Out with the Old, in with the . . . MOOCs?

Recently the semester stared. Without me. I have been a student most of my living memory, so to not be a student this semester is weird. It's throwing me off. So I am looking into ways to continue learning even after my degree. My first approach was TED talks and Khan Academy, but as September has worn on I wanted something that resembled an actual classroom more. So I decided to try out a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). I previously heard about Coursera (thanks, Katie Wilkie!), so I browsed the courses starting soon and found several I found interesting. I narrowed my selection down to the courses that seemed the most interesting to me. Then I enrolled in two: "Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative," which looks at the different ways Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is taken into different media, and "Understanding Media by Understanding Google."

I enrolled in two Coursera classes, and I'm interested to see how they go. A few things that are exciting:

• I get to learn about things I'm interested in, even though I'm not enrolled in a traditional university.
• I get to interact, in real time (or delayed forum-time), with other people interested in learning about the same things that are interesting to me.
• Teaching across this new medium could open up new ways to teach, and more ways to make education available to more people.
• There are people from many places in the world participating in these courses. I hope to learn from the different peoples' perspecitives. One of the MOOCs I'm enrolled in has students from over 150 countries.
• It's free.

But there are some things that make me wonder how this experience will actually work, and how the MOOC format will affect how much I am able to interact with other people and really learn the things the course is about. Here are some of those things:

• There are 44,000 people enrolled in the course. Of those, I suspect only a fraction will stay with it the whole time; let's say a fourth of the people stay. That means that 11,000 people are posting on the forum, on the Google+ group, and participating in the class. There is NO WAY that I, just one student, could keep up with that. Not that I have to. But the constant Google+ notifications and emails are getting annoying, only 3 days into the course.
• With such varied backgrounds, how do we have a starting point? What's the common denominator of people tuning in from all over the world?
• How does a professor truly teach students that he or she never personally interacts with? Or even know the name of?
• Will such a massive scale encourage thought and discussion on topics, or will it be too difficult to monitor even the threads you're participating in?

I'm interested to see how things will pan out. But for now, I see that MOOCs need to work out a few kinks before they take an established place in the world of further education.

Understanding Media by Understanding Google
by Prof. Owen R. Youngman 

And by the way, I structured this HTML mostly on my own! I'm learning HTML5 on Codecademy—I feel awesome.

Beginnings of a New Kind of Publication?

I'm working on a project right now where we're preparing academic articles to be more accessible to a worldwide audience. We've been editing them and preparing them for translation.

Just for a little background information, the main focus of the online publication is on religious articles, but we also want to have other things that are relevant to the church and its history. The purpose is to aid the readers in their religious scholarship by editing academic articles to be more appealing to a lay audience, and also in a way curating articles that might help in the readers' religious study.

The current model is to edit the articles, get the approval of the original publishers and authors, and then publish the articles on a website. The original idea was to create a print publication, but we determined that putting the information on a website met the needs of a wide audience better.

Something that has sat on the back of my mind for a while is that we're making such a great entrance into the world of academic research about our topic, but we're planning on just putting the information out there, then leaving it. That makes a static site, zombie-esque, if you will. We want to generate more interest and discussion than that. And from the digital culture class I took, I know there are so many more ways of using the resource of the internet than just posting and forgetting. I wondered if making the site more interactive would help us meet the purposes of the publication, hopefully in better ways than we thought of before.

So I'm going to pin down some of my ideas here.

We want to encourage connections—between individuals and between ideas.
 Some rights reserved by Sweet Dreamz Design

The purpose of our publication is to encourage people to expand their knowledge of the Church and its doctrine. Our approach is to provide accessible versions of scholarly articles (meaning we shorten them and edit to include global English).

I wonder if we could enhance learning by providing more interactive means on the website. Here are a few things I've been thinking:

• Discussion boards. People could talk about the issues raised by the scholarly articles. A link to the discussion would be provided at the bottom of the article.
• General discussion boards for gospel topics.
• Some ways to connect people with other (online) resources. 
• We want people to be able to create connections, between people and between ideas.
• Other ways to let them interact?
• A connection to social media sites?
• List questions the article raises? (This seems so didactic to me...especially since the information is supposed to be cross-cultural, and people from different backgrounds will probably see different questions in the articles. We don't want to discourage them from participating. How would this be a good thing?)

What are some other ways to create a place where people can come to talk about topics? How would we get the word out? What are ways we can engage people in a community so they can talk about things, not just read them?

Death of the Letter?

Are letters dying? Already dead?

I've heard people lament the death of the art of letter writing, and I'd have to agree that it seems that the way letters were once will probably never be again, at least on that grand of a scale. But I wonder if the lament is more than just a lament of the loss of the cursive, the folding, and the form of the content of the letter. I think what people are usually mourning is the loss of communication and beautiful words that letter-writing signifies.

So does the death of the letter mean that we don't communicate as well as we used to? We are swimming or sinking in a digital world, surrounded by new ways of speaking, new connections with people who see the world differently, and an inundation of words, words, words. Does it mean that we're stuck with "btw" and "lol" instead of more meaningful ways to communicate? Is all of this making us communication-dumb? Is technology making us less human?!

To start with, I don't think that everyone in the Victorian period (some mark that time as the height of letter-writing) was good at writing letters. Why would they need letter-writing guides if everyone naturally did it well?

In a similar vein, I don't think everyone that communicates online does it well or eloquently (sometimes the same thing, sometimes not). I have seen many a poorly-written blog post and many websites that are not helpful at all. But I do think that this change in medium doesn't mean automatic death of our desire as humans to communicate and connect with other people. And so the decline of one medium simply means we will find ways to communicate using our new options.

It's kind of exciting, actually. Whereas before you had to be good at letter-writing or speaking in person (luckily that one never really gets ruled out) to be able to communicate well, now there is a whole array of options to communicate: video chat, email, social networking, forums, and other institution-organized forms of communication. We can communicate with many people at once through video, and unlike the assemblies of old, our message stays up there, as easily seen in ten years as it is this afternoon.

So the actual act of conveying words from one person to another can be facilitated by technology. But what of the quality of those words? Does more words mean less true human connection? I think for some people it can. Some people are intimidated by or disillusioned with technology, so their messages to others and the world get obscured by the medium. But I don't think this is new; I'm sure some people got so caught up (or tripped up) by using the form of letter writing, or were so afraid of using it incorrectly, that they communicated very little. And some who were considered "experts" by the neatness of their writing and the fanciness of their paper might have had very little sense in the content of their letter.

How do we connect in the digital world, not allowing the methods of communication interfere with teh message? How do we make sure our word still carry value, still make connections with other people on the planet, those that share our human condition?