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.

Day 13 (again): Janux at large scale

Just out of curiosity, I enrolled in the Beer course since that is the course that has gotten the most publicity. I figured it would have a lot of students in it, so I would get to see how Janux works scaled up. Well, there are indeed hundreds of people in there... but social? Apparently not.

There is a "What is Beer?" discussion board which has 312 posts in reply to the instructor's prompt... all just in one big list. The posts are not dated (?), but it looks like the oldest posts are at the top because the post at the top of the list has 22 comments in reply; presumably it was first. To see the most recent comments you would have to scroll (and scroll and scroll) on down to the bottom of that list.

And for interactivity? Well, there are 312 comments here. How many have "0 comments" in reply? That would apparently be 297 of them, 95% of the total. (I am basing this on doing a Control-F search in the browser window, since I certainly do not have the patience to scroll through the comments and count them one by one.)

How many have 1 comment? 8
2 comments? 1
3 comments? 4
4 comments? 1
22 comments? 1 (that would be the first/oldest comment at the top)

The crucial problems of how to distribute activity throughout a large discussion board is a topic that many online educators have discussed, and there are various solutions. It doesn't appear that Janux has taken any of that into account. At least Kerry is urging people to comment on each other's posts in his course design. Here - with 297 out of 312 comments apparently (?) having no interaction - I would guess both the course design and the software are working against the social interaction. I read somewhere that over 5000 people signed up for the open beer course. So, it looks like the usual MOOC hype: lots of people signing up, but hardly anybody participating in the social parts of the class (although they might indeed be watching videos and taking quizzes).

Day 13: Janux no longer working in Safari?

So, I thought I would give Safari a try this morning since I never really figured out which browser was best overall... but apparently Safari doesn't work anymore at all. I logged in, and was able to navigate through a couple of screens, but my Interpretation essay seems to have disappeared. Screenshot:

That is, the browser knows my essay is there (I can click on the link in the discussion list and go there), but the screen is all white where the essay should be.

So, I pressed refresh. That made the screen go all grey, and now I cannot navigate to anything anywhere - there is no functioning link or button of any kind on the page. Screenshot:

So I pressed refresh again. I got the little green loading man. And it's loading. And loading. And loading.

And still loading. So I'll try refresh again. Still just the little green guy loading. Since the only address I see in the browser address bar is https://janux.ou.edu I cannot try forcing it back to the home page or anything. So, I give up on Safari for today.

Let's try Chrome. Okay, I'm in. Recent Activity still broken on my profile page (last activity showing is January 19).  No comment on my Week 2 Essay (and no reply to the comment I left for the only other person who did an essay), and no comment on my Week 2 Resource (and no reply to the comment I left for the only other person who did a resource). No other essays for me to read and comment on, and no other resources.

From the "recent activity" stream for everyone (which does seem to include comments and replies, because I see our valiant T.A. replying to people's Introductions from back in Week 1), I noticed that someone whose name I don't recognize posted this comment: "My previous thoughts and notions of previous historians and explorers have been reinforced these past two weeks. Like I stated, I have always greatly admired these beginning scientists' bravery, but throughout this short time we have been in class by admiration has TREMENDOUSLY grown because of the new knowledge and information I am learning about them. Learning the specific details of their discovers, inventions, and processes to achieve these has already changed my perspective. History is certainly transformative and the more I learn about it, the more transformed I become----I look forward to the transformations this semester will bring!​"

Wow, that's some enthusiasm! I haven't seen any other contributions by this person so far. This person's recent activity consists of "so-and-so joined NextThought January 13 2014," and nothing else, but of course we know Recent Activity is broken, so that means nothing - her comment is listed in the recent activity stream for "everyone," but does not show up on the recent activity stream for her profile. What is "recent activity" supposed to be I wonder...? I am glad this other person is having such a transformative experience, and I would have enjoyed reading her posts about that. I checked the "about" part of her profile and found only this: "Empty Profile :( This user has not filled out their profile." So much for social.

But now I really am wondering what is going on: it sounds like this person is participating in the class, although I have seen none of this person's contributions anywhere, so I cannot comment on them (not that the person would ever know I commented...). Am I just somehow not seeing the things that people post? Oh wait, I think I get it: this person is probably a student in the for-credit class, and somehow this post ended up over in our not-for-credit area. I know it is possible for them to get here because the only other student who posted an essay and resource for Week 2 here in the not-for-credit section is actually a for-credit student who is cross-posting on purpose. So I'm guessing this person ended up over here by accident somehow, and maybe things really are going great over in the for-credit version of the class.

Anyway, I really do have to decide what to do this weekend, since this frustration is just not worth it. I guess I'll check back tomorrow one more time to see if anything happened in the essay or resource areas for Week 2. If there are no new essays or resources to read and/or no replies on my essay and resource, I'm going to stop wasting my time here and just read the books for class plus some more books in the history of science. And collecting more Latin sundials of course! As this Victorian sundial warns us, there is no time to waste: TEMPUS EDAX RERUM, "Time is the devourer of things."

Day 12: Still lonely in the labyrinth.

The "recent activity" stream for "everyone" (not sure just what that means - everyone in this class?), shows that our T.A. Brent is now diligently leaving comments for lots of people, but I wonder if they will ever see his comments since they will get no notification about it. I wonder, in fact, how many people are actually still participating. I posted my assignment for today in the online resource area and commented on the one other assignment I found there. I also posted a comment on the one other essay that someone had posted, although he had not commented on my essay. As I learned from his post, he is also enrolled in the for-credit course apparently, so perhaps he is doing all his commenting in the for-credit area; that would certainly be understandable since presumably it is less grim there than it is here in the open course.

So, as I said in yesterday's diary entry, there is simply no feeling of social here at all really. Between the lack of notifications and the apparently dwindling-to-non-existent participation in the open side of this course, this doesn't feel any different than the way I would work on my own, reading and writing in my blog about what I've learned.

In fact, it is worse than reading and blogging, because my blog is something I can share with other people in my online learning network (that's why I am crossposting here). In contrast, I cannot share anything inside the Janux walled garden at all with the outside world. Indeed, I don't think I can link to things even when I am inside Janux; at least, I have not been able to figure out if anything is directly linkable in there or not.

Of course, the argument made by Janux boosters is that because of this "unique" social software we should be willing to trade away the undeniable benefits of open learning. Based on the two weeks of this class so far, I would say that looks like the worst kind of devil's bargain. Instead of having Kerry's great learning materials available to anyone, any time on the open Internet, they are locked away ... for no good reason. Instead of having materials that can be indexed by search engines and thus discovered by others, they are unreachable and undiscoverable by others.

What a shame. The social aspects of the Janux so-called community would have to be enormous to convince me that such a trade-off is even worth considering. As it is, with Janux being so poorly designed (no notifications...? what were they thinking?), it seems to me a terrible shame that OU instructors have invested so much time and effort in developing materials to put inside the Janux walls instead of developing truly open resources.

In addition, I should note that my "Recent Activity" is still broken; the most recent item showing is still the old assignment dated January 19. None of my activity since then is showing up, which means I have little faith in the "recent activity" stream that I guess is supposed to be the key to how I am supposed to interact with others in the course in the absence of actual notifications.

Finally, for what it's worth, I had asked about notifications all the way back in September when we were first allowed to log on to Janux to look around; here is a screenshot of the "thought" I added back then in response to someone named Nathalie who works for NextThought. I never got a reply to this comment, presumably because Natalie never knew that I left the comment . . . since she didn't get a notification about it.

Day 11: yep, so-called Recent Activity is broken

After posting my interpretation essay last night, I was really curious if that would cause my Recent Activity to refresh, but it did not. So, I have to conclude that the Recent Activity is just broken. That would be bad enough, and in the absence of any notification system, it is a disaster. You cannot get notifications to stay in touch with people who comment or reply to you, and you cannot even get in touch with people yourself by bookmarking profiles and looking at people's Recent Activity stream. That makes the prospects of carrying on with the social aspects of this class pretty grim.

I don't know if Recent Activity is supposed to include comments and replies, but in the absence of any other notification system, it sure seems logical that comments and replies would be displayed there. Yet even if comments and replies are omitted, I have submitted 7 different assignments for this class, plus an Introduction post. Of those submissions, 2 involved creating a new discussion, and 6 involved adding a comment to an existing discussion created by the instructor. Only one of those submissions shows up in my recent activity, and it is not the most recent; it is an assignment from January 19. Since January 19, I have created one new discussion and posted comments in two existing discussions (along with all the comments and replies I have made to other people's submissions).

So, here's where things stand — No notifications. Recent Activity stream is broken. At this point, I don't know what to do. I cannot understand how we are supposed to make this into a social learning experience if the software is not designed to promote our interaction.

Here is my so-called Recent Activity; screenshot taken this morning, January 24, showing a last activity date of January 19. Conclusion: Recent Activity is broken.

Day 10: loving the zodiac

So, I just posted an interpretation essay for Week 2 (last week I did an online resource, but not an interpretation essay). I had so much fun writing it because I had been thinking about the zodiac and ecliptic and enjoying my new knowledge all day long today! I'm not quite sure where this will take me, but learning about sundials and the zodiac has really clicked for me, and it is a topic I hope to keep exploring all semester long. Since both sundials and representations of the zodiac are found throughout all the historical periods being covered by this course, I feel confident that I have latched on to something really useful, a thread that will lead me through the Janux labyrinth.

And a lonely labyrinth it is. The more I think about this total lack of notifications, the more discouraged I am about how this course will develop over time. I'm doing fine because I've got my blog here; I can take a look at my assignment posts and get a sense of progress that is very encouraging. But where is all the social encouragement that Janux is supposed to making possible...? I wrote in detail yesterday about the lack of notifications, and I noticed today that Brent, our T.A., had left many comments at the Introductions board. But will anybody see the comments he has left for them...? Time online is a precious thing; none of us can afford to squander that resource. By collecting my assignments here in my blog, I feel good about the time I am investing. I do not feel good about time invested in comments and replies at Janux, although without comments and replies, how will we ever achieve the social integration that is essential to real learning...? I applaud Janux for their emphasis on the social dimensions of learning, but I find the software to be all the more depressing for just that reason. Social? Really? I don't think so.

So, I would gladly spend another half hour or so leaving comments and interacting with other people at the course, but there's nothing going on apparently - at least, I can't tell if there is a conversation I am missing out on. I guess it just means I will go research some more sun dials!

Update: This sundial led me to Francis Bacon... what an adventure! Details about just where this Latin motto comes from in the Bestiaria blog post - it is indeed Francis Bacon at work, along with the ingenious maker of the sundial.

TEMPUS FUGIT     AUGEBITUR SCIENTIA

Time Flies    Knowledge Will Increase

(Wikimedia Commons: Belgian sundial)

Day 9: effects of no notifications

I've returned for a quick visit tonight - I did some reading in Lindberg last night which I really enjoyed, and I watched the video about the Collection's oldest object (very cool), and then I posted my quick reflections about that in the discussion board. My motivation to participate in the discussion boards is really low, though - with the lack of notifications, what can we really expect there?

I am discouraged to make my own posts because I don't expect they will lead to any real dialogue. Most of the things I have posted so far have received no comments; I think I got one comment on my Week 1 posting that included two books, but that is the only comment I've received. At least, I think so - how would I know? Without notifications, I have no way to be sure. I cannot even check using my recent activity stream because that is incorrect and incomplete: my so-called recent activity shows only one item total out of the six assignments that I've posted in different discussion boards, nor does my Introduction post show up, and there is also no sign of the comments I've made on other people's posts (I've followed Kerry's instructions to leave a couple of comments on existing posts when I add my own post to a discussion board).

I am also discouraged to leave comments for others because, without notifications, I have little confidence that they will see my comment. I did leave one comment for someone which led to a reply, but I think that is the only reply there has been to one of my comments... although again, I am not sure. Without notifications, how would I know? It's very frustrating to leave comments when there is really no expectation that the other person will know you have left them a comment.

Lack of conversation is apparently the norm: at the Introductions board, there are 37 Introduction posts. Of those, 27 have no comments at all. There are comments on 10 of them, but only on 5 of those is there a reply from the original poster; presumably the other people who did get comments have no idea that they got comments. Because... without notifications... how would they? I'm also not sure what is going on there. At one point we were told that this Introductions board was for both the for-credit and not-for-credit versions of the class, and I did indeed meet some for-credit students at that discussion board. But where are the rest of the Introductions? If there are 50 people in the for-credit class, I would expect they would all be there, even if participation is low (almost non-existent apparently) for the not-for-credit students.

In my own classes, I have opted for blogs rather than discussion boards exactly because of the dilemma posed by the discussion board format. With a blog, at least you can quickly see what is going on, and you also have the satisfaction of watching your own work accumulate over the semester (as I can see my assignments here because I am crossposting them in this blog). With discussion boards, your contributions get scattered hither and thither, and you cannot even easily find them later. Being scattered would be worth it if those contributions were part of an actual discussion, but with the poor design of the Janux software, discussion is very difficult, and this is not even a large class. I shudder to think what is going on in the classes much larger than this.

I never thought I would say this... but it makes me miss the Coursera discussion boards, where at least you could quickly see at a glance who had posted and keep track of the latest comments quickly and easily. Not possible here at Janux.

Sigh.

Day 8: lack of oomph!

I can really relate to my students tonight, the ones who are taking classes on top of working full-time. It's Tuesday evening, and I really should do some work for History of Science tonight, but I am lacking in oomph to do that.

I think Week 2 has started, but I did not receive an email about that, so I am not 100% sure.

Much more serious problem: no notifications of any kind regarding discussion board participation. Man, that is SO frustrating! I posted a lot of comments and replies once the system finally allowed me to do that... but I have no way of knowing if anyone has posted a reply to one of my comments so that I could participate in an actual back-and-forth dialogue.

There is a "recent activity" stream... but it does not show activity that is specifically of interest to me. I can filter the stream to "my contacts," but that is still not the same as knowing about replies to my comments or replies to the discussion board item I posted in the Week 1 Online Resource area.

Moreover, I am really not confident about the "recent activity" stream since when I check my own recent activity, it is completely inaccurate, showing almost none of my recent activity at all. So, when I go to the profile pages of other people and click recent activity, am I really seeing their recent activity? Since my listing is not complete, I doubt that theirs is either.

Update: Okay, I did my starting assumptions (it was fun to do: Darmok!), and I also commented on some other people's starting assumptions, and then I also commented on two of the online resource assignments that people had shared for Week 1; nobody had done any commenting there. It doesn't look like a lot of participation in the not-for-credit part of the class (will it pick up...? or it is going to dwindle even more...?), and I fear that the lack of notifications will really have a negative impact on people's participation.

Day 7: Power of public!

Not sure I will be doing class work today (Happy Martin Luther King Day to all!), but I did want to include this Google+ post about a really cool thing that happened thanks to my having left a comment about the "ultima latet" sundial over at Wikimedia. PUBLIC: it is powerful!!!

Day 6: end of week 1... and comments are FINALLY working!!!

Today is Sunday, so it is the end of the first week of class. I've actually managed to do work for the class almost every day (I am a fan of a little bit every day rather than big bursts of work just once or twice a week), so that's good. The course content itself is fascinating; my frustrations with the Janux software are enormous.

I did manage to create a discussion today, sharing my Week 1 Online Resource: Sundials assignment. That will be a good way for me to find out if I net NOTIFICATIONS for comments left at a discussion that I started.

Notifications and activity. So far, I have received no email notifications of any kind, which seems to me a real problem. The Janux software is so unappealing that I am not likely to just browse and see if anybody has replied to me, so a real notification system is badly needed! There is apparently an activity stream for the course, but it is pretty much useless since it just lists everything, rather than separating out activity in general from actual notifications. I see that I can filter my stream by contacts, so I guess one of my tasks today is to add to my contacts in order to filter my stream.

Commenting. But my first task is to figure out if I have better luck with Chrome for leaving comments. I learned yesterday that I apparently have to use Firefox to view the videos, but I got an error message when trying to leave a comment. So, today I am going to use Chrome and see what kind of luck I have leaving comments for people. So, I am off to try this task. I will report back after I am done.

OMG: AT LAST!

The software actually seems to be working - no error messages, no disappearing reply boxes, no persistent comment texts (all problems I've experienced in the past week every time that I tried to comment).....

I can comment now! Three comments in a row - no error messages.

MIRABILE VISU.

I can finally participate in the class like a normal online student. Whoo-hoo!

Off to go comment some more...

And it's still working. I left a half-dozen comments for the people I found whom I know at the course, and I ran into no glitches. I'm scared to say that too loudly since the Janux gremlins will probably come get me... but so far, so good.

This is the first time I have been able to participate in the class: VERY HAPPY.

Day 5: Software reporting

I'm back to try again with Janux today. Here is a screenshot that shows what happens when I try to view a video and transcript; the video play button is off my screen to the left, and no matter how much I widen the browser window, there is nothing I can do. There is no way to get the video viewer on the screen completely. This is Chrome on a Mac. I have a very wide monitor, so that is not the problem - but I have all this black blank space on the right, and the video player is scrolled just enough off the left that I cannot click play (click on image below to see larger view).

So, I'll go try in Safari. Well, that doesn't work - the little green man just dances and dances and dances, but the site will not load.

Firefox is my last option, so I will go back to that. Okay, it looks like Firefox is the browser to use. Admittedly, I never use Firefox for anything anymore, but if that is the browser Janux is optimized for (???), then I guess that is what I will use. Mission One accomplished: I was able to watch the Flat Earth video and take notes. And no, I did not take notes inside Janux. The thought did not even cross my mind. Not only do I not trust the software, I have no clue why they would be useful to me or anyone else trapped inside Janux when I can just take notes with a real blogging tool, searchable, linkable, findable, and EASY TO USE. Like Blogger.

I'll add updates to this post if/when I run into problems. I guess it's better to say "when" since this software experience is consistently unacceptable. If it were not for my OVERWHELMING interest in Kerry's course, I would not bother with this since it is clearly not ready for prime time yet. And honestly, if this is only going to work in Firefox on the Mac, they should tell people that, but I haven't seen anything about browser recommendations anywhere, and given how confusing the navigation is, I'm not even sure where I would go to look.

Update: Problems with Screen Width also in Firefox

So, even in Firefox I am having real problems with screen width. I went to the Introductions Forum area because I had not done an introduction yet. Yet I have to view that window at over 1000 pixels in order to participate - and that is way way way too wide a screen in which to comfortably read or write. Yet when I narrow the width of the window to something more comfortable, like say 600 or even 750 pixels, it scrolls off the screen. The minimum width is apparently 1050 pixels, even in Firefox:

For software that claims to be social, it is apparently doing everything it can to make me not want to participate here... even though I am one of the most eagerly social online people you will find at OU. Sigh.

Update: I went to meet people at the Introductions forum now that I am feeling confident Firefox is the browser I need to use. Very excited to see a former student there, so I wrote her a long comment (which I was smart enough to save in a text file, knowing the problems with this software) and then the little green man danced and danced and danced for a very long time, and in the end I got this error message:

So, once again, I leave in defeat. I do not understand how this software could have been tested in the fall and still be failing to meet even the most basic level of usability. I did save the comment in a text file (thank goodness), but I have no patience left to try to leave the comment using other browsers. I'll try again tomorrow I guess.

Kerry, if you are reading this, I don't know what to do. I agree with you that the social aspects of this class are the most important thing, but I cannot figure out how to participate with this software. I've saved the comment for Casey Jo when I feel brave enough to try again. Do I have to use a separate browser for everything: Firefox for watching video with transcript, Chrome for leaving comments (but even then I had the bouncing and disappearing reply box)...?

HELP!!!!!

Day 4: Catching Up

I decided to take yesterday (Wednesday) off because of all the frustrations I had with the software on Tuesday. The fact that the course CONTENT is so incredibly appealing only made the software frustration worse! But I took a day off and am ready to get back into things. I will update this post throughout the evening as I proceed.

Organizing. I decided to separate out my actual assignments from these records of my interaction with the software, so I created a separate assignments label and diary label for posts, and also an email label to record observations about the great emails that Kerry is sending out. Yes, NextThought has a pseudo-sort-of-blogging tool ("Thoughts"), but I have zero desire to try to use that. I want something permanent, something public, and something that I can organize in a useful way. Blogs work for me. I cannot figure out what Janux is supposed to do for me as a journaling tool. What I have seen so far does not impress me.

Email. I wrote up a post about Kerry's EXCELLENT email of today. It really revived my spirits and made me feel ready to start studying again!

Video Timing Out. Terrible video time-outs. I am getting time-outs as I try to watch the video. Very frustrating. About every five seconds or so it is having to stop and buffer. Is there a way to download the videos (I don't care how long it takes), and then I could view them without being interrupted every few seconds...? At least now I have the transcript, but I really want to WATCH the video too.  (pause) Time-outs lasting longer now. This one is lasting for about a minute...  Sigh.  I will go read the transcript while I wait; I have that open in a different window. (pause) WOW, the transcript was fascinating and I did take notes. I feel very badly not to have seen the video. It is still buffering even now after I finished reading the transcript and taking notes. Buffering ad infinitum apparently; here's where it timed out and just kept buffering non-stop:

Discussion Board. I find it impossible to compose anything of real length in the discussion board because the editing screen is HUGE - it must 1000 pixels wide on my screen (if I make the browser window smaller it just scrolls off the screen). Can I make it a more normal size somehow? Well, I just compose in my blog, and then copy and paste. But for the replies, I type in the editing box, and then something really strange happens. After I add my reply, I still see the editing box, and it still has my text in it. I don't understand: why do I see my reply, which I think (???) is published, but also see the text in the editing box...? Screenshot below. I am trying to use Chrome on a Mac. My published reply (is it published?) can be seen below the editing box... which still has my reply in it!

I want to leave a reply for someone else, so I click reply, but no new box comes up, just the box with my existing reply. Argh!

So, I navigate completely away from the page; I go to lessons, then choose 1.3 Stonehenge, and enter the discussion area again, and the reply box with my reply to Annie is STILL floating on the screen (now it has moved position) - so how can I even leave a reply for someone else...? Screenshot:

I give up. There is someone else I really do want to reply to, but I cannot figure out how to do that and I don't want my reply to Annie to disappear because I type over it in the only reply box I see on the screen. This is BEYOND FRUSTRATING. I agree with Kerry: the life of this course should be our interactions with each other, but the discussion board does not work. 

I was going to spend some serious time on the course tonight, but I give up. I will try again this weekend. The problem here is the software; I am really disappointed. So much for good intentions to spend a lot of time interacting with people in the course tonight. Sigh. 

Day 3: Starting Assumptions, Week 1

Okay, I am less frazzled this evening (first day of school is always so crazy!), and it looks like Janux is less frazzled, too - I was able to log on with no problem this time.

I will confess that I do not understand the Dashboard - there is obviously some weird stuff going on that is buggy as you can see in this screenshot, and I don't understand the order of things here at all; the starting assumptions discussion is here on the top, very prominent, but the video does not match (it's an orientation video I think); then Topic 2 is above Topic 1, and the assignment I need to do - starting assumptions - is kind of  in the middle of everything. So, I would expect the Dashboard to be the place to tell me what I need to do now... but it's not. I will try Lessons instead!

Okay, Lessons is organized in a way I understand. There is the Orientation on top - but that's a video I've already seen (it was released a while ago - I actually saw it on the OU website homepage when it was featured there), and I do know about academic integrity already (we're in trouble if I don't, ha ha). So, given my limited time, I'm going to plunge into Starting Assumptions which I think has a video for me to watch... let me click and see!

YES. Excellent... I see the video. But, not excellent, it looks like I cannot share this video, and I cannot use it with my video viewing tool of choice, VideoNot.es. ARGH! The way I like to watch educational videos is with the amazing VideoNot.es so that I can take notes that are keyed to the timestamp of the video. No such luck. Open videos benefit everybody... as do transcripts. Especially in the absence of a note-taking took like VideoNot.es, a transcript would really help for note-taking too. Coursera has transcripts (plain text) for videos... I sure would like to see that here too, but I did not see a transcript for this video.

But the video was a pleasure to listen to (Kerry is fabulous, as always), and here are my thoughts, which I will also go post in Janux:

~ ~ ~

(Since this software troubleshooting stuff is so distracting, I've moved the actual assignment to a new post - Week 1 Starting Assumptions - and created a Label to keep the assignments separate: Assignments.)

~ ~ ~

I'm going to go post this now and I look forward to commenting on some other people's post. I actually cannot find the "assignments" area with the "Declaration" ... but that helps me decide what I had already decided more or less, which was not to do any of the quizzes or grades or anything like that. I'm here for the pleasure of the learning; that is plenty for me. :-)

Update:

I was going to post my starting assumptions, but here is what happened:

That is in Safari. Let me go try in Chrome. ...

Update. Okay, I was able to post the reply in Chrome, but I the replies are all screwy somehow. I click reply, and there's no window. One time I did get it to bring up a window, so I typed a reply, but I cannot see if it went through. So, I went back to Safari; still getting the error message there, so I am going to try Firefox. That's the last browser I've got, so if that does not work I will call it a night. The interface is pretty terrible for discussion... I thought Coursera was terrible, but at least it was pretty simple. This is just hard to use, and for no good reason that I can figure out. I wish everything would just stay still! I think the reply window is there but it keeps scrolling out of view before I can type anything.

Update. Okay, I managed to leave my second comment in Firefox, which I guess was the best of the three, but the whole experience was maddening. There's some weird kind of delay as I type, and the space is really off-putting to browse around in. I'm used to all kinds of online environments, and I'm online all day interacting with people... but this space is really not working for me. If I were not committed to the course, I would give it up. I'd very much like to interact with the people and get to know them, but I'm not confident that this is going to happen, not with an interface that is so off-putting. Normally I would be browsing around in there, reading more, leaving lots of comments for different people - but I left two comments for people who had no comments at all on their posts (I hope everybody gets at least one comment), and that's it.

Maybe I'll try on my iPad or Chromebook later to see if it is more congenial on something other than a Mac...

Update. On the iPad I cannot get it to load at all; I just get the little green man doing his dance as it says "Loading..." - but it never finishes loading. That's Safari on the iPad.  Let me try Chromebook as one last attempt to find the hardware that will really work here...

Update. Chromebook: It also will not load on the Chromebook. I don't get the little green man; I just get "Waiting for janux.ou.edu" in the status bar. Waiting. Wating. Waiting. So maybe they are still having load problems and that is also why I was getting such a bad lag and terrible responsiveness when I actually was able to get to the discussion.

I will hope for better tomorrow... but if I were a casual visitor here, not committed to the course, I would not be coming back. Too many other places online to see, too much other stuff to do without all this frustration.

Day 2: Glad I have the books to read... system down?

Okay, here we go! I can already tell this experience is going to renew my empathy with my students who are often getting around to their online class work at the end of a very long day. That is the case for me... but I have vowed to do my half hour every day, so here I am, about to log on to janux.ou.edu on the first official day of the class and see what I can learn! I'm using Safari to do this since I did not have good luck with Chrome over the weekend.

Uh-oh...

Is it server overload? I'm getting an error message. I heard that there were load problems earlier in the day, but I was hoping to be able to log on tonight. Let me try Firefox and see if that makes a difference.

Hmmmm, it looks like I am going to get timed out because it is grinding... and grinding... and grinding... ha ha, which is pretty much how I feel today myself. No luck in Firefox. I'll try Chrome just in case. I get the little green man doing his dance in Chrome, but nothing more:

But I did buy the books this weekend, so I will read for a half hour and hope for better tomorrow! I'm assuming I can't go wrong in reading! :-)

UPDATE: I had a great time reading... and I guess that goes to validate the "all the eggs in one basket" danger of these types of learning management systems which want to be your one and only learning space (something I have very carefully avoided in all my online classes). So, thanks to Kerry's email of Sunday, I had the three class books on my Kindle and I read the opening pages of each one. They were all very stimulating, although I definitely had a clear favorite among them: give me more David Lindberg! The way he began with a consideration of orality and oral ways of thinking was so congenial, and that is a theme I will definitely want to watch for as the class gets under way: how do those oral expressions and oral ways of thinking persist in our own lives  (we are still users of oral language after all!), even as we also acquire new habits of thinking that are indeed foreign to traditional oral cultures...? Man, I love that stuff. Reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy was a very momentous event in my own understanding of the world, and so I read the opening pages of Lindberg's book with much pleasure and excitement. I am really looking forward to seeing how these books will relate to the other materials Kerry wants to share with us in the class. Plus, I already have so many ideas for things I would like to study and research as part of this class, questions to answer, things to learn. Especially after having gotten a glimpse of the material in the books, I am very much hoping there will be some kind of class project that we will each be doing and then sharing with the other students.

Meanwhile, I will look for a happier Janux tomorrow!

Day 1: Starting with questions

After reading my friend Kerry's blog post about the Janux History of Science class launch, I decided I would enroll and give it a try. I do this with some trepidation because my past three experiences with MOOCs were very frustrating; I saw so much missed opportunity as a result of both poor course design and poor software design too.

At the same time, I feel obligated to give at least one of the Janux MOOCs a try, if only because my school has invested close to a million dollars in the software alone (see bottom of this post), in addition to the considerable costs involved in creating each course (you can get a sense of that from reading Kerry's post). My first impression of Janux from just logging on and looking around last fall was not good, even compared to the MOOC platforms I have participated in previously (Blackboard CourseSites, Coursera, and NovoEd/VenureLab). But I am going to give it another try, and I will be using this blog to record my experience.

So, after reading Kerry's blog post yesterday, I went to janux.ou.edu to sign up. Because I had previously enrolled in two courses to explore last fall, Janux plunked me inside the course I had last visited and it took me a solid five minutes to figure out how to get out of that course in order to reach the Janux homepage where I could enroll in Kerry's course. I would really like to unenroll from the two courses I was testing in the fall, but I cannot figure out how to do that. I'll worry about that later!

When I did reach the main screen that lists available courses, I clicked on Kerry's course to enroll. The course begins on Monday, January 13, so it is not open yet, but I did get an email welcoming me to the course. Since that is my first experience of the course so far, I've pasted in a screenshot of the email, with my thoughts and questions below.

The first paragraph explains that this is a public version of an existing OU course and, since I am familiar with that existing course, I am very curious what will happen to it in the Janux space. Kerry and I first developed our online courses together over 10 years ago, and we used a very similar course design at that time: weekly readings with students writing in response to those readings, along with a semester-long student project based on a topic of each student's choice. I've carried on teaching my online courses using that same model for all these years; you can see my courses here, and past student projects here. The student projects are the most important part of my courses, and one of my biggest disappointments with many of the MOOCs I have seen is that they focus on top-down content delivery rather than student content creation and the sharing of that student-created content. Will Kerry's Janux course have a strong emphasis on student projects as his previous version of the course did? That is one of the questions I am most curious about!

The next paragraph is hype, and after being subjected to a continuous barrage of hype from all sorts of MOOC providers over the past year and half, I am not impressed by the hype. "One-of-a-kind learning experience" ... "true learning community" ... that's hype. So, no comment.

The third paragraph gets at what is the biggest problem for me here with Janux, so I will quote it here in full: "Feel free to spread the word around about the course by forwarding this email or sharing about it through social media. Encourage your friends to join, add them as a friend, and then form a study group on the platform" (bolding is mine). In other words, the idea is not that people should form learning communities at other social networking sites, nope, don't do that. Instead, we are supposed to join Janux and create our study groups on the platform. I personally have no inclination at all to do that because it means the learning that I want to share will NOT be shared with my friends who decline (understandably) to participate in the course. There are hundreds of people I interact with at Google+ with whom I share the things I learn, and from whom I am likewise learning new things every day. The reciprocity of my learning community at Google+ is something I am really committed to, and I would gladly take what I am learning in this History of Science class and share that at Google+, connecting with other people at Google+ who are enrolled in the class (but we'd need a hashtag to do that... no hashtag was supplied), as well as connecting with people I know there who are not enrolled in the class but who would be very interested indeed to learn along with me.

So, since I am being not just asked but required to pour my time and energy into a closed-off space, a black hole of learning which is disconnected from my existing learning communities both at Google+ and Twitter (and, yep, I would say those are "true" learning communities, too), I am very reluctant to over-invest. To cope with that, I will set a strict time limit of 30 minutes per day on this course. If it were integrated with the learning communities I am already part of, I could see spending more time. But 30 minutes spent at Janux is 30 minutes spent away from the learning communities that already work very well for me. This blog at least is public, but I guess it will be the only public evidence of my Janux learning experience.

And will 30 minutes per day be enough? I have all kinds of questions like that, basic questions about course operations. The email does not go into details; the remaining paragraph is one about how to enroll in the class for credit, but I know that Kerry's for-credit version of the class filled up long ago during regular enrollment; I imagine some people will feel frustrated to find out that they cannot enroll, despite what the email says.

Let me see if I can find more information at the class page on Janux. Hmmmm, I suspect loading problems; here is a screenshot of what happens when I log on. Probably as a result of all the publicity about the courses starting up Monday they are having some overload problems. I'd sure like to find a syllabus or FAQs about the course to get a sense of the time commitment that is expected, along with answers to some other questions.

I pressed refresh, and I saw a brief glimpse of the class page but then it went white again. I'll go try in another browser (I'm using Chrome right now), but I may let the overload problem end my session for today, checking in again this weekend to see if I can get some more answers!

Aha, doing much better in Safari; maybe it is a Chrome problem. I see my friend Kerry when I log on in Safari.

And look: Kerry's blog post gives me the YouTube version so I can embed it here! My opinion of Janux will go up CONSIDERABLY if these videos are all going to be available at YouTube after all (I wouldn't have guessed that from the version inside the Janux platform). So here is the video, thanks to the YouTube version I found in Kerry's blog (three cheers for blogs!) - there's no embed code at the Janux course page itself:

I can't tell just how much time will be required, and it looks like they have not updated the start date (undefined NaN, 0NaN), but I know from the email and Kerry's blog that it starts on Monday:

I'm looking for something like a syllabus with more information about the class, but apparently that is not available.

And my half hour is now up anyway! I'll just close by way of contrast with the information available about my courses to anyone who is curious - students who are enrolled or anybody at all; both classes have an Orientation Week to make sure the students understand the software we will be using and what the courses entail. Will I see an orientation of some kind when I log on to Janux on Monday? I hope so. I'll find out on Monday I guess.

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September 2013 Regents Final Agenda