WEBVTT 00:00:01.279 --> 00:00:08.605 In this video, I'm going to go through a conceptual model of cMOOCs, 00:00:08.605 --> 00:00:14.150 based on my experience with a number of MOOCs, 00:00:14.150 --> 00:00:17.149 but particularly the Learning Creative Learning cMOOC 00:00:17.149 --> 00:00:22.830 that's currently running at Mitch Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten Group 00:00:22.830 --> 00:00:25.361 at the MIT Media Lab. 00:00:26.437 --> 00:00:30.433 So - so a couple of things, before I'm getting started here: 00:00:30.433 --> 00:00:37.000 This is just an experiment, like LCL: I hope people take it. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:41.045 in the spirit I make it, which I'm just playing around with ideas. 00:00:41.045 --> 00:00:47.104 As I get down into the model, the cubes you see represent the roles we play 00:00:47.104 --> 00:00:48.810 It's important to remember that, that they represent 00:00:48.810 --> 00:00:54.252 like the whole person just representing certain things that - certain roles that each of us take on. 00:00:57.346 --> 00:01:01.027 Reality is vastly more complex than the model I present here, 00:01:01.027 --> 00:01:10.085 so this is just a little attempt to just try to get an understanding of MOOCs 00:01:10.085 --> 00:01:15.178 with a subset of the reality that is a cMOOC. 00:01:16.619 --> 00:01:19.972 This model - this conceptual model certainly derives 00:01:19.972 --> 00:01:23.890 the work of George Siemens and Steven Downes 00:01:24.220 --> 00:01:31.530 who were the people who made the first MOOC - or developed the idea of MOOCs 00:01:31.530 --> 00:01:40.403 and as you can see from the two tweets above, at the top of the screen, 00:01:43.183 --> 00:01:46.731 George Siemens certainly is not opposed to the idea 00:01:48.151 --> 00:01:54.347 of viewing the networks that are created in MOOCs as similar to networks of neurons 00:01:54.347 --> 00:02:02.203 and Stephen Downes has explicitly said that he was thinking of neural networks 00:02:02.203 --> 00:02:04.630 when he was developing MOOCs. 00:02:04.630 --> 00:02:08.912 So, with those caveats, let's get started. 00:02:09.807 --> 00:02:13.797 So this is an overview, in the background here, of MIT. 00:02:13.797 --> 00:02:19.959 Sorry, Cambridge from the left, Boston on the right, Charles River over here, 00:02:19.959 --> 00:02:23.664 and MIT is just under that - those white dots. 00:02:23.664 --> 00:02:25.638 So, let's go and take a look. 00:02:28.168 --> 00:02:32.328 So, here I have the artifacts that have been created by the MOOC, 00:02:32.545 --> 00:02:34.738 some of them again, right, not all of them. 00:02:34.738 --> 00:02:39.447 Here I have sort of the cloud of us, of the participants in the MOOC, 00:02:39.447 --> 00:02:48.274 again, representing our roles as MOOC participants, not the entirety of our entity. 00:02:50.101 --> 00:02:59.092 And then down here these dots represent people at MIT. 00:02:59.092 --> 00:03:00.843 So, this is the Media Lab, 00:03:00.843 --> 00:03:03.373 this is Mitch Resnick's group here, 00:03:03.373 --> 00:03:05.826 these are other groups, other buildings at MIT 00:03:05.826 --> 00:03:10.894 and again, right, this is just a small set, subset of reality. 00:03:10.894 --> 00:03:14.761 There are literally, you know, hundreds of these groups at MIT, 00:03:14.761 --> 00:03:23.832 thousands of students at MIT, it's just one university in dozens of universities in Boston and Cambridge. 00:03:28.223 --> 00:03:34.142 So Mitch and his group developed LCL, and 00:03:34.702 --> 00:03:38.592 -- let me just turn on something here for a second -- 00:03:40.534 --> 00:03:48.839 and the lines here represent exchange of information between people. 00:03:48.839 --> 00:03:57.918 And obviously, Mitch is exchanging lots of information with his own team, as they are with him, 00:03:57.918 --> 00:04:04.391 and Mitch is also exchanging information with other groups at MIT, 00:04:04.391 --> 00:04:06.447 people leading other groups at MIT, 00:04:06.447 --> 00:04:09.207 and, obviously, the administration at MIT. 00:04:13.607 --> 00:04:18.780 So there's work related to LCL going on at this level, sort of you know, 00:04:18.780 --> 00:04:22.975 making the course happen and providing the resources for it. 00:04:22.975 --> 00:04:27.203 I'm not going to focus too much on that, but just want to sort of start there. 00:04:30.921 --> 00:04:34.261 And I'm going to turn the edges off for a bit. 00:04:34.261 --> 00:04:41.211 So we all start off, as we begin the MOOC with this, with this sort of cloud of us -- 00:04:42.455 --> 00:04:48.151 we are obviously from all over the world, but through the internet, we sort of are connect-- 00:04:48.151 --> 00:04:54.078 have gathered here over MIT and the Media Lab to be part of this MOOC, 00:04:54.078 --> 00:04:58.254 but at the start of the MOOC, we're very disconnected, right? 00:04:58.254 --> 00:05:01.938 it's just a bunch of us who've shown up for this experience. 00:05:06.757 --> 00:05:12.311 And, you know, we all go to the web site and we read about it, and we listen to Mitch, 00:05:12.311 --> 00:05:16.922 and we get a sense of what we're in for and we can connect to resources 00:05:16.922 --> 00:05:21.486 that Mitch and his team have put up to get it started. 00:05:22.203 --> 00:05:25.923 Again, at this point, there are very few connections between people. 00:05:29.953 --> 00:05:38.176 And, as we join the Google+ community, and start blogging about it and tweeting about it, 00:05:38.176 --> 00:05:48.158 we start making links between ourselves -- up here -- 00:05:49.130 --> 00:05:53.318 And then the course gets started. 00:05:53.577 --> 00:05:58.949 I've represented that as this first lecture, a presentation that Mitch did, 00:06:01.659 --> 00:06:07.867 and it sends out a lot of information to all of us, right? 00:06:07.867 --> 00:06:09.386 to all participating in the group. 00:06:09.386 --> 00:06:13.523 Now obviously, his - Mitch and his team are also paying close attention 00:06:13.523 --> 00:06:20.911 to this stream of information coming out of that first presentation. 00:06:27.896 --> 00:06:35.445 And, associated with the video presentation are readings for each of these...for each of the weeks 00:06:39.305 --> 00:06:43.093 and - well I think that's all I wanted to say here. 00:06:46.668 --> 00:06:52.478 And immediately after, or even before, that first presentation 00:06:52.478 --> 00:06:55.806 people were starting to tweet, were starting to add to the ... 00:07:03.583 --> 00:07:08.932 ... the main Google+ group and were also starting 00:07:08.932 --> 00:07:12.787 to get to know the people in our own little groups 00:07:12.797 --> 00:07:16.637 and posting there, and some of us are 00:07:16.637 --> 00:07:21.832 starting to blog about LCL. 00:07:25.661 --> 00:07:28.177 Right? Lots of us writing blogs, 00:07:28.177 --> 00:07:29.661 or some of us writing blogs, so there's 00:07:29.661 --> 00:07:33.017 this information that starts really flowing rapidly. 00:07:35.012 --> 00:07:40.274 And, as we do that we start to form connections here. 00:07:41.870 --> 00:07:44.096 And if I did this again I would have these connections 00:07:44.096 --> 00:07:48.551 gradually thicken and intensify, but I was working out 00:07:48.551 --> 00:07:51.964 these ideas as I made the model, so we have 00:07:51.964 --> 00:07:59.293 the fully networked collection of us here. 00:08:02.459 --> 00:08:04.745 And, through these colored lines I'm just 00:08:04.745 --> 00:08:07.808 representing the information that we're exchanging 00:08:07.808 --> 00:08:10.826 via the Google+ group, on Twitter, 00:08:10.826 --> 00:08:13.846 via the blogs, and ... 00:08:16.763 --> 00:08:19.839 and that was after the first week. 00:08:19.839 --> 00:08:23.076 The second week, we get the lecture from the... 00:08:24.464 --> 00:08:26.754 the presentation [mumbles], 00:08:27.109 --> 00:08:33.366 and we're assigned to talk about a gear, 00:08:33.366 --> 00:08:38.740 learning gear from our childhood based on Papert's (?) writings. 00:08:38.740 --> 00:08:41.469 And we start posting, sharing information 00:08:41.469 --> 00:08:45.426 on our small LCL groups, and some of us 00:08:45.426 --> 00:08:46.975 on the big LCL group. 00:08:47.594 --> 00:08:51.050 And again, blogging about it and sharing the information in other ways. 00:08:54.880 --> 00:08:59.832 There is communication going between 00:08:59.832 --> 00:09:06.082 Mitch and the other LCL group moderators, 00:09:07.104 --> 00:09:10.322 between all of us here in the network cloud. 00:09:14.070 --> 00:09:22.216 So there's this flow of information from 00:09:22.216 --> 00:09:25.529 first Mitch and his team put it up here, 00:09:25.529 --> 00:09:27.746 and it comes out to us, 00:09:27.746 --> 00:09:31.836 we comment upon it, and sometimes directly talk 00:09:31.836 --> 00:09:34.340 with Mitch and his team. 00:09:35.233 --> 00:09:37.389 And mostly we're sending information out here 00:09:37.389 --> 00:09:45.437 to these streams, and sharing that way. 00:09:46.066 --> 00:09:48.497 Which, of course, Mitch and his team are watching 00:09:48.497 --> 00:09:51.745 what appears out in these various streams. 00:09:52.570 --> 00:09:54.596 There's a lot of information flowing around. 00:09:55.333 --> 00:09:57.990 And then, the third week was ... 00:10:02.146 --> 00:10:07.348 the Dale Dowerdy (?), and Buckly (?), 00:10:07.348 --> 00:10:12.309 and we were supposed to create scratch projects 00:10:12.309 --> 00:10:14.010 which many of us did. 00:10:14.010 --> 00:10:16.467 We shared those and learned from eachother. 00:10:18.556 --> 00:10:22.090 And the density of our network is increasing up here. 00:10:23.077 --> 00:10:27.352 And then the fourth week, it was the 00:10:27.352 --> 00:10:31.760 infamous Alan Kay-dominated lecture. 00:10:33.970 --> 00:10:36.375 That certainly generated a lot of, 00:10:37.942 --> 00:10:40.382 a lot of feedback. 00:10:41.798 --> 00:10:43.986 Mostly, at least most of what I saw, 00:10:43.986 --> 00:10:45.609 was on the LCL main group. 00:10:49.319 --> 00:10:51.454 Our assignment was to work with 00:10:54.294 --> 00:10:55.951 the drawing program... 00:10:56.947 --> 00:10:59.189 <chuckles> whose name is escaping me right now. 00:11:00.132 --> 00:11:01.711 Oh...anyway. 00:11:03.624 --> 00:11:07.110 Obviously dozens and dozens, 00:11:07.110 --> 00:11:10.357 if not hundreds of these programs were created, 00:11:10.357 --> 00:11:11.644 and I've just shown two here. 00:11:18.708 --> 00:11:22.264 And then, the last week's lecture on 00:11:22.264 --> 00:11:27.838 open learning, again generating more artifacts, 00:11:27.838 --> 00:11:29.918 stream of more artifacts, 00:11:29.918 --> 00:11:34.440 some of us working with the stack exchange 00:11:34.440 --> 00:11:38.162 and some of us offering courses and hangouts, et cetera. 00:11:38.162 --> 00:11:40.909 And again there were lots more than 00:11:40.909 --> 00:11:42.683 I'm showing here. 00:11:42.683 --> 00:11:46.360 And as the course continues we will be 00:11:46.360 --> 00:11:48.509 producing more artifacts. 00:11:50.757 --> 00:11:52.754 And as I've said before, 00:11:54.364 --> 00:12:00.371 Mitch and his team are watching all of this happen. 00:12:03.334 --> 00:12:04.770 They're probably not looking at 00:12:04.770 --> 00:12:09.412 every single scratch project put up on 00:12:09.412 --> 00:12:13.270 the scratch website, or every single 00:12:13.270 --> 00:12:16.644 sub-group on Google+, but they're 00:12:16.644 --> 00:12:19.121 keeping an eye on things and sortof 00:12:19.121 --> 00:12:22.835 trying to understand how this is all developing. 00:12:25.452 --> 00:12:28.138 And of course, that gets fed back to us, 00:12:28.138 --> 00:12:33.729 in the form of, you know, 00:12:33.729 --> 00:12:38.334 upcoming lectures where they share what they've seen. 00:12:38.334 --> 00:12:44.587 And the chat, which is becoming a part 00:12:44.587 --> 00:12:48.824 of each presentation, and just direct communication 00:12:50.644 --> 00:12:53.975 back and forth with us, all of us or some of us. 00:12:56.772 --> 00:12:59.069 And so we have this, we have this 00:12:59.069 --> 00:13:02.704 network that we've built very quickly, 00:13:04.384 --> 00:13:13.830 which is <clears throat> doing something, maybe. 00:13:15.144 --> 00:13:17.172 Exactly what is not clear to me, 00:13:17.172 --> 00:13:19.855 since we're certainly producing a lot of information. 00:13:21.836 --> 00:13:24.207 I guess the question I have is, 00:13:24.207 --> 00:13:26.985 what are the potentials here? 00:13:26.985 --> 00:13:29.776 What emergent properties might this have, I don't know, 00:13:29.776 --> 00:13:33.965 but in a sense there are interesting possibilities. 00:13:40.034 --> 00:13:43.677 I think, we know that most of the world 00:13:43.677 --> 00:13:45.638 is going to be living in cities within 00:13:45.638 --> 00:13:49.237 a hundred years, and cities are... 00:13:50.609 --> 00:13:52.955 we're going to have to get a lot smarter 00:13:52.955 --> 00:13:57.048 about how we run our cities. 00:13:59.865 --> 00:14:01.681 There's in fact a whole movement with the 00:14:01.681 --> 00:14:03.563 urban studies community called 00:14:03.563 --> 00:14:05.201 "Smarter Cities" ... 00:14:06.568 --> 00:14:10.373 and I think part of the emergent properties 00:14:10.373 --> 00:14:13.197 that are possible with cMOOCs 00:14:14.259 --> 00:14:17.767 is we're sort of training a lot of us 00:14:17.767 --> 00:14:20.236 to work in these networks 00:14:21.456 --> 00:14:23.907 that can be developed very quickly 00:14:23.907 --> 00:14:26.355 with the current tools of the internet, 00:14:26.355 --> 00:14:28.397 which I assume will become even easier 00:14:28.397 --> 00:14:30.055 to build in the future, 00:14:30.865 --> 00:14:35.105 and so the cMOOC experience is, in a way, 00:14:35.114 --> 00:14:39.264 sort of training us to be better at 00:14:39.264 --> 00:14:44.211 running our communities in the future, 00:14:44.211 --> 00:14:45.975 making our communities much smarter. 00:14:46.693 --> 00:14:49.150 So that's, that's where I am with this. 00:14:49.150 --> 00:14:50.560 I would love feedback. 00:14:50.560 --> 00:14:52.813 I will post the model online, 00:14:52.813 --> 00:14:54.816 so that anybody who wants it can download it. 00:14:54.816 --> 00:14:59.203 And, again, this is just very experimental. 00:14:59.203 --> 00:15:01.345 Just playing around with ideas. 00:15:01.345 --> 00:15:02.834 So. Thanks! 00:15:02.834 --> 00:15:04.838 Thanks for watching.