Traces in the sands of the MOON

[dustcube]

Networked learning, aka MOONs (Massive Open Online Networks), provides
opportunities for people to connect, interact, communicate,
collaborate. MOOCs are MOONs of a special type.

As researchers, how can we track those 'traces in the sands of the
MOON'?

The essence of research is good questions, rather than good answers,
so lets make a start with these:

Why are you interested in this?

What's your experience?

Whose shoulders are you standing on? (ref: Newton)

What are your units of observation? (ref: ANT, CAST, CODA, SNA (?) or
another acronym of your choice)

What are your findings so far?

What is the relationship between 'tracker' and 'trackee'?

[Jenny]

I sometimes wonder myself why I am interested in this. I think it's
because I am interested in the relationship between teacher and
learner in online environments, how people learn online and
determining who is the teacher and who is the learner in any online
communication. It all stems from a lifetime of trying to teach
effectively and more recently in trying to teach effectively online.
My experience is that the online environment can be a very powerful
learning environment.

Whose shoulders are you standing on? Where to start - Dewey, Vygotsky,
Freire, Ausubel, Piaget, Bruner .........

Units of observation. In recent years I tend to look at online
learning through a community of practice lens (Wenger's ideas). Have I
understood this question correctly? I never was any good at acronyms.

Findings so far are that theory is all well and good - practice is a
whole different ball game. Sorry if this sounds flippant.

What is the relationship between 'tracker' and 'trackee'? That's the
interesting bit!

Jenny

[dustcube]

Jenny, my experience is similarly that online learning can be a very
powerful learning environment.

The practice is the hard, and interesting bit. Each online workshop
that I run comes out quite different. Much more so than an on campus
class, or even on campus workshop.

So: how do we track 'practice'? If you apply the CoP lens, what kind
of thing do your see (and not see)?

[Jenny]

Hi Roy - I have just had a paper accepted by JCAL which I worked on
with my colleagues Karen Guldberg, who I also met in an online course
- The paper 'Foundations of Communities of Practice: enablers and
barriers to participation will be published (I think) in the next
issue.

We found these were the enablers and barriers - technology,
connectivity, understanding norms, emotion and learning tensions.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'track practice'. Would you like to
elaborate?

I find that my relationships with my online students (as a whole
group) tend to be more intense than my relationships used to be when I
taught f2f - which I did for very many years.

Jenny

[Shaomeng]

Hi everyone

Thanks to dustcube for posting these questions. As a learner who is
educated in a pretty isolated information environment in China, the
only way for me to thrive is to learn and connect actively. So my
primary interest is in learning, rather than teaching. Little
distinction as it may seems, it is a perspective that makes more sense
to me.

The most valuable experience I've had is the experience of learning
self-directly with only the computer. I am a first year
learning&cognition graduate student here in U of Minnesota now. No
research background, no formal theory training, but eager to learn.

Shoulders: I started with some of the traditional learning theories by
reading a textbook, these theories resonate with me back then. Then I
stumbled upon a google group just like this in China, I encountered
George and Stephen's work, which totally changed my view of learning.
Although hardly know anything about anything, as a learner, I am also
intrigued by complexity theory and network theory, which I am trying
to learn between my assignments. I literally entered into a FLOW
experience when I first encountered a lot of these theories. That's
why I am also interested in positive psychology. As a human-being
always want to make sense out of the complex world(what a weakness,
when we tend to abandon our instincts sometimes, as Nietzsche might
argue), I also find understanding people's action from a behavior
economics perspective interesting. Evolutionary psychology seems also
promising in understanding human psyche. As I always wonder what is
human emotion and such things like this, I am also influenced by it.
But as I never studied all these interesting field formally and all
the information I got are from OCW, webpages, some popular textbooks
that I could get my hands on, and blogs, all the knowledge I had is
very fragmented and incomplete I might remember few of these guys'
name, but I might not able to remember most of their names.

I have no findings, no observation. But as a graduate student who is
in the process of getting an "academic" training, I am very interested
in how to conduct research on the networked learning. In the end, I am
here to learn and to connect.