Straddling Multiple Worlds in a MOOC
I’ve done it. I’ve signed up for Connected Courses, mapped my blog to my own domain (and paid the $), downloaded WordPress, and added my blog to the syndicated list. I must be out of my mind. Why, you ask? Here’s the list.
- I’m writing my dissertation and planning to Be Done this year. The title, Breaking Open the Wor(l)d: New Literacies, the World Wide Web, and the English of the Future captures some of the worlds I feel I’m straddling: literacies, semiotics, English as a secondary school subject (epistemologies of). Ha– I just had to pause to look up the title on my proposal. I leave it to you to discern what that might mean. (Seriously, though, after a lot of
flounderingthinking and rethinking, I feel that I’m now off and writing with a bang. - I’ve tried to participate in two other MOOCs and ended up abandoning them. I just could never figure out how they worked. Connected Courses seems to have a different and very clear structure. I’m hoping that makes the difference.
- I’m participating with several connections in mind. Yes, I’m somewhat affiliated with higher ed — I wonder about the possibilities of a MOOC within a more typical teacher education program– but I’m also, maybe more so, a secondary person. I’m convinced that with the increasing evil of standardized testing and the corporatization of public education, the dropout rate is going to soar. I wonder if a MOOC could leverage the out-of-school literacy practices of youth and keep them connected to a very different model of schooling. I need more experience with MOOCs to further that thinking. So I’m straddling camps, as it were.
BUT. I’m curious.
I loved that Jim Groom talked about wanted to support people in getting into the under-the-hood aspects of a blog. I’m not doing this out of a conviction that learning to code will change the education world– this post on Medium expresses some thoughts I’ve been considering. I want to see what I might discover from my own experience of tinkering— maybe I’m wrong and coding will change the world. (Maker-ism and all.) I think it could be fun.
FWIW, I’m not one for academic writing in my blog. I just like to think out loud. My posts will probably be brief and sporadic.
I’m also not one for couching my opinions in niceties. I happen to have a few of them and I feel them deeply and urgently. I’m for kids. Teachers. Schooling that makes sense to kids. OK, that was a nicety. If I could explode some thinking about what makes schooling, I would. I’ve told my MA students that I anticipate that they will become upset in my classes. That seems to happen. Maybe it will happen here, too. Oh well….
Photo mariachily via photopin cc
Hello Karen, and welcome aboard! I like that you aim to upset your students. When I first started teaching, with no training, I found Postman and Weingarten’s “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” to be very helpful. Do you know it?
Absolutely. I read it years ago and reread it regularly to keep myself fresh. I love that “Crap Detection” was given as a speech at an NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) convention in 1969. I appreciate the way you use the term in your work. Hmmm. Maybe TAASA should be the first reading assigned in a course. Have you tried it? Thanks for reading & commenting.