I received an announcement from the SL group Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) about a FutureED group and meetup in SL. Turns out there’s a meetup every Monday of the FutureED MOOC at the UEPP Tufts University region in SL at Noon SLT.
Today I had a nice conversation with Spiral Theas, Orlando7 Decosta, Stylianos Ling, and Beth Ghostraven. I think we come from a variety of global places and all are inspired by the FutureED MOOC.
HASTAC
I also think we’re all a little overwhelmed by the vastness of HASTAC, but it’s already starting to feel a little more navigable to me and I think it’s definitely a great long-term place to spend time and effort.
Getting to FutureED
It seemed like we’re all on board with Cathy Davidson’s vision of radical change in education. But we also see higher and other ED as such a giant infrastructure with so many tentacles! How do you change? We didn’t feel that we’d have quick, sweeping change and tear down the University walls. So that suggest incremental change. Perhaps one faculty member at a time. Students are as inured to “old EDU” as faculty and staff, so all stakeholders will have to evolve into new roles. New roles that seem in the long run, better for everyone, but on the way there, more work for everyone. Will faculty near retirement want to bother? Do unengaged students prefer “boring lectures” to better experiences that require more work and initiative from them?
And yet for all the difficulty with change, it seems like EDU a generation from now will look very, very different.
Websites & Twitter
- Olando7 Decosta (Roland Legrand): @RolandLegrand • MixedRealities.com
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Spiral Theas (Robin Heyden): @rheyden • RobinHeyden.wordpress.com
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Stylianos Mystakidis (Stylianos Ling): @stylianosm2 • blog.edu.gr
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MediciPrincess (Isabella Medici): @MediciPrincess • MecidiPrincess.com
My profile on HASTAC
Thanks for the great post, Izzy. It was great to meet you in the virtual world and I look forward to our ongoing education conversations.
Thanks so much Robin. It was wonderful meeting you. Perhaps we should think about putting out some sort of project or activity this week. I find MOOCs interesting in that there is so much energy to dive into them — like the mountain of forum posts we noted — but then they wrap up so quickly and are, to a fair degree, forgotten. If there’s a way to find colleagues to collaborate with over a longer time frame, that would, for me, make the MOOC more successful.
BTW, I created a Virtual Identity group on HASTAC:
http://www.hastac.org/groups/virtual-identity
If we can find any other project or perspective, I’d be happy to join or launch any other group. I do think it’s worth seeing if HASTAC is a platform where we can collaborate over time.