Saturday, February 1, 2014

The Imperative of Open: Give and Take

As what will probably be my last post in this blog, I wanted to say something about my Latin sundial project, which is my main takeaway from the class and for which I am very grateful. Even though I am not carrying on with the class (as explained here), making it the second MOOC I have dropped out of (more on that here), I am very glad to have started the sundial project as a result of this class, and it is something that I hope I will be continuing for a long time into the future.

THE OPEN INTERNET. As I will explain below, this Latin sundial project is possible thanks to the content that people have freely shared on the open Internet, and in turn I will be giving back the content that I create, sharing it on the open Internet and hoping to make my discoveries useful to others. A lack of openness, I would argue, is the biggest problem with Janux and its so-called open courses: even if the Janux software did work as promised, I would still find it extremely frustrating to be creating content inside a closed space, content which few people (if any) are likely to see.

To give a more concrete sense of just what openness means to my sundial project, let me explain how the project evolved... and that begins with a clock tower in the town of Conegliano, Italy.

PUBLIC SPACE. Back in what must have been 1998 or so, I was a grad student studying at the University of Siena in Italy. Alberto, one of the other grad students, kindly invited me to come visit him at his home in Conegliano, north of Venice. I had never been to that part of Italy before, and I accepted with pleasure. As we strolled around the town, Alberto pointed out to me the motto on the clock tower of the campanile: VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT (They all wound; the last one kills). He asked me if I got it, and I had to confess that I did not; I had never paid attention to the inscriptions on clocks and sundials before, so the riddling language was new to me. The feminine gender of ultima in Latin is the clue: "they" are the "hours" (Latin horae): VULNERANT OMNES (HORAE), ULTIMA (HORA) NECAT. A "memento mori" message, perfect for a clock. And it is the ultimate public domain: a public monument, there for all to read and learn from... those who know the secret code anyway!


(Photo by pink floyd)

BLOGS AND FREE BOOKS. In the 15 years or so since I saw that clock, I have spent a lot of time studying Latin proverbs and mottoes (see my Latin blog, Bestiaria Latina), and the mottoes found on sundials have been among my special favorites. Like the motto on that clock, the mottoes on sundials are often enigmatic while also expressing profound notions about life and the passage of time. For my Latin Via Proverbs book (free PDF here), I was able to harvest a great many wonderful Latin sundial mottoes from this public domain book: The Book of Sun-dials by Mrs. Alfred Gatty [Margaret Scott Gatty] which you can see presented very nicely in the Celebration of Women Writers project, one of Mark Ockerbloom's Digital Library projects at the University of Pennsylvania.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING. Fast forward to the Janux History of Science class, 2014. In a video about Stonehenge for the first week, Kerry Magruder, our instructor, discussed various theories of how the ancient builders of Stonehenge might have used the stones to observe the path of the sun in the sky and other celestial phenomena. That got me thinking about sundials, so for the "online resource" assignment during that first week, I collected sundial materials and bookmarked those sundial resources with Diigo. That, I thought, would be a good way to share those resources with others, while also introducing other people in the class to the use of Diigo. Nobody in the class except for the instructor read my post, though, so I did not really accomplish much in terms of the class, but I also published the assignment as a post here in this blog - Week 1 Online Resource: Sundials - where perhaps it might be read by others. Meanwhile, those Diigo links will be useful to me, and possibly to others too, as I continue to develop the sundial project.

BLOGGING SUNDIAL IMAGES. Also during the first week of class, I started blogging about sundial photographs that I found online, searching specifically for images that were labeled for re-use, thanks to all those photographers who make their photos available in this way at Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, and elsewhere on the open Internet. I have eight of these sundial posts so far, and I have now begun to include Latin sundials in the weekly cycle of content that I share in my Bestiaria Latina round-up posts.

PINTEREST BOARDS AND WIDGETS. Finally, to increase the different ways I can share the Latin sundials and my blog posts about them, I created a Pinterest Board of Latin Sundials, and I learned how to create widgets of individual pins which you can see in the sidebar of this blog. Pinterest is a tool that is still pretty new to me, so learning about the pin widgets was a fun discovery. I was able to create pin widgets for all my posts and then randomize them with RotateContent.com, an amazing tool that Randy Hoyt (genius programmer) built many years ago... and it's still going strong! The result of the randomizing widget appears below: if you have javascript enabled, you should see a Pinterest pin widget at random whenever this page reloads. (Want to make your own javascript widget with randomized or date-based content? RotateContent.com awaits you!)




This open process by which existing content is discovered, re-created, and then shared, hopefully to be discovered again (and again and again) stands in sharp contrast to Janux, where all you can do is post something in a discussion board that might (or might not) be seen by someone in the class, and which is then not likely to be seen by anyone ever again. I far prefer to create things and share them on the open Internet, a space where others can find those things, enjoy them, and perhaps even use them to create new content of their own to share. So, while I won't be posting here any more, I will keep adding sundials to my collection... and I'll update my randomizing widget so that as my sundial collection grows, you'll be able to see it growing here too!


A Tale of Four MOOCs

Although it's probably not fair to call the Janux History of Science course a MOOC, it's clear that Janux aspires to offer MOOCs (as in the beer course), so I'll include it here in this list of my four MOOCs.

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Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success (no university sponsor). This was a MOOC taught by Curtis Bonk (of Indiana University) on the Blackboard CourseSites platform in May of 2012. It was my first MOOC, and I only completed a few weeks of the course. Admittedly, I was not the right student for the class; it was aimed at K-12 instructors not already using the Internet. I was curious about Blackboard CourseSites, however, which proved to be very disappointing in every way. The most memorable experience for me was a discussion that took place at Lisa Lane's blog (always a great place for discussion) in which some people from Blackboard also participated, along with Curtis Bonk, the course instructor. Note that such a discussion could never really have happened inside CourseSites itself; we needed an open space, like Lisa's blog, for that to happen. I did not create a dedicated blog of my own for the class, but this Google+ post provides a good summary of my experience.


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Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (Univ. of Michigan). This was a MOOC taught by Eric Rabkin on the Coursera platform; I participated in the first iteration of the class during summer/fall of 2012. I completed the full ten weeks of the course, but my initial eagerness was gone after just a week or two. Overall, I would rate the course a disaster. I read some good books and made some good friends, but I also developed an antipathy to MOOCs that I doubt I will ever fully get over. I blogged about the experience in detail at my Coursera Fantasy blog, and there were also lengthy discussions at Google+ among the course participants who connected with one another there. The course claimed to be the online equivalent of one of Eric Rabkin's undergraduate course at Michigan, and it seems that at least some of the features of his campus-based classes also haunted the MOOC version. Based largely on my experiences in that class, I wrote an article about the Coursera software, "Fifty Ways to Fix the Software," that will be coming out soon in a book about MOOCs edited by Steve Krause and Charlie Lowe, Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Online Open Courses (Parlor Press). The book will be CC-licensed, which is why I participated in the project: the book really is open, even if many so-called MOOCs are often not very open at all. (On MOOCs and openwashing, see Audrey Watters on "The Battle for Open.")


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Designing a New Learning Environment (Stanford). This was a course taught by Paul Kim on the NovoEd (then called VentureLab) platform in the fall of 2012. I completed this MOOC, and overall it was a very positive experience. The course was not really the equivalent of a college course; instead, it was more like an ongoing professional development workshop for educators and educational technologists, and I was exactly the kind of student that the course anticipated. Participation in the class was very international, and I made some good new friends in this course from many different countries, people with whom I am still in touch at Google+ and Twitter. The software was not great, but it was good enough, especially compared to the Coursera software. In particular, NovoEd offered a blogging tool so that our blogs were both public on the Internet while also being integrated into the NovoEd system. We had teams, too, and the teams also had blogs. While I would have preferred a more truly open course (something like ds106), the programmers at NovoEd were making a real effort to build a community space that was not entirely cut off from the rest of the digital world.

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History of Science to the Age of Newton (Univ. of Oklahoma). This is the course taught by Kerry Magruder on the Janux platform that I have been blogging about here. Sadly, while this course had the best content of the four MOOCs I have participated in, the Janux software has made it impossible for me to continue. I am very disappointed that the programmers at NextThought did not take the best of the MOOC software out there (ds106, gRSShopper, NovoEd, etc.) and build on that to create something excellent. Instead, they have created something that does not seem to work well at any scale, small or massive. For details, see the posts labeled "diary" in this blog.



Day 14: no notifications, no way to continue

It's Saturday (three cheers for the weekend!), and last week was a more normal week for me, with student writing assignments and practice websites to respond to. It kept me busy all week (which is the norm), and now I will check back in at Janux History of Science, knowing that unless there they have built a notification system, this is not going to work for me. Even when I was able to hover over the course for the first two weeks, checking for interaction, it was extremely frustrating to not have notifications. Now that I am able to work only on weekends, without notifications it seems impossible. But I'm going to check in and see.

[Aside: I should note that the first thing I see when I open my browser is the handy Google+ notifications bar which appears at the top of the Google pages which I use; Google search is my homepage, so I know I have 8 notifications for me in Google+. That can wait, and I know it can wait - the notifications system in G+ is not perfect, but it works very well for the erratic way in which I am able to find time for G+ both during the week and on weekends.]

So, using Chrome, I am logging in to Janux. The "recent activity" stream shows 22 items, but, as usual, I have no way of knowing which items are "connected" to me, either by being replies to my posts or replies to my replies. There's also no way to clear the stream by clicking things off as read even if I were motivated to try to use this stream to find items relevant to my course activity.

So, my only alternative is apparently to go through the discussion boards one by one, looking for replies to my posts, and also hoping to find replies to my replies (you know... dialogue).

I posted in the Week 2 online resources board.  A nice reply from Kerry, and I replied to him. The odds of him ever seeing that reply seem low indeed, unless instructors perhaps have a notification system different from the student system. There is also a good suggestion from another student in the class about a resource that would benefit the class next time around; the odds of Kerry having seen his suggestion are low (even though it is a reply to a board in which he is participating; normally, a discussion board would allow you to request to be notified of such an event). I left a reply for that reply too, although the odds of the person ever seeing it seem practically zero.

Since activity is so low on this board (I don't think there are more than a dozen people even participating in the open side of the course...?), I was in fact able to easily find the reply I left for another student on his post; no reply to my reply.

Another board where I posted last week has another long comment from Kerry (although I feel badly; he should not be having to take time to do this with all the rest of the work he has to do). I added a reply to Kerry, not knowing if he will see it or not, and I almost feel badly about that since I really don't want him to take time to relpy. The idea with an open course like this is that the students, not the instructor, should be sustaining the discussion.

I had also posted in the origins of ancient astronomy board last week; no reply to my post. Of the 8 comments there, 4 have no replies at all, 3 have only 1 reply (probably unread by anyone), and 1 has 2 replies, but not a back-and-forth dialogue; the original poster did not reply to the reply. Probably that person has not read either of the 2 replies. We need some kind of "interactivity rating" to apply to discussion boards; the interactivity rating here would surely be extremely poor, almost non-existent.

Finally, I had also posted in the starting assumptions board last week; no reply to my post. Again, 8 posts, 5 with no replies at all, 1 with 1 reply, and 2 with 3 replies including, glory hallelujah, a reply to a reply I had left on someone else's post... an actual conversation: my first and only almost-conversation here at Janux in two weeks of dedicated participation. So, I left a reply to that reply, but in the absence of notifications, I suspect the person will never get it - but it would be a dialogue very much worth continuing, if only the software actually facilitated dialogue.

So, those are the boards for last week. There might have been something back in the boards from Week 1 where I also participated in multiple boards (four or five; I can't remember). But I have no motivation to go through those boards, digging around wondering if maybe there was a reply to a post or a reply to a reply. It's futile: either I will discover no replies (which is depressing) or else I will discover replies, knowing that if I reply to those replies, the person will surely never ever see what I write (even more depressing).

In sum, a discussion board system like this really cannot promote interaction without notifications, and what a shame that NextThought apparently devoted no thought to that at all. I had complained about the lack of notifications to a NextThought staff member some months ago, way back in September, but now the NextThought webpage does not list that person on staff anymore. Maybe she was in charge of notifications, ha ha. Anyway, she is gone. I wonder if anyone at NextThought is working on notifications now.

For now, anyway, the Janux platform will not work for me. If I am going to just be writing for myself, I would rather do that in a blog, so that I can easily share what I am writing with others and also link to the blog posts in conjunction with the other teaching and learning that I am doing online. But that's it - I'm done here, just another MOOC dropout.

Meanwhile, I will carry on with the sundials, a project I never would have started without this class. In a separate post, I will explain about how my sundial project depends absolutely on the world of open knowledge and sharing on the Internet... a culture that apparently the folks at Janux do not understand very well at all. Even within their closed-off space, they have not built a system that supports sharing and conversation, much less making connections with the world outside their closed space.

I'll also write up a post comparing this MOOC experience to my other three MOOC experiences. Janux was both the best (content) and the worst (software) of those four MOOCs. Of the other three, I finished two and dropped out of one. Dropping out of Janux now brings my MOOC drop-out count to two and two. Which still puts me above the MOOC drop-out rate average, ha ha.