I hesitantly post this, as I’m spending the evening looking at DALMOOC and hope to take part, but know I’m short on free time right now (what with a new baby and trying to buy a house) and starting the course late.
This is either the first in a series of blog posts about this course, or, we shall never talk about this again.
The course encourages open and distributed publishing of work and assessments, which makes answering this first ‘warm-up’ task feel like more of a commitment to the course than I can really make. But here goes…
Competency 0.1: Describe and navigate the distributed structure of DALMOOC, different ways to engage with peers and various technologies to manage and share personal learning.
DALMOOC offers and encourages learning experiences that span many online products from many providers but which all connect back to a core curriculum hosted on the edX platform. This ranges from learning to use 3rd party tools and software to interacting with peers on commercial social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Learners can pick the tools and engagement best suited to them, including an option to follow just the core curriculum within edX if they prefer to do so.
It actually feels a lot like how we work at Mozilla, which is overwhelming and disorientating at first but empowering in the long run.
Writing this publically, however lazily, has forced me to engage with the task much more actively than I might have just sitting back and watching a lecture and answering a quiz.
But I suspect that a fear of the web, and a lack of experience ‘working open’ would make this a terrifying experience for many people. The DALMOOC topic probably pre-selects for people with a higher than average disposition to work this way though, which helps.