A few months ago, I stumbled upon MOOCs. Immediately, I was hooked. I found Coursera, was intrigued by the EDC-MOOC course description and signed up in seconds flat. In November, I notice a rapid growth of Twitter followers. Surprised, I investigate and lo and behold, the new tweeps were course mates in this MOOC I had almost forgotten about. A few weeks later, I receive a Facebook invite from a fellow classmate, Eric Clark, and here's where my EDC-MOOC story begins to unfold. I'm not a FB fan, but I do have a FB page for sharing ed tech. I revived my personal page and joined. Within a few weeks there were over 150 of us. We did not formally introduce ourselves or our professional background; in the beginning, we began to share ideas, web tools, articles, links, images, videos and more, gradually we were gaining each other's trust, and somehow we earned it. Our enthusiasm for learning and sharing became contagious, and we all felt the collective excitement about the course that wouldn't begin until the following year. We spent the holiday season together (sort of), wished each other Merry Christmas. The Australians and others, reassured us Americans that the world was intact on that day in December when we wondered if EDC-MOOC would ever even be. We rang in the new year (sort of), and now in one more day the journey begins for real this time. We all met as strangers, but so many of us have developed digital friendships because of the atmosphere each and every member of the EDC MOOC community has created through our individual contributions, large or small.
This is my last pre-course blog post to go down memory lane and show some of the new members where we started, and where we've been. As Laurie wrote recently on her blog, "the places we'll go" as learning nomads in EDC-MOOC is really up to us.
Take a look at EDC MOOC's Digital Culture-A Retrospective.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it!
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." —Helen Keller
Can't believe there are no comments yet :-) Even as I am not a total newbie and had been enrolled since sometime in November I enjoyed your summary of the journey so far. It shows that there was much more preparation activity and things going for a much longer time than the course itself will take. And hopefully, it will continue afterwards. I would hope to stay in contact with some (surely it's utopic to wish that for thousands of participants), not to miss their good ideas, their tech-advice and the inspiration.
ReplyDeleteIt is true, we feel so close despite being located so far from each other and we are all over the world. It is the common goal of learning that does that to us. I sent more online Christmas wishes than I wrote paper cards to relatives and friends :-)
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ReplyDeleteI actually appreciated how you presented your memory lane quite well. :) I didn't know about MOOCs before and the alike, but I'm just so glad I bumped into this article as well: http://www.elearners.com/online-education-resources/online-learning/moocs-under-the-microscope/
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful presentation, Ary. I love the community which edcmooc seems to foster. I think it was even stronger with the 2 month lead time you had in edcmooc 1. Something to consider for next time if you are CTA again. :)
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