How to Participate in a cMOOC

By Stephen Downes
Oct 08, 2021
Transcript of How to Participate in a cMOOC

Audio file
2021 10 08 - Ethics.mp3
Transcript

Auto-transcribed by Office 365 - changes made to remove all the duplicates of "Speaker n' at the beginning of each new line

Speaker 1
So I can see if I.
Can hear you.

Speaker 2
Nice to see you Stephen.
Ah, nice to meet you guys.

Speaker 1
Excellent Margaret hi.
So OK, this is awesome, so I've been having horrible horrible web server problems so so much so I turned off all generated page displays.
I'm hitting my resource limits.
Uh, I believe it's probably.
My fault.
There's probably a programming error in there somewhere causing a loop, but I don't know what it.
Is and I can't seem to find the problem.
So there we go.
So, so people who expected to go on the website and watch in the activity center etc.
But aren't able to watch this meeting, which is unfortunate.
I'm sort of trying to step my way through the problem, but it's really difficult when I'm able to get one page load every five minutes.
So I have no idea what's causing it, but it's very weird so.
Uh, enough about my server problems so so instead of me launching into something, oh it's Juan Domingo.
Fernos welcome.
Let let me get reactions from you guys.
Up to this point, how?
How have you been finding the course?
And I I realized we haven't actually launched into the subject.
Of the course.
Yet, but just the the setup and the mood in the initial instructions.
How have you been finding that?
Better thumbs up for Matias.

Speaker 2
Yeah, it's been.
Good if I may say I haven't put enough time in Steven, so I apologize, but I watched the video you had on setting up a blog and subscribing it or adding it to the course newsletter.
So I'll I'm working on that and I hope to have that to you today and I'm I'm listening.
To this so I'm looking forward to be fully engaged as we.
Go through here.

Speaker 1
Something I've noticed about this June.
This zoom setup is if I talk while you're talking, it cuts you off, so that's interesting.
I wonder if it works in reverse if you speak while I'm speaking, does it cut me off?
I'll bet you it doesn't.
Yeah, that's interesting so.
The main purpose of this session or.
What I what?
I had in mind talking about is just the the concept of participating in A C MC, generally because it's quite a contrast to your regular everyday course where your steps.
Through learning activities as a group and everybody does the same thing and there are learning objectives and all of that.
So a number of you have already taken.
Well, actually, I see Matias and Margaret.
You both have your mic muted.
Are you able to speak and just don't want to or you're not able to speak?

Speaker 4
I think I can speak, I just don't.
Have anything intelligent to say?

Speaker 1
OK, I'm sure you do, but.
So I'll put that down.
It's choosing not to speak at the moment, Natalia.
How about you?
Are you able to speak?
You're not able to speak OK, so that'll limit your participation somewhat.
That's too bad.
I'll keep the chat open to have.
Keep an eye on what he's.
Say so if you have a comment to make just.
Make it the chat.
Switching off your camera is you're getting bandwidth warnings.
OK?
Well yeah from Margaret.
Yeah yeah, that's the problem with this whole concept of online learning is bandwidth and I still don't think it's been solved personally.

Speaker 3
Uh, so.

Speaker 1
So there's so basically Bernie, it's you and me conversing with Margaret interjecting one so.
So how have you taken any of these simants from me before?

Speaker 2
What in order?
No, but I I saw you at a conference about 15 years ago or 10 or 15 years ago.
And yeah, it influenced me back then.
Stephen influenced me back then.
So and I've been.
Subscribing and I I follow your your your writings and I.
It's influenced my teaching.
Influenced my teaching.
Constantly and or continually.
So I'm I'm.
I really appreciate the opportunity to say hello to you, and I'm indebted to you.
I am indebted to you.
Uhm, so I'm looking to just stay sharp here and you're going to force me to do come out of my.
Sort of some.
Of the patterns, maybe I've fallen into.
I'm pretty not a bad online teacher, but I know there's always something to learn and you're definitely you know.
Looking at all all kinds of things.
So I'm looking forward to participating and.
It's important to say I'm a teacher, so I need to be effective online.
And I can't just sit back.
I need to be.
Engaging people and so I'm it's a real pleasure to to be here with you on this this journey.

Speaker 1
Well I appreciate that I always worry.
Uh, whenever do any of these things is because I do things quite a bit differently from shall we say best practices.
And I was worried.
Does that make me have had online teacher?
Uh but I I run that risk Margaret, have you taken any see marks that I've offered previously?

Speaker 4
No, I haven't.
This is my first foray.
It's my first foray into.
A movie in general.

Speaker 1
Oh wow.
OK, well that that's interesting.
So you haven't been spoiled.
Or yes, I'll use the word spoiled by Coursera or edx or anything like that.

Speaker 4
I've done some like non synchronous stuff with Coursera and I'm currently in a part time.

Speaker 1
Oh yeah.

Speaker 4
You know formal university online program, nothing nothing look like.

Speaker 1
OK.
Technically, I think everything offered by Coursera is a quote unquote MOOC, but of course that that's less and less true.
Perhaps as time goes by.
Now I'm just going to shift my screen here.
Sure, OK, we have one person watching the YouTube stream, so we do have a fifth person, but they're they're just not visible to us.
So, so I'm just whoops, I've minimized hours chat.
So I'm just moving my.
My stuff around select I can see the chat on the YouTube channel.
The YouTube channel is at least a minute behind us, maybe more which I find very interesting, so I guess there's some signal processing happening there.
I'm learning all kinds of stuff about how all this works.
I really I didn't expect.
Zoom to have a live stream mode, but as soon as I saw it I knew I wanted it because what my original plan was was to do the zoom conversation on the desktop and then use an application called open broadcaster systems.
To pick up my desk, my screen activity and then transmit that to YouTube. That would have meant twice the bandwidth.
It's on my end and that would have probably ruined all the effect.
But this seems to be working pretty well.
This is for for.
Bernie and Margo especially, I know Matias has taken many of these looks before.
He's an old hand at it and he he spends more time correcting me and telling me that there are things broken on the site.
So and then than anything but.
Taking assuming is very different and and let me outline a couple of the major things that makes it different.

Speaker 2
If I may, can I ask a question here?
Yeah, even I.
Even I did take a MOOC of five years.
Or so ago.
On how to be a good online teacher.
It was by some Italian Italian University or something.
It was really good and I enjoyed it so.
So so that I have taken a MOOC and.
It was it was.
It was good.

Speaker 1
OK, I wonder if I I wonder if that was through.

Speaker 2
Yes, yes Emma.

Speaker 1
OK, OK yeah, right that's that's wonderful because I did some work with them.
They're based in Naples.
They're really good.
People down there and that I had the opportunity to visit with them a number of times and I really Miss Naples.
I I missed the pizza, especially in Naples.
I'm I'm now a pizza purist.
All good.
OK, so.
Uh, we have a list of topics and you know those are the the 8 modules of the course 9 if we include this one, but it's not really a curriculum traditionally defined.
Uhm, it's probably better to think of the list of modules or the list of topics that recovering as a list of things that I want to talk about, and I'm inviting all of you to talk about them with me.
Because there's no real centralized control, there's no requirement that you talk about these particular topics.
You know, I mean, because the MC sort of brings together a bunch of people who are sharing resources with each other, etc.
And you might go off.
Another tangent.
And there's nothing I can do to stop that and nothing I want to do to stop that.
So if if the participants in the mood decide to abandon the course outline completely and go in a different direction, that's actually fine with me.
I'll still keep talking about the things I want to talk about.
That's I'm stubborn that way.
But you know, I'll probably have comments on what you're talking about too.
Or maybe not, who knows?
So in a sense, you know, although there's a list of things I want to talk about.
In a sense, it's like I'm an equal participant in a conversation with you, although I am talking about a bunch of certain things.
And this was modeled.
Yeah, the the original MC that we created.
Back in 2008, they explicitly used this model. This was modeled on.
Courses were offered way back, you know, in the I don't wanna say early days 'cause early days goes back to the 1500s. But but before now at places like Oxford and Cambridge and whatever, at least as I've interpreted that.
Processed this of course I was never there and I didn't dig deep reading on that, but but the idea was that.
Students attended these universities and they formed themselves into learning societies and in some cases secret societies.
But mostly learning societies seem to have the society for analytical philosophy or society for consciousness and thought or whatever.
Most of my knowledge.
But this process comes from the world of philosophy.
And so they self organize their own studies.
They teach now one of the things that Oxford and Cambridge can offer that I can't is the students also worked with an individual professor who would be their main mentor and leader through the whole process.
But but other than that?
So I can't do that, but the way these societies would work is they would control or convince.
One of the professors to offer a series of lectures on a topic, AKA a course of lectures.
Which to me is where the word course comes from is just a course of lectures, a series of lectures on the topic.
And the professor.
Peace their job.
Uh, I would.
Reluctantly agree 'cause it takes away from their research and their one on one work and students and show up in the classroom or more more accurately, in Auditorium Hall and deliver these lectures and so.
You had some very, you know, through history.
You've had some very famous courses of lectures offered by these philosophers.
Is the the Ludvig Mic and Stein lectures.
I believe that they were at Oxford, but I'm not sure.
It's either Oxford or Cambridge this wherever Bertrand Russell was in GE Moore was and a bunch of the others.
You know, there was one apocryphal story where.
He walked into the lecture theatre and of course there there are some people in the lecture theatre and she EM. Anscombe and a bunch of others.
Uh, he walked in he went to speak, he went.
He sat there, he thought for about 1/2 an hour and then he abruptly turned around a lot.
I I won't do that to you.
But I really reserved the right.
And and you know the these things sometimes descended into popularity contests.
And there's the story of young, uh?
Hegel would attract huge audiences to his lectures and in the same university at the same time, Arthur Schopenhauer would attract a small, paltry crowd of people so.
But that's the idea, right and?
Then what the?
Students would do after that is they'd.
Take the content of these lectures and they do whatever they wanted with it.
You know they.
They would take copious notes and most of what we have of ludvic kanstein philosophy today.
In fact, you know almost all of it comes from the notes of his students, whose Bekenstein.
Like me, uhm, wasn't big in writing books, but he would write a whole series of notes and and then organize and rearrange.
All of these.
Notes, so after his death, students had access to their notes notebooks to Vic and Steins notes and in that whole pile stuff.
And so they organized his books. I'm I'm sort of like that with my Oh well, daily. So I got 30,000 he did.
It too a little.
Uh, if I ever become as famous as victims and somebody can sort into real thinking.
And and this course kind of works that way to where all throw out notes and thoughts and things like that.
But again, because it's a MOOC ASI MC, I invite you to do that too, so we actually get not just one person.
Set of notes.
Individual thoughts, but we get a group of people set of notes and thoughts and then we can reorganize them, respond to them back and forth, et cetera.
So that was the overall model of the.
MC When we first started.
And it it actually worked really well.
When we we had 2200 people, it doesn't work as well with the smaller MC and and so then we get more pushed to do something more formal and structured. But you know I I always remain hopeful.
I read this morning about someone doing AI in a MOOC there where they cheated a bit because they wanted to test.
You know how the AI could respond to what people were saying in the MC in order to meet learning needs?
And that's a good idea.
But instead of actually offering emotion, doing it in real life, they created a simulation of a 1000 person.
Look what a great idea. I wouldn't have to actually offer moose at all in the future. I just run a simulation on my mood and it'll have 1000 people and therefore be successful.
And then draw all kinds of conclusions from that.
That that was that was pretty funny.
That's the first aspect of it, and that's why I ask people to create their own their own blogs and to contribute, you know, by writing in.
The blog it.
Doesn't matter really to me if people like the blog.
In writing Twitter, people haven't been writing in Twitter, so I guess it matters a little bit, but actually we.
In the early days and I continued to this day, have encouraged people to, you know, use whatever forum works for them.
And and I've sort of settled into blogs over time because a lot of it and it's sort of funny.
A lot of these alternative forums have sort of fallen into disuse.
For example, in in the early days people created groups in Google Groups.
And had nice threaded discussions where they argued with each other and with us and with strangers who would come by.
And that was really good and.
I'm not sure I could do it now, but I was able back then to bring in the RSS from the Google Groups as well and put them in the newsletter and I did that.
It wasn't as structured in his neat as the blog post, but it was still pretty interesting stuff.
We had another group even created their own island in second life.
That was back when second life was a faint.
There was no way to aggregate that, but you know there are limits to everything.
I still still feel that way, you know.
They want people to use any platform that they.
Point and if a method exists to bring the content from that platform.
To the course.
Then I'll make that happen.
Sometimes it means I have to write some software, but but happily I can write the software to do that and it sort of makes an interesting sideline to the whole loop.
Experience, at least for me.
Uhm, again works better with more people than rather than fewer people.
Now we have we're up to about 120 people signed up for the Email newsletter. Of course, I said explicitly you don't have to sign up for the Email newsletter, so so I'm hoping some people took.
Me at my word on that and are subscribing to the course through RSS.
I have no idea how many people have subscribed through RSS.
I could look it up on Feedly, maybe, but you know, I imagine it's fewer than email newsletters.
Site gives us an idea of the size of this course, so it's kind of smallish.
So in other words, it's a MOOC in a affordances only, as opposed to.
Achievement, but you know, to me it's not about how many people have signed up.
It never is.
I was perfectly prepared and I would have done it and still will do it in the future if it comes up to do this session.
Live on zoom all by myself.
It would not be the first time.
I've done a session with zero people in the audience and I'm sure it won't.
Be the last.
So any that's the first part of this, so any any thoughts and questions on all of that so far?

Speaker 2
No sounds good, yeah?

Speaker 1
OK.
So the second thing I've added to this, and I experimented with this for the first time in 2018, which was my previous move.
It's been that long since I offered a move I keep meaning to do one, and I keep not doing it so.
I was sort of like.
Kicking myself and forcing myself to do this one 'cause.
Uhm so and.
A big thing about learning online is that it needs to be more than just consuming content and more than just seminars like this even.
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah I.
I actually have breakout rooms enabled though, so I'll be breaking you into four breakout rooms later.
No, I won't.
Hi Keith.
We have Keith joining us as connecting to audio at the.
Moment, so I'm not sure how about uh?
Worked out with all those dire warnings from zoom coming in my email.
I'm still waiting for these interlopers on the web to come and bomb our our our zoom meeting.
I've I've never experienced zoom bombing so I'm kind of looking forward to that, but it hasn't happened yet.
Unless, Keith, you resume bomber, but I don't think you are because you immediately came in.
No video and your microphone muted.
So muted not muted oh.
There you are. Hi Keith.
Can see you now on video, but you're not presenting as a zoom bomber.
You're presenting as an interested and engaged participant.
So welcome.
Uhm, so again, feel free to jump in with audio at any point.
Uhm, and as I mentioned earlier, I've discovered that if I speak, it's sort of.
The the the technical term is ducking, it'll reduce the.
It'll reduce the volume of anyone elses speaks so I can talk over it.
It's interesting that zoom has auto ducking for for the presenter.
Uhm, anyhow so.
Should be more.
Than just discussions like this shouldn't be more than just reading content.
There should be activities.
So I was inspired by Jim Groom.
Who offered a course called digital storytelling. 106 DS 106 at Mary Washington University in the US somewhere.
Kingston's in Maryland or something.
I should know this, but I don't.
I mean, it doesn't matter where it is, but.
What matters is that it's a real university, so he always had a, uh, largest group of people who really participated because they needed to get course grades.
I have no such inducements to offer, but.
What he did is 4 activities in the course.
You set up an activity bank. Now DS 106 is all about digital storytelling, so the activities all revolved around fat.
But the idea is that participants in the course could contribute activities through the course where if people did those activities rather than be selected.
Activities that would count as part of their course grade, so I tried that in E Learning 3.0 not in the E Learning 3.0 I had about the same.
Participation is in this MOOC, which should have been a warning, but So what happened was I I created a bunch of activities and those were the only activities in the course.
Nobody contributed more and that's you know I would.
Maybe 10 years ago it would have taken that personally, but I think that's a really common phenomenon.
You know, it's it's hard to get people to participate in that way.
Unless you know it's giving them a better way to.
Get grades in your course toward a degree.
Nonetheless, I've or I have I I should be more accurate with my tenses.
I am in the process of creating activities for this course as well.
So for each module over time you'll see a list of activities I will set up a form.
So that people can contribute their own activities so.
That will have.
The equivalent of an activity bank in this course.
It's something that I want my platform to support anyways, and I think it's a good idea and I think it's a great idea in fact, and that's why I wanted to steal it from Jim Grimm.
So, but how do you induce people to do the activities?
Because that's the other side of it.
Now a lot of people just did the activities 'cause they're engaged and interested in the course.
And I'm, I'm hoping people will do that here. I gave them really hard activities in E. Learning 3.0, you know like.
You know, set up a brave browser.
And use it to publish content into the Interplanetary file system, then access that content through a distributed file reading tool, stuff like that.
It was horrible, but people did it and and and.
You know, I was really encouraged by that.
I'll probably do that course again sometime in the future, and I think the tools will have improved by that.
I'm sure they will have at least some of them so.
But I still wanted to provide some sort of inducement, and at the time in 2018 everybody was talking about microlearning and badges.
So I spent some time integrated the course with Badger.
And created a mechanism whereby as people submitted their blog posts or whatever through the RSS feed, I can read those and award them a badge for a particular module.
And I'm setting that up.
Again here for this course.
Uhm, now in my perfect world.
A lot of this would happen automatically.
And and specifically, two things would happen automatically, number one.
You working in your own environment would not need to indicate that this work applies to this task.
In this module, the system would just detect that that's what you're doing.
But if you're working on, you know WordPress or Blogger or whatever, I see no.
These systems don't do that.
They haven't a clue.
What you're writing about.
So it's helpful if you indicate what module, what task you're working toward, if that's what you're doing.
Even if you don't do that, as I read your posts and obviously I'll be able to easily read everybody's posts because we don't have 2000 people contributing posts. If it qualifies for a badge, I'll still award it for the badge.
Uhm, so you might be getting badges.
You didn't actually apply for.
I'm proactive that way.
But you can see why, like like even MC, every personal intervention is A is a bottleneck, right?
So because a person who's looking at things and deciding whether or not to award badges.
Uh, they have an upper limit of how many things they can look at your all in education.
You know about that if you're like me.
You've probably sat down Once Upon a time with the proverbial vertical feet of marking to do.
And that is a vivid illustration of the upper limits of how much sort of stuff you can do.
So you know, ideally in a proper boot, the MC itself would determine whether or not your contribution is a submission for a task, and there are two ways to do it either.
The the system itself recognizes it, or you indicate that it is, and then the system reads that you've indicated it, so that's on my.
That's in the back of my mind is something I want my system to do eventually, but right now it doesn't do that and it's losely because.
You guys are using tools that are outside my control, so I can't make them do that.
The other thing is.
The actual marking of these things.
By marking what I mean is it qualifies for a badge or it doesn't?
And again, I'll just hit the button to award the badge I can.
Make that automatic.
Uhm, but you know eventually.
It would be something.
I don't know if I could ever write this, but it would be an artificial intelligence of some sort.
Saying, does this piece of writing satisfy the conditions of that batch?
Match them and see that's an interesting problem and and that's actually looking at some of the content.
This course, Even so, I may be exploring that at least in concept.
I don't know if I could do it in actual practical reality in the in the scope of time that we have, but you know that sort of thing is, is something worth thinking about?
So I've added that aspect to the course and part of what's causing my system to crash at the moment is making all of these pieces work together.
'cause here's the.
Other thing about a connectivist MOOC and now we're onto the third topic.
It's nonlinear.
And and I know it seems linear because we have a series of one through 8 modules and and that's because the book takes place in time and time, at least as we know it is linear.
You know, I do philosophy, so I'm perfectly prepared to contemplate the existence of non linear time.
However, that would work, but but.
You know there's.
There's certain practical limitations to thinking of time is not linear, so for the purposes of this course, time is linear.
How many other courses were you?
Do you get that right for the purposes of this course, we will say that time is linear.
And so, so there is an unavoidably linear element to it, but after that the course is nonlinear.
The course is structured or set up as a graph.
And and the the extent of that graph.
I'm not sure how that'll work exactly.
Yet the the graph sort of grows.
Now when I say graph.
What I mean by that is that.
There are a bunch of different entities in the course and I have different types of entities I have.
Modules I have posts in fact different types of posts presentations.
Uh, events, people, authors, links.
Which is what you're providing your you show up in the course graph as authors because you offer stuff and as links because that's what you author.
And more, there's a whole bunch of different types of entities, so.
My application which is called Grasshopper.
What it does in the background is.
It takes these entities and draws a link between them, so anytime you submit something.
It actually creates it creates a link which is the thing that you submitted.
There's a feed which is your blonde just thought of generally and an author, so there's three things there, so author align to feed and align to link and then back to author.
So those are three entities which are connected, so you have entities.
And connections between these entities, and that's what forms a graph.
A graph just is entities connected together, so the whole course is structured like that.
Now in the past, that structuring has been limited to the actual practical presentation of the course I have in my mind.
The idea of extending that to the content of the course as well.
So for example, in the in the second module we'll be looking at applications of artificial intelligence so.
I'm going to make each application properly so called.
A node or an entity in the graph.
And there will be.
I don't know there's 40 or 50 of them.
And and and, and we'll talk about those.
So have each of these activities and then.
Including but not limited to, the posts that you create will have links that are associated with these activities.
So how maybe I shouldn't call them activities or not activities, applications or column applications?
So there will be an application of AI connected to a link connected to a person connected to maybe an external feed, whatever.
Then in the next section we'll be doing issues related to AI.
So again my thinking is.
I'll make each issue a node in the graph and then issues might relate to applications might relate to resources, etc.
Something like that.
Now this is.
So this is kind of meta right?
Because the topic.
Of the course.
Is specifically these applications these issues?
These theories of ethics, etc that we're going to be looking at in in the third module?
Look at ethical codes.
I've got something like 40 or 50 ethical codes that I've looked at and analyzed.
Over the years, each one of those would be an entity, and then we can link them together so.
What that will give us is first of all, gives us a way of thinking about this material, which is kind of non-linear.
We can think about it in a more global or comprehensive way.
And I'll try to be, well.
My intention is to provide ways of accessing these.
That makes them more accessible, make them easier to comprehend, because right now it's you know if you ask what are the issues of artificial intelligence.
It's easy to get mushy in a hurry.
And by mushy I mean vague, imprecise, not really sure about what the domains are.
You know what I mean?
But after the course, ideally you will be able to go well.
There are four major types of issues, two of which are caused by this, two of which are caused by that.
We break these down or whatever you know you can talk about these issues intelligently.
And in such a way.
That you're able to discuss them comprehensively, you know, rather than saying the issue in AI, is this particular thing, which is what we see mostly in my experience, by looking at them as this graph related, you know, so more holistically, we were able to talk.
About all of the issues or what the issues in general represent.
Or whatever.
I don't know what it will turn out to be because that's how we see MOOC works, right?
I don't know what we'll learn.
We have this topic area.
We're going to look at it.
You're going to wrestle with it and by thinking of the content as a graph by thinking of ourselves as part of that graph.
What we learn will and the technical term is emerge from the graph.
We will begin to see patterns.
We will begin to see irregularities.
The idea is that we come out of this course.
Being able to recognize themes, ideas, etc in the literature or whatever, and I have found through my own experience when I worked this way.
Then then when I sit down to read, say.
A new article.
Or, you know a new publication or new study.
I'm sitting.
There going, oh.
Yeah, that's one of those.
That's one of those.
That's one of those you know I recognize and and then able to place this in the larger model simply by.
My previous work in this field and that's how I've worked generally, and that's how I work specifically in any particular domain.
And so it's that sort.
Of practice that I'm trying to engender.
In the course.
And yeah, that part with my software is.
Broken right now.
So and specifically where?
Uh, I use the graph like I have, say, a presentation, and I use the graph to associate it with a module and then present that that's a simple direct association.
That part is broken.
And it's it's.
I have a typo or.
Uh or some badly phrased bit of code somewhere in there in the piece that.
Presents web pages and it's probably sending it into an endless loop.
But that's the thought.
Thoughts on that?

Speaker 4
Sounds interesting, let's see how it builds.

Speaker 1
It's again not the usual way of presenting a course, because the usual way of presenting a course is, I would give you some learning outcomes, right?
And then you would, and I would structure the activities to produce these outcomes in you and then you would achieve.
These I can't.
Do that just.
I don't know what the learning outcomes are.
So, and actually, the activities you know you sort of think about what the activities could be.
Uh, well, if there were 2000 of us I'd say OK. Each person in the course draw an association, you know.
Do do some.
Associating right look at, say, an ethical code and map it to the issues that it addresses, and I'd give you a tool to do that.
And I still do that.
I think that would be fun.
So things like that or.
As always, you know, here's the topic area.
You know, like a type of application.
Find examples out in the world of that list, living your blog and so that when you feed them in.
When you write it, it'll the system will analyze your blog, find these activities that are these examples and map them to that application.
Hard to describe that.
When we get to that point, I.
Mean part of my?
Responsibility is to make that particular.
Task as clear as possible.
So, uhm.
Of course, again, the utility of these tasks is greatly increased with a larger number of people, but nonetheless will still be able to produce interesting results even with a small group of people doing some of this work.
And even if nobody does any work, I've got a whole bunch of links that I can associate with things anyways, so you'll still get this really interesting resource that you can use.
I see Bernie is not taking a call.
Uh, we're almost at our time, but there's a fourth thing as well about this and and and Matias is well aware of this and and possibly Keith as well and.
And that's the the, uh.
The openness of it.
Now we're doing this in like we're live streaming this conversation, for example.
And that's she.
Maybe maybe I should talk about.
I got a thumbs up from Matias alright, or from Keith rather.
Cool so.
I was just thinking like he could have openness level 1 openness level 2 because educators love levels of things.
But maybe I walked over or dimension, but OK, this is level 1 openness, the actual conversation we're having, which I'm sorry.
A bit one sided, but we'll live with that for now anyways, later on.
I'm hoping all of you tell me much.
More than I tell you.
But that's you know, pretty immediate, obvious openness.
We're live streaming on YouTube. Any number of people could be listening on YouTube. In fact, two or watching no bonus, we double over our audience.
You know, and any member people can watch the video later on into posterity.
So that's one type of openness, but.
Another type of openness is that the if you will assets of the course.
Are intended to be available for reuse by other people.
In the future, now buy the assets.
Every individual entity.
That or or artifacts?
That's a part of the course is available for reuse, and now I always.
I always.
Use a non commercial license, but that's just me, but honestly I don't care.
Uhm, but it's you know it, it just slows them down a bit.
But so you know all of the posts, the videos, the contributions, Now your contributions.
That's up to you.
You can license on however you want and this course will respect that license.
Now, presumably when you put it in the feed and.
Allow the course to.
Harvest that you're at least giving me permission to link back to whatever it is.
I do have copies of the.
Resources in the course database.
But ultimately, what really matters is the original that you've produced the copy I have is.
Simply to make it easier to do some functions with it.
But it's not like my intent is to display your content on my website.
That's not the point.
In fact, it's even it's actually the anti point.
I don't want to do that.
I want the content to be distributed and out there in the world so that if for some reason.
Grasshopper or my website or whatever blows up or has a catastrophic failure at the server side, which could happen.
All this other content exists some.
And and continues to insist after the course is finished, so that's the second level of openness.
There's a third level of openness which is the metadata about the course.
And and some examples of that, the list of feeds that's harvested.
So this list of feeds is made available in a format called Opme and what that means is that any person with an RSS reader can get this file opml file, which is the list of feeds loaded into their own RSS.
Reader and they can follow everybody feeds, including the course feed without ever actually interacting with the course itself.
So that's a different kind of openness.
It takes it even a step further, right?
So the list of links in the course, the list of posts in the course, I would say not.
The list of people because I don't know who's registered, but those who have volunteered to be authors.
That list UM, et cetera.
I'm not sure what other lists there would be, but any type of data in the course there's a list of entities of that type of data, the list of applications of AI.
Will be made available now.
There's no opml for that, but there is a standard format called Jason JavaScript Object notation and so all of these lists will be made available in that.
What can be done with that well?
I don't know.
But something right?
Uh, so a simple example.
Somebody who's creating a website could take the list of all the links, or the list of all the applications, or the list of all the.
Issues create their own websites such that it reads that JSON list formats it makes mail presents it as a nice list.
Or they could set up a little search website so that it reads that list and you can type in a search term and it finds that in the list of Jason and they can do that without really knowing a whole lot of programming.
And they they wouldn't even need a web server.
To do that, they they could probably do that right on their own desktop.
So that's another level of openness, right?
And all of us will be available to you either as a web resource or as a search interface or whatever.
So you know in the future.
If you're wondering, you know somebody says well.
Is there an?
Issue about AI or analytics that has to do with.
Disease is we can do a search on the list of things that we have.
Come and say yes or no.
So what what was that the third level?
I lost track of my levels.
But there's a fourth level.
And the fourth level is the graph itself.
The the list of all these links between types of entities that also is open.
Uhm, and that's published as.
Well, there's different ways of publishing it.
I will publish it as Jason.
There's also I have the thing that I use called Graph Markup Language Matias.
One of the things that he does is he takes these graphs and imports it into one of his own programs that produces all kinds of diagrams and tables.
This information can be imported inputted into a graph database so that you can do searches on it.
Now we might do that.
We might not.
I don't know.
It might be taking the whole thing a bit too far.
We do need to focus on the topic as opposed to meat.
Things to do with graphs.
Which is a different course.
But the idea is that.
When you're doing your search, you're not just searching through the properties of the list of items like, say, the list of applications of AI, but you're searching through the properties of the list of items and the things that list is related to a first order search, and the things those things are related to.
A second order search.
And so on.
So you can get very sophisticated searches of these graphs so.
Part of the objective of the course is to create this graph of applications, issues, codes etc related to artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, slash analytics in e-learning.
Uh, so let's.
And make that open.
And and then, there's probably a fifth level of openness beyond those fourth levels of openness, but I don't know what it is yet.
But it'll be something.
So, and that's you know, you know we George Siemens and I and others, Dave Cormier and a bunch of us know the whole bunch of people wasn't just us built the first massive open online course and it was massive, but massive.
Is you know, just.
It's an aspirational thing.
It doesn't have to be massive.
It can be massive by affordance.
Let's take this course and it was online, definitely.
And it was a course in the sense of a series of lectures, but the key thing for us was open.
We're using open resources.
Bringing in open resources.
Maybe that's level minus one that we use resources that are open to actually create the course itself, but then.
You know the the.
Ongoing process of the course and the production of artifacts for the course that's all opened as well to produce a longer lasting, more robust resource, you know.
And those those original CONNECTIVIST courses are still available, and they're still used by people as resources and ideally.
This course would be used as a resource by people working on these topics in the future.
If it's a good course, if it's not a good course, it'll be forgotten and languish in obscurity until eventually somebody unplugs the server.
Yeah, well, that's the risk we run in academia, but it's a risk we're taking to my mind.
That's the process of taking a MOOC, right?
You're not taking a course to learn a bunch of stuff, although you probably will.
Uh, you're involved in this conversation in this project.
In this act of network building, both among ourselves, but also of resources and topics and all of that, where do you think?

Speaker 2
To it, Stephen?
Nice to see you.
Nice to see the other people too.
I'm really looking forward to connecting with the other people in the course in any way possible and I I like the fact that we don't know where it's going.
Go the.
That's that, that's exactly what I like.
I like that idea.

Speaker 1
Any other thoughts?

Speaker 3
Yeah, well I I.
Was involved with both the first connectivist MOOC, the first one that you and George and Dave said, and on e-learning 3.0 and I thoroughly enjoyed the experiences and.
The E Learning 3 point.
Oh, I described to the people.
I work with is it really hurt my head?
It's important to have learning experiences.
That haunt your head.
Because otherwise you coast through in a big echo chamber and one of the things I like about the model that you provide Steven is you have to challenge yourself.
'cause it's too.
Easy to consume so you have to consume in a way where you can create something new for that.
So I've got high hopes for this because I really enjoyed the last two that have been involved, so you're looking forward to this.

Speaker 1
Margaret and his aunt.

Speaker 4
I'm really just seconding one query in cases that I'm looking forward to looking at the dynamics.
I mean different people, different perspectives, different ideas about.

Speaker 1
OK, great, that takes us to 1:00 o'clock and I want to be if nothing else punctual because for the purposes of this course times linear.
So, so the next live session.
Will be the.
Introduction to module one, not on Monday because Monday is a holiday here in Canada.
So on Tuesday, October the 12th, just verifying yes.
Tuesday, October the 12th at 12 noon Eastern Daylight Time.
So we'll see you all day.

Speaker 3
OK, bye.

Force:yes