Making It Real: Organizing and Articulating Learning #eduMOOC

Finally got access to Moodle! Yay!

I really like Jenny Ankenbauer’s response (July 5) to Karen Swan’s question “What are the most pressing questions [re online learning] that still remain unanswered?” (July 2) in the Social Forum for eduMOOC (http://www.integrating-technology.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5049). Here is the part of Jenny’s response that really resonated with me:

‘The MOOC movement is an honorable effort to reform education… and a brilliant solution to release jealously held privileged knowledge to those who, without previous, socially connected opportunity, could never hope to get their nose in the knowledge trough. But MOOC’s are not capable in and of themselves of validating performance. In the absence of an assessment process that can externally validate my learning in a MOOC, I will consider a MOOC an opportunity to fill-in my learning gaps…It is a rare opportunity to spend critical time-on-task with time the only price I need to pay. I can obtain the privileged knowledge I lack[,] from recognized and externally validated experts in the field. And maybe that is all a MOOC is meant to be…an option and part of the solution, never claiming to be THE solution.’

I also like Joyce McKnight’s response (July 5), which reads, in part, ‘…what I call tacit (largely unconscious learning) that occurs as we live, work, read, reflect, act etc. in everyday life only becomes conscious (i.e. explicit) learning when we are able to articulate it and organize it…I think the same process is probably equally true with a MOOC...it would only be as I organize my learning into categories and articulate it that it would move from simply tacit learning (kind of floating around in my mind) to explicit learning…it takes discipline (organization) to really make sense of things and making sense is at least part of what formal learning is about.’