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Well, there are soooo many things I looooved about clmooc. So many, and yet I never “properly” engaged with it*… But here are the top five things I plan to take from #clmooc back to my own context
1. The #f5f concept!
I love love love this concept, which is short for “find 5 Fridays”. Forget the Fridays, but keep the Fives. I even co-authored with Tanya Lau (a fellow rhizo14er, clmoocer and edcontexts facilitator) an article for edcontexts that does exactly that: describe five of our favorite places to follow. Look at these creative f5f prompts creative prompts for week 6! I will start asking students to do something similar and maybe even colleagues!!! The 5 things for work (i work at the Center for Learning and Teaching) could be like, new technologies they learned about this month (for the techies), 5 useful articles, or maybe even in our meetings to highlight only the top 5 events of the week for each of us! For students, it could be their final reflection paper, asking them to highlight the top five articles or technologies or whatever that they benefited from each module, their top 5 moments of learning in the course… Which leads to …
2. Telling stories via images
Wow, I could use this in so many ways! First, I could ask students to each bring in a photo, and we play a game where students pick random photos and make stories out of them collaboratively. Another option is as a final course reflection, to select 5 photos to represent their experience (had this idea before but it is not unique, i think others have suggested it) – to add to their final ePortfolio. I am not a naturally visual person, but seeing so much beauty and creativity done visually (and by people many of whom are actually writing teachers – the ones who teach the verbal side of things) has gotten me excited.
3. Game ideas
I teach a module on educational games and I love the different take on games that came up in #clmooc, with all those games related to using words, stories, poetry, and also a discussion about what games mean and how culture influences what counts as a game, etc…. I am now thinking about games differently, more openly than before.
4. Cool tools
Sorry I won’t actually list any tools here, but as always, watching Kevin Hodgson and Terry Elliott (e.g. here and here) for two days, you can learn about twenty new cool tools. Clmooc even have a google doc with a list of tools… Two cool tools they used are hackpad (i like it for collab editing more than google docs, for some things) and Zeega for multimedia. I am ambivalent about the value of other tools, like Haikudeck, why is that better than powerpoint? And Flipagram, i like it coz it’s an app so I can easily use in my smartphone or iPad, but Windows Movie Maker does a better job, it’s just not an app… So I need to be on a PC.
5. New people on my PLN
Best outcome in any MOOC, for me, is meeting people I hope to keep interacting with and to be inspired by after the MOOC is over. I don’t want to list them here in case I miss someone 🙂
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* I say “properly” between quotes because I know there is no predefined way to engage, I am just comparing to my own usual engagement with a MOOC I would like (never engaged as much as i did in #rhizo14, though #nwoer came close but was only one week; and yet #clmooc is maybe a v close third, and only because it coincided with Ramadan and a very intense summer semester). I engaged in the sense that I made most of the makes and looked at some others, joined some twitter chats, watched some hangouts, met a few new people, but did not become fully immersed in the community as much as I did in rhizo14. Partly related to circumstances, partly the google plus platform, partly that I was enjoying and learning quite a lot from my smaller community of edcontexts and rhizo14 folks with a small group of new people, without “needing” to engage more, but I still would have liked to engage more
I especially appreciated your insights regarding context. If there’s one thing I will insist upon when it comes to learning (and “professional development,” for lack of a less-debased term), it’s that practitioners need to have the chance to reflect on how to make sense of how new ideas will fit into their specific contexts. My main suggestion for CLMOOC 2015 will be to make these connections & reflections more explicit.
Also, this is not quite related to your post, but does one wish “Happy Eid Mubarak”? Or is it just “Eid Mubarak”? I saw both on Twitter yesterday and wasn’t sure about the usage.
So happy that the context views made a difference. It helped that several of us from edcontexts took part in clmooc together and used that energy to energize ourselves 🙂
Re: Eid (thanks for the wishes!) Well Mubarak means “blessed” and adjectives in Arabic go AFTER the noun… So happy Eid Mubarak is a very Anglo-Arab expression ppl who are bilingual will get. But usually we would say either Happy Eid or Eid Mubarak but not both 🙂
Got it! “Eid” is the name of the event. I’m not sure why that was so hard for me to figure out – Spanish works the same way with noun-adjective, and though I’m not as fluent as I’d like to be, almost everyone in the urban sections of Southern California knows some Spanish.
At 4 pm Pacific on Tuesday, we’re having a Make With Me about connecting the CLMOOC experience to our teaching context – I realize that this is 1 or 2 in the morning for you, but if you are awake, it’d be great if you join in! We are aiming to make this Make With Me driven by CLMOOC participants rather than facilitators.
Thanks, Michael, will try to make it, but much easier to join twitter chats than hangouts at those odd hours…