I suddenly realized this morning that many of my early “blog posts”, from way back when I first started engaging in online Connectivist Learning, are potentially “wasted resources” if I do not now go back, revisit them, harvest them, and curate them into some semblance of documentation. The concept of Metacognitive Learning (Flavell, 1976) is well established, but the Learning Protocols, -ie- the how-to-do-it-STePs for Metacognitive Learning, are NOT commonly known. In other words, there aren’t many DIY textbooks out there entitled – “How to embark in self Metacognitive Learning”.
So, I have decided to start a personal effort to revisit the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that I took last year, where I first embarked in Connectivist Learning. I want to “harvest” the MOOC platform by copy-pasting some of the key aha-moment blogs that I had posted in that platform, and re-post them here, in my public blog. I will then document my Metacognitive reflections of what I now (today) have learned since those original blogs. These documentations will form a data repository for qualitative research analysis, and will (hopefully) spark potential article publications by myself and/or other collaborators/readers. I welcome anyone who reads this blog to utilize the data that I am posting here, for the purposes of learning and publishing about learning.
FYI, my virgin MOOC was a course by Stanford University titled “Designing a New Learning Environment” (DNLE). The platform on which that MOOC was hosted, is NovoED, previously known as VentureLab.
The following is the first blog that I am “harvesting” from DNLE.
Copy-pasted from my DNLE Personal Journal from 8 months ago
https://novoed.com/education/blog_posts/user/59471
https://novoed.com/education/blog_posts/6897?data_type=post
Potential research stemming from this MOOC (DNLE)
This post was originally posted as a response to a discussion in another thread. I am copy-pasting it here, as it highlights the potential for (additional) research to be carried out, based on this DNLE MOOC “experiment”.
The topic of online terminology, connotations, culture, context, and syntax…. this is an area of study of personal interest to me. I had been researching the impact of these variables on human task performance for awhile now. In my studies, I also looked at the differences between what impacts a native monolingual English speaker, versus what impacts a native bilingual speaker (someone who truly was raised with two languages from birth), versus what impacts a person who speaks English as a second language.
Context has a different impact when it is listed as part of a task instruction, or issued by the instructor, or by persons of official authority in a context, or when posted by a peer.
The use of vocabulary, its impact on readers, and its application in purposeful subliminal messaging, has been studied and published extensively in the field of advertising. But it has not yet been researched or published much in the field of instructional design. Also, what little that has been studied, has always been in the context of the western world. Now, with global online MOOCS, I personally think this area of study needs to be addressed in the context of various international cultures.
Why, just look at THIS MOOC alone… if you sift through the many journals, forums and projects (and I don’t mean just the popular active threads… take a look at the many projects by bilingual and non-English speaking students), you can see an array of language sentence structures, and the evident impact (positive or negative) that certain posts convey.
Just through accidental discovery, I have encountered at least a dozen or so posts that had been “misread” or “differently-interpreted” due to differences in language syntax. Imagine if someone actually purposefully looked at that phenomenon as a bonafide research question…
I think someone should use this MOOC to do a study on that.
i12LOL! 