OLDSMOOC for new ideas

Again, a new beginning for me.

And MOOCs seem to be a freudian repetition: I can’t understand why with a blowing agenda, demanding bosses (yes, more than one 🙂 and students (those are hundreds…) I decide to engage myself into another MOOC.

And as somebody said, we have #OLDSMOOC for new ideas…

The reply to this concern could be on my own expectations on the course http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/6781

Following the extremely crowded open forum, it seems that I share with my (thousands) of “classmates” a similar way to go about our own professional motivations: we are believers in the lifelong-lifewide learning. We need to understand, see, exchange and apply to our professional practices.

That’s a sign of times. We are passionate practitioners, but we are also part of a fast, fluid (and maybe furious, in an excess of “F”s) learning society.

We are all concerned about MOOCs: why, how, what for…I’m astonished about the high numbers of people telling that one of the main motivations is to participate to understand this vast phenomenon, beyond the specific topic of Learning Design.

The answer is maybe embedded in the same question: why are we here? We are here because, maybe, being here is an opportunity to reflect about the educational change we are all searching for in our daily practice and institutions.

My first reflection is that we are all trying to cross boundaries. But not the geographical ones. Yes, we are doing it. But beyond the boundaries of distance and time, we are talking about crossing the lines of our institutional contexts of practice; trying to looking at them from outside, trying to wear other lens, running away from the little daily frustrations, from the annoying monotony; from our own lack or excess of ideas; in search for new order or new chaos…

Is the topic a second concern?

Some colleagues have declared so.

But it is not to me: I decided to participate because I need to understand, said by the voices of the people that in some extent have created the meme (see, for this concept, Conole‘s blog) of Learning Design, the field of research and practice, to go beyond instructional design, a concept that has represented an important phase of my professional career.

Now I’m ready. And I start posting my expectations, reading my colleagues’ ones, and reading, avidly, about the idea.

Will I be able to follow the pace?

That’s a crucial question for a MOOCer.

Like the Danish prince, I guess that to be (online) or not to be.

That’s the question.