• Category Archives MOOCS

  • Whitman

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

    Started another MOOC today.  I won’t be taking a certificate in this one, just as I didn’t take one in the Modern/Post Modern class.  This class focuses on Walt Whitman, ModPo piqued my interest in him and his work.

    EdX is another of the MOOC providers, this one tends toward the more high brow: M.I.T., Harvard.  The Whitman class is taught by a Harvard professor and I can’t tell you how many times she mentioned Harvard, Harvard’s resources and the number of poets who attended Harvard.  That put me off.  On the other hand she seems to have an interesting pedagogy in play, one congruent with Whitman which involves taking poetry to the streets and to other cities.

    I plan to read the poetry, listen to the lectures and let the rest of it wash over me.  In the climate change MOOC I’m going for the certificate which means all the quizes, two exams, required activities.  I haven’t taken a mid-term or a final exam in over twenty years.  Should be fun.

    There seem to be more critiques than praises right now popping up about MOOC’s. Expensive to set up and difficult to maintain.  Not as good as professor-student interaction.  Confusing to students and employers about who is certifying a student’s capabilities.  This is the anti-thesis of the revolutionary heavy breathing that began when they came out.

    There is a synthesis down the line that will find MOOC’s do a great job of teaching disciplined students, especially such students geographically dispersed.  There will be proctored exams and course series that function like college majors.  A degree may no longer have only one institution behind it, but a coterie, an alliance, an association.

    Will MOOC’s replace current colleges and universities?  Probably not.  Almost certainly not.  Will some of them get replaced?  Almost certainly.  Bricks and mortar is not the only way to learn and the more options students have the better for them.  This may not be best for the current geocentric system, but for whom was it built in the first place?  The student.  The issue is the education, its quality, availability and affordability.  If a few campuses have to become housing complexes, that’s no great loss.

     


    MOOCS Poetry

  • And Things Were New

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

    So much new.  There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more.  Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.

    There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting.  That’s when past experience helps.

    Learning new tools for the Great Wheel.  Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way.  Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.

    In it now and glad of it.


    Great Wheel Great Work MOOCS Weather +Climate Writing

  • More on MOOC’s

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                Winter Moon

    My comment to this NYT’s article:

    I have taken and completed four MOOC’s. And, yes, I have a degree(s).

    32,000 enrolled in my last course. It lasted 10 weeks and let’s go with the 4% completion. That’s 1,200 students who completed the class, more than would fit the largest lecture hall course in the U.S., one with teachers and teacher’s aides.

    That MOOC’s have not delivered on the dream of widely distributed high quality education says little. They’re barely two years old. How long did it take for the current bricks and mortar campus to become normative? And, that was a long time ago.

    The MOOC’s are an excellent tool, but that’s all they are. There is not yet a coherent enough catalog of courses for the equivalent of a college major (except perhaps in computer related courses).

    This tool will be used to build the educational system of the future, I’m sure of it. Will they be the only tool? No, but the high quality of the MOOC’s I’ve taken, two from U. Penn, one from Wesleyan and one from Hong Kong University have shown me the potential they have for excellence. It will be the excellence they deliver, combined with some clustering of students, mentoring, use of MOOCs in already existing educational systems and as yet undreamed of support apparatus that will deliver them more broadly.

    And, it will happen.


    MOOCS

  • A New Beard Model (I caught Darwin.)

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

    “…the Penn survey found that in the United States and developing countries alike, most Coursera students were well educated, employed, young and male.”  NYT

    (Whitman.  My new beard model.)

    I have it half right.  If you’re retired, a self-guided learner and expect challenge and high quality, then MOOC’s are perfect.  In addition the cost is favorable.  They’re free and can be taken with no driving on your own schedule.  Yes, there may be some expense for books, but if you’re a self-guided learner already, what’s another book or two or three?

    As the quote above shows, the learning communities, usually in the tens of thousands have a predominantly young makeup.  This is invigorating to me.  Let’s me see what the next generation’s up to.  O.K.  Maybe it’s the generation after the next generation.

    Of course, you have to enjoy structured education.  I don’t always, but when I’m taking only courses that address my interests, as opposed to those of a curricula, I find the upside of considered readings and condensed material in lectures suits me.

    If my dream were to manifest in this realm, there would be enough variety of courses to allow a college major’s depth and breadth in a particular discipline.  Right now they’re very hit and miss.  Greek Mythology, ModPo, Modern-Post Modern and History for a New China, the MOOC’s I’ve taken, are humanities courses, but there is no way to follow any of them with narrowers courses, say in Homeric Epic, or Whitman, or the Industrial Revolution or Early Dynasties of China.  In this sense the MOOC experience is less than satisfying.

    That only amounts, however, to wishing that a very good thing was better rather than a true critique.  Keep’em coming, Coursera and EdX.  My computer’s on.

     


    Humanities MOOCS Poetry

  • The Unreliable Narrator–You

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

    Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

    There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

    On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

    (Henry and William James)

    What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

    As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

    So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

     

     


    Dreams Faith and Spirituality Feelings Memories MOOCS Myth and Story Poetry Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant. Third Phase

  • Thank God It’s Frida

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

    Latin with Greg this morning.  I felt like I’d made good progress with my work, but in doing the translating with him, I hit a snag.  There was a long sentence, six verses in length, with a complicated structure, hinging on a definition of a verb that was, Greg said, esoteric.  Getting that one out of whack made the entire six verses difficult, entangled. Just when I began to feel incompetent (not a feeling I enjoy), Greg pushed us further into the translation.

    Once we got out of that briar patch my work improved.  “Perfect.  You’ve got it!”  “It was just that complex sentence and ferunt (the verb in question) that messed you up.  You kept at it.  That’s the key.”

    “Oh, tenacity I have.  I’ve got too much time in this to give up now.”

    Kate’s away at a continuing medical education event on pain.  After Greg and I finished I fed the dogs, made lunch and took a nap.  Gertie, who rehurt her leg, came in and snuggled up next to me.  This afternoon she’s moving much better.  Good to see since she’s been down for a few days.

    Finished up ModPo with assessments of four other student’s essays and watched a beginning video on Dramatica Pro, the new writing software I purchased.  I plan to use it to build Loki’s Children, but before that I have to learn how to use it.

    With Latin on a steady course and ModPo finished, I’ve just got Missing and Ovid to occupy my days.  And they’re plenty.  With, of course, learning how to use Dramatica.

     

     


    Dogs Latin MOOCS Poetry Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • Education for Everyone

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

    Back from sheepshead.  The goddess let up and gave me some good cards tonight, one very good hand in particular.  A roll of the dice for Fortuna.

    Finished the last ModPo poet today, the last video of Al Filreis and the gang doing close readings.  I still have my assignments to write, but I’ll finish those tomorrow.  I chose not to get a certificate in the Modern/Post Modern class, but I’ve earned one in ModPo.  There are 35,000 people in the class.  35,000.  That would be a crowded lecture hall.

    The revolutionary impulse of the MOOCs is just beginning to be felt.  The university will have to have a rethink in not too many years with this technology working on the disaggregation of education in the same way the net has disaggregated so many things before it.  This will work to the benefit of many constituencies:  the poor, the geographically isolated, the third phasers, adult learners of all ages, even the traditional college student for whom the cost of four years has become a leaden albatross hung around their neck at graduation, a weight rather than a celebration.

    Missing’s fifth revision has begun to open up very exciting possibilities, ones I didn’t see before.  I’ve reentered the story with the same enthusiasm I had when I first wrote it.

    Four more verses of Ovid done.  Greg and I talk tomorrow, the first session where I’ll be using the new technique of staying “in” the Latin.  I’m looking forward to gaining more facility with it.


    Friends Latin MOOCS Poetry Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • Still Plugging Along

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

    Working through the revisions in Missing, having fun, surprising myself.  About a third of the way into the manuscript, though the later chapters have more work than what I’ve done so far.  Ways of knitting themes and character development with the narrative come more easily at this stage.

    Got a new piece of software today, Dramatica Pro.  I’m hoping it will help me deepen my work while making it more exciting.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  It’s supposed to take a long time to learn.

    Five more verses of Ovid.  These verses had a textual problem that had me digging around in the Oxford Classical Text’s version.  It’s supposed to be the best manuscript available now.  The Metamorphoses presents certain problems since it’s oldest manuscript dates from the 9th century, seven to eight hundred years after it was written.  The Aeneid, for example, has some fourth century manuscripts, still within the time of the Roman Empire.

    And finished up the next to last poet of ModPo. I’ll finish tomorrow and start on my assessments on Friday.  Yeah.


    GeekWorld Latin MOOCS Poetry Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • Just Glad For Them To Be Over

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

    Finished the quick page through of Missing and have decided on key steps to take next. There will be some formatting, substantial rewriting at the end, amplification of descriptions in certain parts and a bit of rearranging.  My goal is to finish before we leave for Denver.

    My capacity to translate while “in” the Latin seems to be growing.  In the passage from today Jupiter is very mad and has decided to destroy the mortal race.  Which he will do, later on in the book.  How?  By means of a flood.

    I’m down to the last two poets in ModPo, plus the four assessments of other’s writing assignments.  After two and a half months of considerable work in ModPo and Modern/Post Modern, I’m experiencing that end of the quarter blah.  I don’t really want to finish the work, but I’m going to because I’ve invested so much now.  I get this filled up feeling, brought on by choices I’ve made, yes, but it’s still there.

    These were two really good courses and worth the time and effort, more than repaying the work.  Just glad for them to be over.


    Art and Culture Latin MOOCS Translating Metamorphoses Writing

  • Conceptual Poetry

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

    if every word spoken in new york city daily
    were somehow to materialize as a snowflake,
    each day there would be a blizzard.

    Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy.  Postscript

     

    The last week of ModPo.  The conceptual poets.  The book from which the quote above comes, Soliloquy, is every word the poet, Kenneth Goldsmith, spoke in a whole week.  He wore a microphone, recorded his speech, then sat down and transcribed it.  A lot of work.  Not as much work, however, as another work of his, Day, in which he transcribed every word in one day’s New York Times.  A 1,000 page book.

    Christian Bok, a Canadian poet, took seven years to complete his project, Euonia.  In Euonia he writes 5 chapters, each of which had to have a banquet, an orgy, a feast, a voyage, refer to the act of writing and, most improbably, use only words containing only one vowel, the same vowel, 98% of those words available.  There is a bit more to Euonia, which means beautiful thinking and is the shortest word in the English language that uses all the vowels.

    These are highwire acts of virtuosity and the real creative act is in the concept, especially in Goldsmith.  The concept–what would every word in one edition of the New York Times look like transcribed into a linear text and bound in a book look like?–was the creative moment.  The act of fulfillment, the days and weeks of transcription, is either non creative or uncreative.

    Interesting stuff.  I’m more with this than I was with the Chance poets of last week.


    MOOCS Poetry