Elearnspace

I love this! Stanford University Artificial Intelligence is being offered as an open online course. I’ve been involved in numerous massive open online courses (MOOCs) – they’ve been wonderful personal learning experiences. MOOCs are great opportunities to connect with colleagues from around the world and develop a broad understanding of topics from diverse perspectives.

Google+ was a bit of a breaking point for me. After recreating my online social network ( largely based on blogs from early 2000) in Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Quora, G+ was a chore. I spent a few weeks of responding to G+ friend requests, trying to engage with a few people, posting a few random links, all the while trying to upkeep (occasionally) Twitter and (almost never) Facebook.

It’s old news that Blackboard has been acquired by a private equity firm for $1.64 billion.
An education company being acquired is hardly novel – we are entering a period of dramatic change in education and the change will largely be led from outside of the education system.

I’ve been playing around with Google+. As others have stated, it’s Google’s best foray into social networking. It’s an impressive product, defined by Google’s typical clean interface. The idea of “circles” is somewhat related to Twitter Lists and is helpful for organizing friends/colleagues and tracking different activity streams.

In fall, we (TEKRI, NRC, UPEI and possibly a few other organizations) are hosting an open online course. The course will run for about 35 weeks and credit options will be available for students in the Athabasca University MDE program and with Georgia Tech. I’ll post links to those registration pages as soon as they are available.

Wonderful to see that (massive) open online courses (MOOCs) continue to be adopted by traditional universities and educators. Dave, Stephen, and I announced our Change MOOC starting in Fall 2011.

I’ve never had the need or occasion to participate in a riot. The events unfolding in the Middle East reveal the high cost of rioting for change – abuse, injury, and even death. As a Canadian, it’s tough to conceive of any challenges we face that are comparable to the pursuit of freedom occurring in those countries.