In this video, I'm going to go through a conceptual model of cMOOCs,
based on my experience with a number of MOOCs,
but particularly the Learning Creative Learning cMOOC
that's currently running at Mitch Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten Group
at the MIT Media Lab.
So - so a couple of things, before I'm getting started here:
This is just an experiment, like LCL: I hope people take it.
in the spirit I make it, which I'm just playing around with ideas.
As I get down into the model, the cubes you see represent the roles we play
It's important to remember that, that they represent
like the whole person just representing certain things that - certain roles that each of us take on.
Reality is vastly more complex than the model I present here,
so this is just a little attempt to just try to get an understanding of MOOCs
with a subset of the reality that is a cMOOC.
This model - this conceptual model certainly derives
the work of George Siemens and Steven Downes
who were the people who made the first MOOC - or developed the idea of MOOCs
and as you can see from the two tweets above, at the top of the screen,
George Siemens certainly is not opposed to the idea
of viewing the networks that are created in MOOCs as similar to networks of neurons
and Stephen Downes has explicitly said that he was thinking of neural networks
when he was developing MOOCs.
So, with those caveats, let's get started.
So this is an overview, in the background here, of MIT.
Sorry, Cambridge from the left, Boston on the right, Charles River over here,
and MIT is just under that - those white dots.
So, let's go and take a look.
So, here I have the artifacts that have been created by the MOOC,
some of them again, right, not all of them.
Here I have sort of the cloud of us, of the participants in the MOOC,
again, representing our roles as MOOC participants, not the entirety of our entity.
And then down here these dots represent people at MIT.
So, this is the Media Lab,
this is Mitch Resnick's group here,
these are other groups, other buildings at MIT
and again, right, this is just a small set, subset of reality.
There are literally, you know, hundreds of these groups at MIT,
thousands of students at MIT, it's just one university in dozens of universities in Boston and Cambridge.
So Mitch and his group developed LCL, and
-- let me just turn on something here for a second --
and the lines here represent exchange of information between people.
And obviously, Mitch is exchanging lots of information with his own team, as they are with him,
and Mitch is also exchanging information with other groups at MIT,
people leading other groups at MIT,
and, obviously, the administration at MIT.
So there's work related to LCL going on at this level, sort of you know,
making the course happen and providing the resources for it.
I'm not going to focus too much on that, but just want to sort of start there.
And I'm going to turn the edges off for a bit.
So we all start off, as we begin the MOOC with this, with this sort of cloud of us --
we are obviously from all over the world, but through the internet, we sort of are connect--
have gathered here over MIT and the Media Lab to be part of this MOOC,
but at the start of the MOOC, we're very disconnected, right?
it's just a bunch of us who've shown up for this experience.
And, you know, we all go to the web site and we read about it, and we listen to Mitch,
and we get a sense of what we're in for and we can connect to resources
that Mitch and his team have put up to get it started.
Again, at this point, there are very few connections between people.
And, as we join the Google+ community, and start blogging about it and tweeting about it,
we start making links between ourselves -- up here --
And then the course gets started.
I've represented that as this first lecture, a presentation that Mitch did,
and it sends out a lot of information to all of us, right?
to all participating in the group.
Now obviously, his - Mitch and his team are also paying close attention
to this stream of information coming out of that first presentation.
And, associated with the video presentation are readings for each of these...for each of the weeks
and - well I think that's all I wanted to say here.
And immediately after, or even before, that first presentation
people were starting to tweet, were starting to add to the ...
... the main Google+ group and were also starting
to get to know the people in our own little groups
and posting there, and some of us are
starting to blog about LCL.
Right? Lots of us writing blogs,
or some of us writing blogs, so there's
this information that starts really flowing rapidly.
And, as we do that we start to form connections here.
And if I did this again I would have these connections
gradually thicken and intensify, but I was working out
these ideas as I made the model, so we have
the fully networked collection of us here.
And, through these colored lines I'm just
representing the information that we're exchanging
via the Google+ group, on Twitter,
via the blogs, and ...
and that was after the first week.
The second week, we get the lecture from the...
the presentation [mumbles],
and we're assigned to talk about a gear,
learning gear from our childhood based on Papert's (?) writings.
And we start posting, sharing information
on our small LCL groups, and some of us
on the big LCL group.
And again, blogging about it and sharing the information in other ways.
There is communication going between
Mitch and the other LCL group moderators,
between all of us here in the network cloud.
So there's this flow of information from
first Mitch and his team put it up here,
and it comes out to us,
we comment upon it, and sometimes directly talk
with Mitch and his team.
And mostly we're sending information out here
to these streams, and sharing that way.
Which, of course, Mitch and his team are watching
what appears out in these various streams.
There's a lot of information flowing around.
And then, the third week was ...
the Dale Dowerdy (?), and Buckly (?),
and we were supposed to create scratch projects
which many of us did.
We shared those and learned from eachother.
And the density of our network is increasing up here.
And then the fourth week, it was the
infamous Alan Kay-dominated lecture.
That certainly generated a lot of,
a lot of feedback.
Mostly, at least most of what I saw,
was on the LCL main group.
Our assignment was to work with
the drawing program...
whose name is escaping me right now.
Oh...anyway.
Obviously dozens and dozens,
if not hundreds of these programs were created,
and I've just shown two here.
And then, the last week's lecture on
open learning, again generating more artifacts,
stream of more artifacts,
some of us working with the stack exchange
and some of us offering courses and hangouts, et cetera.
And again there were lots more than
I'm showing here.
And as the course continues we will be
producing more artifacts.
And as I've said before,
Mitch and his team are watching all of this happen.
They're probably not looking at
every single scratch project put up on
the scratch website, or every single
sub-group on Google+, but they're
keeping an eye on things and sortof
trying to understand how this is all developing.
And of course, that gets fed back to us,
in the form of, you know,
upcoming lectures where they share what they've seen.
And the chat, which is becoming a part
of each presentation, and just direct communication
back and forth with us, all of us or some of us.
And so we have this, we have this
network that we've built very quickly,
which is doing something, maybe.
Exactly what is not clear to me,
since we're certainly producing a lot of information.
I guess the question I have is,
what are the potentials here?
What emergent properties might this have, I don't know,
but in a sense there are interesting possibilities.
I think, we know that most of the world
is going to be living in cities within
a hundred years, and cities are...
we're going to have to get a lot smarter
about how we run our cities.
There's in fact a whole movement with the
urban studies community called
"Smarter Cities" ...
and I think part of the emergent properties
that are possible with cMOOCs
is we're sort of training a lot of us
to work in these networks
that can be developed very quickly
with the current tools of the internet,
which I assume will become even easier
to build in the future,
and so the cMOOC experience is, in a way,
sort of training us to be better at
running our communities in the future,
making our communities much smarter.
So that's, that's where I am with this.
I would love feedback.
I will post the model online,
so that anybody who wants it can download it.
And, again, this is just very experimental.
Just playing around with ideas.
So. Thanks!
Thanks for watching.