The #edcmooc theory? of the Big Bang

Image: Greg Morss

Weeeeeeell.. E-learning and Digital Cultures began a couple of days ago.

And all hell broke loose.

Why? Because of all the overwhelming amount of information that's flooding everywhere. The first impact after the explosion is that following the course will be like trying to find a needle in a (giant) haystack.

Too much information is shared everywhere, through all the given tools, mainly via social networks and groups (Facebook, Twitter, G+... I lost the count) built by the students for the students. A huge, inmense amount of content created by the participants every day, every hour, every minute.

Oh dear, and more will come. 

This sudden emerged factory of planets is neither a good nor a bad thing per se. The problem is not about dealing with the quantity but to have a clear idea of what needle each of us has to look for.

And that needle has a name: digital artifact. Or so is how the Creators have named the final project: the small planet to be created by the students; we, current unspecified masses morphing into a digital artifact by which we will be assessed.

#edcmooc

It's certainly been a while now since the last entry was published.

But this blog is not abandoned. Many things happen in real life that keeps this planet away from gravitating at least for a while. But here we are again. 

Many of you are aware that we are experiencing a MOOC's boom moment. For those who have not yet been captivated by a MOOC, it stands for Massive Open Online Course.
Remember that old post about e-learning? Well, a MOOC perfectly fits e-earning's definition at its best. And be aware that there is now a good bunch of them out there now. Universe expanding itself!

May these lines serve as an introductory for one particular course: E-learning and Digital Cultures, #edcmooc for friends that has just been launched at Coursera, one of the pioneers in the MOOC's territory conquest.

Productivity Future Vision - by Microsoft

There a nice and catchy video that you've probably seen by now in which Microsoft foresees the future. Time will tell whether they are right or wrong.

Social Media Revolution

Whether it makes you think or just to dismiss it as B.S, many of you already know this video.
For those who don't, here it is.

elearning

Let's consider some factors of modern life:

- we have a hectic day-to-day. Stress, if you want to call it that way. The lack of relax time and constant "on the loop" attitude.
- people are becoming more interconnected thanks to smartphones, tablets, and several other devices product of the new technologies.

So, with the above in mind, the big question has to be: Is there any time left to attend a traditional class?. Meaning: time to commute from home/workplace to the educational institution where the classes take place. And sub-question: are we willing to adjust our schedule to that of the class?.

Credit: jscreationzs

If the answer to the above questions is no, then elearning enters its way.

Our life is becoming more and more electronically involved. Even learning is adopting this form through a long list of web-based methodologies. Not only universities which are holding virtual classrooms exclusively online, but even old universities are eventually using the internet platform as a complement to traditional teaching techniques. Of course, you can replace the word 'university' for other educational institutions like schools or academies and the result will be the same.
 
Initially, this entry was going to be similar to the home office post from a while ago, since the parallelisms are pretty clear: take ahead an activity with the rest of the group at an specific (external) site or carry it on individually at home. Name it to study, name it to work. But the pros and cons inherent to this activity were so extremely similar to those of the home office that the idea of repeating a post was quickly dismissed.

Now, a new question arises. Can it be considered elearning the fact that an article found while surfing the net provides you new knowledge? We would say yes. And we dare to include those TV shows which have an educational purpose. You know, the ones that help you learn languages or, hey, why not? the ones about cooking!. Seriously, you end up learning how to cook some amazing plate just as if you'd attended a gourmet course.

Visitors map

Credit: renjith krishnan

Oh dear, if you ever think about changing your visits' widget, never go ahead by yourself without reading the instructions first. Especially if it only asks you for so little as to first update the widget, instead of remove the old widget and immediately installing the new one.What has happened to this blog is that the beautiful Earth map you have at your right is empty, or with just a bunch of visits. The others went missing. They just vanished.

That's the bad thing to happen if you imitate my manners. The good thing, though, is that it gave me the opportunity to write a few lines about widgets. Visitors counters in particular.

This is not an analysis of the widgets as they do practically the same: count the visits to your website or blog. The slight differences are related to visual aspects of the maps, with no really significant gaps in their performance. Here we use, Revolver Maps for no particular reason, it allows you to add rotating globes. They look nice and clean. In the same line there is ClustrMaps, a very well known and widely used. Colorful MapLoco and popular whos.amung.us close the list of the recommended maps. Check them out and decide which one looks best on your site.

Those widgets are gracious to use in a blog, as they break the statistic layout and bring some interesting and curious gadget to a website. However, they are not really good for tracking purposes. There are other tools which fit better at tracking, as they were created for this aim. But this issue will be addressed in another entry.

BranchOut

BranchOut works as an app in Facebook but its aim is slightly different from the regular FB applications. What we usually have in mind when thinking about Facebook apps are those designed to help us deal with our free time, are entertainment oriented and in general, become amusing applications to kill the time with.

But this one is different. BranchOut is the Facebook answer to Linkedin or Xing, and its aim seems to connect people for professional purposes, starting with your own Facebook friends network. Very much the same as the other two mentioned platforms. Oh, and you can even import your profile from Linkedin.