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my release on moocs - Jay Cross

As a former CPA and corporate controller who found himself totally bored with that occupation in the early 1980s, I remember the harsh realities of the day. At the time, I took TV and correspondence courses to break out of the cube farms and qualify for graduate school in educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin. Realistically, those were my only choices. As with the packaging of TV dinners, such courses had prescribed curricula and activities with no real alternatives as to the learning path. You ate what was served. Keep in mind that the University of Wisconsin System eCampus would not come into existence for another couple of decades. And the highly innovative UW Flexible Option degree program was not even a dream. - Jay Cross

MOOC Madness An inside look at the latest phenomenon in online learning. In this special report, we look at the hype, the hope, and the details—and offer the voices of the pioneers, converts, skeptics, and the undecided. - Jay Cross

The Conversation about MOOCs. Australia. - Jay Cross

Curt's Slides 8/2012 - Jay Cross

Wired UK raises the possibility that the university may have to restructure itself. That undoubtedly will raise numerous hackles. But from an intellectual standpoint, it signals a revolution in waiting. Forbes, on the other hand, touts the financial promise of investments in MOOC's and other digital educational offerings. Entrepreneurs and college administrators are already heeding that siren call. But it is mostly the sound of yesterday. - Jay Cross

What are MOOCs? MOOCs are classes that are taught online to large numbers of students, with minimal involvement by professors. Typically, students watch short video lectures and complete assignments that are graded either by machines or by other students. That way a lone professor can support a class with hundreds of thousands of participants. Why all the hype? Advocates of MOOCs have big ambitions, and that makes some college leaders nervous. They're especially worried about having to compete with free courses from some of the world’s most exclusive universities. Of course, we still don't know how much the courses will change the education landscape, and there are plenty of skeptics. - Jay Cross

Educause. 7 things you should know about MOOCs. - Jay Cross

Week 7 (February 18th). Open Education - Jay Cross

I'm reading papers on MOOCs today and leaving breadcrumbs in the form of bookmarks should you want to join me. There's some incendiary writing out there, e.g. this from "The End of the University As We Know it:" - Jay Cross

What is a MOOC? An online phenomenon gathering momentum over the past two years or so, a MOOC integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources. Perhaps most importantly, however, a MOOC builds on the active engagement of several hundred to several thousand “students” who self-organize their participation according to learning goals, prior knowledge and skills, and common interests. Although it may share in some of the conventions of an ordinary course, such as a predefined timeline and weekly topics for consideration, a MOOC generally carries no fees, no prerequisites other than Internet access and interest, no predefined expectations for participation, and no formal accreditation. - Jay Cross

great article collection - Jay Cross

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone - Jay Cross

Complexity, Resilience, and the Need for Agility in Learning Barnett (2002) highlighted that we now live in a world characterized by “super-complexity,” uncertainty, and change: “Work, communication, identity, self, knowing, and even life: the meaning of fundamental concepts are no longer clear in a world of change” (p. 9). Barnett (2002) had his own interpretations of knowledge in relation to uncertainty and change. He would like to see curricula and pedagogy move away from knowledge and skills to be a “pedagogy for human beings.” He discussed a form of knowledge that would involve learners thinking about and confronting themselves with the uncertainties and dilemmas in their own lives. Learning is at the heart of personal change and transformation, and the learner needs to take risks and deal with changing situations in his or her environment. Folke (2010) emphasized the need for resilience, so people will anticipate change then influence developments to achieve societal and... - Jay Cross

Georgia Tech and Coursera Try to Recover From MOOC Stumble February 4, 2013, 3:49 pm By Steve Kolowich When Fatimah Wirth decided to teach a massive open online course about how to run a virtual classroom successfully, she did not expect it to turn into a case study for the opposite. But after a series of design flaws and technical glitches turned Ms. Wirth’s MOOC, “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application,” into an Internet punch line, the instructional designer and her colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology decided on Saturday to suspend the course. The course got off to a bad start - Jay Cross

Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching February 18, 2013, 4:56 am By Steve Kolowich Students regularly drop out of massive open online courses before they come to term. For a professor to drop out is less common. But that is what happened on Saturday in “Microeconomics for Managers,” a MOOC offered by the University of California at Irvine through Coursera. Richard A. McKenzie, an emeritus professor of enterprise and society at the university’s business school, sent a note to his students announcing that he would no longer be teaching the course, which was about to enter its fifth week. “Because of disagreements over how to best conduct this course, I’ve agreed to disengage from it, with regret,” Mr. McKenzie wrote. Mr. McKenzie’s departure marks the second debacle for Coursera this month. Another of the company’s courses, “Fundamentals of Online Education,” was suspended indefinitely after technical and design issues made it too dysfunctional to continue. That... - Jay Cross

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Jay Cross

Latest Articles (Author is Karl-Erik Sveiby unless indicated) Publications and citatation indices on Google Scholar - Jay Cross

Web anthropologist, clairvoyant, futurist. My obsession is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society. And you. Working on a book Beyond Social: Imagining The Postnormal Business. Sign up for the newsletter. GigaOM Pro analyst and curator. Also writing underpaidgenius.com and beaconstreets.com. - Jay Cross

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmar... - Jay Cross

With over 16k plugins (currently) in the WordPress plugin repository, we only (at this time) forbid a few dozen. Those are pretty good odds that if you want to use a plugin on our infrastructure, you should feel free to use it! It’s your blog after all. But what about these disallowed plugins (AKA blacklisted)? Most of them, honestly, fall into a couple “classes” of plugins and we ban them because they collide with our necessary solutions that we put in place as part of our service offerings. - Jay Cross

Nobody Likes a Slow Website We built this Full Page Test tool to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike. In short, we wanted it to be a free, easy-to-use tool to help webmasters and web developers everywhere optimize the performance of their websites. - Jay Cross

Index of all RSA Animate presentations - Jay Cross

great article by Steve Denning - Jay Cross

another tool - Jay Cross

works well, fast - Jay Cross

Hilarious send-up of RSA video ("instant results"). Bet you can't stop watching, no matter how ridiculous this is. If you really want to get the 9s and 10s. I was captivated - Jay Cross

Great "get in touch" page - Jay Cross

Probably renting car - Jay Cross

Probably renting car - Jay Cross