assignments, and Grading:
Assignments suffer from the "view in browser" issue that What's New and Due suffers from, obviously there needs to be something native for mobile to access and submit assignments, preferably with some sort of Dropbox integration so that students can submit their assignments via mobile.  There are a number of word processing (and note taking) apps that leverage dropbox on iOS as their storage mechanism, so it would make sense for Bb mobile to be able to pull files from dropbox as valid items for submissions.
Grading is not an available option on mobile.  Canvas (a competitor LMS) has a nice app (SpeedGrader) that allows you to log into your course, see what's submitted, annotate it, comment on it, and grade it, all from the comfort of your iPad.  With apps like GoodReader having shown us that is it possible to annotate, save and re-sync PDFs into your online storage location of choice (and with Canvas' precedent), I don't see why there aren't any instructor friendly options in Bb mobile.  Now granted, it's early in the semester and papers haven't come in yet (give it another month), but it would be nice to know that I don't need to go to a desktop to receive papers, annotate them, and send them back to students with their grades. This stuff should be seamless on a tablet :-)

Discussions, Groups & Assignments (creation):
Not doable on Bb mobile, you do get the "view in browser" option which does work remarkably well, however it would be nice to get some native functionality to create new discussions while on mobile (something that doesn't require opening a browser window), creating a new assignment, and creating groups on the go.  It seems like Bb mobile has been created with course management in mind (at least to some extent) once all the hard work of setting up the course has already been done through a desktop/full browser client.  It would be nice to see some of that functionality trickle down to the tablet (without having to squint at the screen) :-)

I haven't yet read the Web 2.0 Storytelling chapter on DS106 - I've skimmed through it and it looks pretty interesting -I think it's going to go on my spring break reading list (so sometime in March).  I did however (quickly) go over the O'Reily "what is Web 2.0" and the educause 7 things of Creative Commons (which admittedly I have read before but not in a long time).

My main thought about Web 2.0 is that we ought to not be calling it "Web 2.0" but rather just call it "the web."  Perhaps back in the early to mid 2000s when this stuff was new it was useful to differentiate how the "old' web was different from the "new" web.  The new web however has been with us for quite some time now, so it's no longer new.  As a matter of fact any newness is iterative, a "Web 2.0.010" if you will. We don't pay attention to iterations (no matter how amazing they are) we just use them - so why fixate on the "two point oh" part?  To be clear, I am not bashing O'reilly, but rather I am making a general commentary on our internet using society and how we've latched on to "two point oh".

This reminds me of a parallel in consumer electronics.  The iPad 2 is no longer called "the iPad 2", but rather it's called the iPad.  Back in 2007 I was listening to a podcast on video games.  Up to that point they referred to the XBOX 360, Playstation 3 and Wii as "next generation consoles", but those devices had already been to market for 2 or more years, so the hosts of this podcast (correctly) pondered when does one stop calling something "next gen" when it is so obviously "current gen".  Next gen (and by extension "two point oh") mean something new, something that wasn't the case before.  "Two point oh" has become current gen, and it's time to just take it as the norm :-)

As far as creative commons goes I love the concept. More people, especially academics, need to be releasing their work as creative commons.  I released my Master's capstone project under a CC license with the hope that other language teachers (of the Greek language) would use it as a template and expand on it to create new college level curriculum.  Having knowledge (and items of cultural significance) stuck behind a copyright wall is a travesty.

I was reading an article on the technologizer the other day, on why history needs piracy, which made some pretty valid points - not that piracy is good, but rather that anti-piracy laws and crazy copyright are preventing the archiving and preservation of important cultural works (namely computer software).  If more people released their works under CC, or if companies took copyrighted materials that they have obviously abandoned because they are not economically viable, and released them under a CC license those things would be saved and experienced by future generations (or the current generation that didn't have the privileged position to experience them in the first place).

Of course, having said that, change is hard, and existing structures are not easy to break away from unless you are really determined and unless others are right there with you, supporting you and acting ina similar manner :-)