A Conceptual Model for cMOOCs

A walkthrough of a SketchUp model representing the Learning Creative Learning cMOOC.

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...

<chuckles> 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 <clears throat> 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.