Entries by Ken Ronkowitz

EdX, a nonprofit provider of MOOCs, has increased its member institutions from 12 to 27 as it crosses its one year anniversary. Though edX is a nonprofit, it also announced that it is bringing in revenue and is working towards financial sustainability.

Participating institutions now include Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, The University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in Hong Kong, Kyoto University in Japan, and Seoul National University in South Korea. EdX also welcomes nine universities from North America, Europe and Australia. In the United States, the Consortium has added Cornell University, Berklee College of Music, Boston University, Davidson College, and University of Washington. From Europe, Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, Belgium’s Université catholique de Louvain, and Germany’s Technical University of Munich have been added. The University of Queensland in Australia becomes the second Australian university to join the xConsortium. The expansion reflects edX’s rapidly growing global student body and supports its vision of transforming education by bringing the power of learning to all regardless of location or social status.

EdX defines itself as a nonprofit alternative to Coursera and other for-profit companies that are working with colleges. EdX says it wants to help colleges use technology to rethink campus education as well as deliver online courses.

The xConsortium was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has a mission to focus on "transforming online and on-campus learning through groundbreaking methodologies, game-like experiences and cutting-edge research on an open source platform. EdX provides inspirational and transformative knowledge to students of all ages, social status, and income who form worldwide communities of learners. EdX is focused on people, not profit."

Saylor.org, a longtime member of the open education community, announced a new K12 program of open online courses.

The academic courses are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and use open educational resources (OER) extensively, making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide.

The list of the K12 courses also suggests ways to use and reuse the courses.

Teachers can flip their classroom without shooting thei own videos and incorporate more engaging digital content into classes.

Schools can get current, Common Core-aligned materials for free.

Parents can provide extra resources to supplement what kids learn in school and accelerate or review subjects. It offers a self-contained curriculum for home school families.

And, on their own, students can do more challenging work or subjects their school might not offer. It will give you experience in learning in a different way and acclimate to an online learning environment which is common in colleges.  You can also review material you learned in school and go further and prepare for your SATs/college.


(And I made it through this entire post without once saying "MOOC.")

This will be the fourth summer that I will teach my graduate class in designing social media. Every year, I have asked online for suggestions of book (not usually "textbooks") for the class which is part of the MS in Professional and Technical Communication at NJIT. Students in the PTC program tend to be (or intend to be) designers, technical writers, media & social media managers, but I always get a few students from the management, communications, media, IT and design majors.

The course examines how organizations use social media as communication tools for marketing, education & training and community building and students do social media surveys and create strategy proposals for actual organizations.

Though the bulk of the daily, short readings are current and available online, I also ask each student to select an outside book that focuses on an area of interest to their goals. they share content from that book when appropriate into the discussions online so that the class gets content from a number of other books.

Making the reading selection process itself a social media project seems appropriate. Books and readings in social media go out of date so quickly that it seems foolish to rely on a traditional textbook.

I am also a proponent of Open Educational Resources, especially open textbooks. Having put two sons through college not so long ago, I am also very cognizant of the cost of textbooks. There are lots of open texts (again, textbook may be a misnomer) and I try to use those when possible.

As general texts for the class, I will include three texts that are available free online. These three are not strictly about social media, but each contains ideas that I find provocative to the discussion. I will point students to specific chapters or sections and I feel a lot better about doing that knowing that there will be no cost to them.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler has made the entire book and additional materials available for free download at cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation, by Jono Bacon [free PDF download]

Jonathan Zittrain's book, The Future of the Internet - and how to stop it is also a free pdf download under a Creative Commons license.

---

Outside Reading Book Suggestions for DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEDIA
The first section of the list below includes books I have read and found useful and that students have used. The second section includes titles suggested by readers of this blog, colleagues and titles found, read and recommended by my students in past years. You'll notice that many of the titles are not specifically on social media or are on some area within social media (such as marketing or design).

If you would like to suggest a book related to an aspect of social media, please do so by adding a comment below.

1. Virtual Communities- Felicia Wu Song  "Does contemporary Internet technology strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice? This book seeks to understand the technology on its own terms, focusing on how the technological and organizational configurations of online communities frame our contemporary beliefs and assumptions about community and the individual. It analyzes key structural features of thirty award-winning online community websites."


2. Designing mLearning: Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performanceby Clark Quinn is being used this summer in NJIT's PTC 650 - ELEARNING DESIGN FOR MOBILE


3. What Would Google Do?: Reverse-Engineering the Fastest Growing Company in the History of the World by Jeff Jarvis and also his second book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live


4. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur


5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li


7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations - Amy Shuen


8. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter


9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website - has more of a design focus rather than current trends (so it might be relevant longer).


11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services


12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


13. The Twitter Book by Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein - using twitter in a personal or company context


14. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr


15. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, by Sherry Turkle


16. Virtual Communities (Digital Formations) by Felicia Wu Song


17. The Social Media Handbook: Rules, Policies, and Best Practices to Successfully Manage Your Organization's Social Media Presence, Posts, and Potential - Nancy Flynn


18. There is another book similarly titled The Social Media Management Handbook (subbtitled "Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business")


19. also several other social media handbooks specific to different areas


20. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


21. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, the authors' 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.


22. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell


23. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko


24. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture. 
    

---


The following titles are ones that I have not read, but that have been recommended by my students and others.



25. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


26. Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (and Other
    
    Social Networks) by Dave Kerpen  I am very interested in the art/science of creating content that grabs large audiences. I chose this book because it focuses on creating content as well as how to retain your audience and keep them engaged with your brand. I may also have been taken in by the Facebook thumbs up on the front cover, telling my subconscious that this was the book to buy.
    


27. The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out - Christopher Barger
    


28. The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More by
    
    Kip Bodnar and Jeffrey Cohen.
    


29. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future by S. Craig
    
    Watkins  Unlike the other books that have been posted about so far, the book I chose is not really about marketing with social media. It is more
    
    about the culture of social media and people’s use of it, specifically users in their late teens and early twenties. The author interviewed a number of young people about the ways that they use social media and their feelings and attitudes towards it.


30. Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel


31. Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.
    


32. The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies by Dan Zarrella - a scientific approach to the way businesses and brands approach marketing. It uses a combination of marketing, statistical, and psychological research to explain why and, more importantly, how, companies should adapt marketing strategies such as blogging, social media, email marketing, and webinars.
    


33. Ken Auletta - Googled: The End of the World as We Know It


34. Shel Israel- Twitterville


35. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith Trust Agents


36. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging


37. David Meerman Scott - New Rules of Marketing & PR


38. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers
    


39. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
    


40. David Kirkpatrick - The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World
    


41. Bob Garfield - Chaos Scenario


42. David Meerman Scott - World Wide Rave
    


43. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - "whuffie" is Hunt's word for social capital on the Web
    


44. Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together by Felicia Wu Song
    


45. On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders - Michael A. Banks


46. I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy - Lori Andrews
    


47. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices - Christopher Locke


48. The Social Media Business Equation: Using Online Connections to Grow Your Bottom Line - Eve Mayer Orsburn
    


49. Return on Relationship - Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose
    


50. Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding your Business - Robert McHale
    


51. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture - Jean Burgess, Joshua Green, Henry Jenkins, and John Hartley
    


52. Wide Open Privacy: Strategies for the Digital Life - J.R. Smith and Siobhan MacDermott
    


53. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age - Manuel Castells
    

If MOOCs, or more accurately, open education, is going to actually "revolutionize" education, it will have to change not only how we learn but how we teach.

Coursera, probably the biggest player in massive open online courses now, announced a partnership with 12 top professional development programs and schools of education to open up training and development courses (28 to start) to teachers worldwide. The company says it wants to "create a hub of teacher professional development courses aimed at providing teachers, parents, and anyone else who teaches with the tools and skills to help build stronger education systems.”

There is also a new project called MOOC-Ed (for "massive open online courses for educators) from the Alliance for Excellent Education which is an advocacy organization involved in encouraging digital education in partnership with North Carolina State University’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, at the College of Education.

The first free online class they offered aims at providing thousands of regional administrators in the U.S. help using technology effectively to meet the needs of their school.  The seven-week course was set for April 8 to May 24 and was designed for principals, curriculum directors, superintendents, finance officials, tech directors, and others that plan technology use for K-12th grade.

It is always difficult to pick a "good time" of the year, week, or day to get educators to commit to a few hours of professional development. Asynchronous, online courses may be the best solution to scheduling. For the MOOC-Ed course, it was recommended that you needed to commit 2-4 hours per week for the course.

MOOCs for students in the K-12 environment might have more issues than in higher education. (Although all the MOOC reports I have seen on demographics, including my own course, report high school age students participating.) But using open courses to assist in teacher professional development and increase their their knowledge of technology might work very well.

In the "Academia and the MOOC" course I just completed, even though the participants were mostly from higher education, threads of discussion emerged on using MOOCs in K12 education, corporate training, professional development and, of course, lifelong learners who just want to learn new things without any concern for credit.

Coursera has partnered with the College of Education, University of Washington; Curry School of Education, University of Virginia; Johns Hopkins University School of Education; Match Education’s Sposato Graduate School of Education; Peabody College of education and human development, Vanderbilt University; Relay Graduate School of Education; and University of California, Irvine Extension. They also are partnering with institutions and museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, The Commonwealth Education Trust, Exploratorium, The Museum of Modern Art, and New Teacher Center. This is the first time Coursera is partnering with non-degree-bearing institutions and their first attempt to work with early childhood and K-12-level education.

As with the university courses Coursera offers, these education courses will have video lectures, peer forums, supplemental
materials and interactive components.

In their newly-added category “Teacher Professional Development,” you will find:

“Common Core in Action: Literacy Across Content Areas,” from the New Teacher Center
“Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classroom,” from Relay Graduate School of Education taught by Dave Levin, the co-founder of KIPP
“The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for 21st Century Schools” taught by Mariale Hardiman of John Hopkins School of Education
“Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development,” from UVA, taught by Bridget Hamre, Grace Funk, Allison Leach and Kathy Neesen
“Tinkering Fundamentals: Integrating Making Activities into Your STEM Classroom,” from the Exploratorium
“Student Thinking at the Core,” taught by Barbara Stengel and Marcy Singer-Gabella of Vanderbilt University
“Coaching Teachers: Promoting Changes that Stick,” taught by Orin Gutlerner of Match Education
Three science content focused courses for Educators taught by the American Museum of Natural History
Eight part series on the Foundations of Teaching for Learning aimed at teachers in the developing world taught by Commonwealth Education Trust

The small MOOC that I was facilitating on the Canvas Network ended this past weekend.  I say small because we had 800+ participants and that's small for a MOOC (call it a BOOC - big - or SOOC - small?). I say facilitating because I don't consider it to be the same experience as when I "teach" even if I 'd like to think that when I teach I am also trying to facilitate more than push content at and into students. Actually, along with my designer colleague, Mary Zedeck from Seton Hall University, most of the work was in designing the content for the course. I even have a problem with saying it was a "course" because there were no assignments or grades or credit. I said up front that the C for this MOOC stood for Conversation.

The conversation ran for 4 weeks and was open to registration right up to the last day. You might ask what value that would have to join in a conversation when it was closing, but several people who signed in very late said they were glad that he content would still be available to them after the class ended. They plan to access the content as time permits. I see some value to that, although I would say at least half the value in "Academia and the MOOC" was in connecting with other participants (most of whom were employed in academic roles) in the forums. There were more links and comments to new readings in the discussions than were contained in the modules Mary and I designed. 

But I am hoping that the conversation continues. I will be posting for the next few weeks some of the takeaways from doing this converstion. I also created some areas outside Canvas for that discussion to continue. (I did not use these areas during the 4 weeks because I felt it would dilute the conversation in the course itself.) This also widens the audience and I hpe some readers of this blog will join in now.

John Graves, a "student" in the class, had created a Google+ Community https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112243817982502760507 during our mini-semester and that is place for conversation and also the possibility of some followup literal conversations using Hangouts.

I created an open Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/464360010307595/ where we can easily continue to share links and ideas. I have done this for other courses I teach and they have a pretty good life beyond the semester. There is one on designing social media, one that was started with a group I worked with in a Stanford creativity MOOC, and one on issues in general about educational technology.

Although I don't find the conversations as dynamic in LinkIn as in other social network,  I also created an open group there http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Academia-MOOC-4993629  because there are people active there. We have always hoped that more "professional" conversations would emerge in LinkedIn, but that hasn't happened for me yet. I'm actually more likely to connect professionally with people via this blog, Facebook or Twitter.

We had very lively activity in twitter using our hashtag of #acadmooc during the month that the class ran and I hope that tag continues to gather posts about MOOCs and their impact on academia.  

Thanks to another participant, Ann @annindk, our tweetchat with MOOC pioneer Bryan Alexander is archived on Storify for those who missed it. A second chat that we did within Canvas (closed) with another MOOC pioneer, Stephen Downes, is open to read in several place including here on Serendipity35.

If you are not a real Twitter user, you can also follow that conversation via Tagboard without a twitter account.

Finally, there will be people from the class posting to their own social sites (blogs etc.) about the course. Hopefully, I will get notifications about them or stumble upon them in some Google searching. We discussed in the course (it is hard to drop that familiar term) how little good formal feedback on MOOCs we could find by students. There are a good number of demographics studies on who takes MOOCs, but not much qualitative information on the experience. Most of that does seem to be informal or available on student sites.  Ann Priestley, who was in my MOOC, let me know that she had posted on her blog about the course and I very interested in the positives and negatives about the experience. (I already commented on her post, so that conversation continues). 

All these groups are open, so join in and invite colleagues who have an interest in exploring MOOCs. 

UnCollege challenges the the notion that going to college is the only path to success.

About 70% of high school graduates go on to college, even though studies seem to show that a college degree no longer guarantees success.

• College lacks academic rigor.


• 22% of college grads under 25 are working jobs that do not require a degree


• A college degree = success?


• Creativity is the No. 1 “leadership competency.”


• 70% of learning comes from real-world experiences.


• Self-directed learners outperform traditional students (86th percentile to 50th).

So, UnCollege www.uncollege.org states its mission as being "To change the notion that university is the only path to success and to help people to thrive in an ever changing world in which it is virtually impossible for educational institutions to adapt."

Some of their core belief are ones that intentionally disrupt how we have thought about post-secondary education and success.

• Many people pay too much for university and learn too little.


• You can get an amazing education anywhere—but you’ll have to stop writing papers and start doing things.


• You need an excellent education to survive in a world where 50% of the population is under 30.


• Subjects taught in traditional universities are often contrived,
  theoretical, and irrelevant, promoting conformity and regurgitation
  rather than innovation and learning.


• You don’t have to decide what to do with your life at age 18.


• You can contribute to society without necessarily having a university degree.


• You cannot rely on university to give you a complete and relevant
  education when professors are often more interested in researching than
  teaching.


• If you want to gain the skills requisite for success, you must hack your education.

Some of their efforts include a Gap Year Program and Hackademic Camps.

Students taking MOOCs have always been interested in expanding the opportunities for getting some type of credit or recognition for completing courses. Coursera and others have been looking at working with ACE on credit equivalency because they recognize that there is a percentage of MOOC participants (certainly not all - and probably not a majority) who want to apply their learning to other institutions or employers.

This is also a path that providers (for-profits - and I include colleges in that group for MOOCs) want to go down as they create business plans to use MOOCs. 

And so, Coursera has announced Signature Track. This option will give students in some select classes the opportunity to earn a "Verified Certificate" for completing their Coursera course. It links your coursework to your identity and allows for identity verification (You can create a special profile to link your coursework to your photo ID and unique typing pattern.) It will also offer "Verified certificates" which are official recognition from universities and Coursera for your work done. You can also share your electronic course records with employers, educational institutions, or anyone else through a secure URL.

Some of the first courses to be selected for Signature Track (offered in January 2014) will be Introduction to Genetics and Evolution, Microeconomics Principles,Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Computational Investing Part I, and Clinical Problem Solving.

On Coursera's blog, Peter Lange, Provost of Duke University says, “When we started offering our courses on Coursera, we aimed to extend the reach of our university’s intellectual strengths beyond our own halls, to a global classroom, now, we hope that these credentials, while they will not contribute directly toward a degree, will afford students around the world, of all ages, backgrounds and resources an opportunity to have a legitimate credential for their work in order to advance their career or fulfill themselves personally.”