Archive for the ‘Angela Blog’ Category

Mooching around MOOCs

March 4th, 2014 by Angela Rees

I’ve been researching MOOCs by joining and participating in a few. I’m sure you don’t quite get the whole MOOC experience unless you’re signing up for something you’re genuinely interested in and with hindsight I was never going to get on well with Citizenship and US Immigration.  However, I had high hopes for the Anatomy of the Abdomen, (I once took an Anat. and Phys. subsidiary class) the discussion in the forums was good and there was lots of interaction with the lecturer, but I just couldn’t get through the videos.  I looked for more; an introduction to clinical neuropsychlogy, understanding the economy, basic dentistry… MOOC after MOOC of watch the video, answer the questions.  By video I mean 15 minutes of lecturer talking to the camera.

I want to be inspired and I want to go and find things out for myself.

That said, I do like the look and feel of FutureLearn, there is a discussion forum and comments function, you don’t have to follow the formula.

Some good MOOCs;

http://octel.alt.ac.uk WordPress based course by ALT in using technology in teaching and how to make a MOOC

FSLT14 http://vle.openbrookes.net/course/view.php?id=11 Oxford Brooks Moodle based Mooc First steps in teaching and learning – activity based, so if you don’t participate in the blogging, discussing and collaborative document making you don’t learn anything. You can earn open badges for completing the activities.

TOOC14 (Teaching Open Online Course) begins 10th March http://vle.openbrookes.net/course/view.php?id=12

OOE13 http://www.ooe13.org another WordPress blog, lots of inspiration to go and do something and to embed it in your practice (in this case teaching) Uses Credly for awarding open badges. Course runs for a whole year rather than in short sessions of 2 or 3 weeks. Lots of related networking and peer to peer sharing and discussion via Twitter also assignments shared via Twitter.

Interesting reading;

I found this blog post  http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/ on http://degreeoffreedom.org who is attempting to complete a four year BA in one year through the medium of MOOC.

Great interactive learning ideas I saw today;

Using a Google document to collate a collaborative annotated bibliography by inviting collaborators to use the comments feature to discuss/reflect on the contributions. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I_ZO2KmbbJbzVLukxfVV6co_zFVT_OSW6uUYY1u7VPI/edit?usp=sharing

Using twitter to facilitate peer to peer learning amongst MOOC participants.  https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ooe13&src=hash

Filed under: EmployID Tagged: MOOC, OOE13, TOOC14

Posted in Angela Blog | Comments Off on Mooching around MOOCs

Hiya

March 4th, 2014 by Angela Rees

Originally posted on Babi Tech:

Babi2.0 recently had her 1

st

birthday.  She’s been having fun with the Toca Band app but hasn’t quite figured out what makes it work. She keeps trying to recreate the music by wiggling her fingers over a locked smartphone screen whilst dancing, makes sense, that’s what she did the first time and it worked perfectly.

Other recent advances are that she has started to hold rectangular objects, phone, tv remote, toy with buttons to her ear and say “hiya, hiya, hiya, hiya…” Before 11 months she had been known to hold conversations via pasta and wooden blocks. She has identified the dvd remote as not being a phone because she points that one at the TV, usually during an emotional scene in a Tinkerbell as if to torment her big sister.

She attempted some interaction with Mwnci Bach, a more child friendly version of the popular talking cat and dog apps but soon got frustrated as there’s no dancing to be done.

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Filed under: Dissertation distractions 😉

Posted in Angela Blog | Comments Off on Hiya

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