What happens when 63 eager MOOCers get kicked out of BigBlueButton on their individual derrières? Well, first there’s a big bang as they are ejected to the farthest reaches of the Twitter/FB/G+ multiverse. Then, as gravitational attraction overcomes the energy of expansion, entropy begins to slow and then reverse the direction of the particles. Very rapidly (in far less time than it took me to dream up this analogy) they coalesce and implode on Fuze and a new supernova is born. (Dare we name this new stellar object “MOOWe” for Massive Open Online Webinar?)
Never mind that the presentation wasn’t the most riveting example of engaging interaction we’ve ever seen. Hey, at 1:00 AM I’d want to read my presentation too. The fact is,
WE DID IT!
We weren’t stuck out in the void. We tapped our alphabet soup of connections – PLE/PLN/VLE/PKM whatever – and reconvened almost as fast as you can say “Winnipeg sucks, let’s go to Timbuktu.” And because most of us had pre-read the materials for the presentation, we could pay attention to tackling the audio problem in a half-dozen creative ways on the backchannel. I sure enjoyed the ride. Kept explaining the rush I got to all my puzzled non-MOOC-ing friends the rest of the day. Gotta be some rich deposits there for the researchers to moil through as they analyze what the internet rats without cages did this morning. (Hey, that sounds like a name for a Google group, a MOOC, and a Gospel bluegrass band, “Rats-Without-Cages”. Maybe even a new educational NGO.)
OK, for those of you who haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, I’m sure there are plenty of other #change11 blogs that render a more rational account. Check it out and see what happened in our very first live session of Change: Education, Learning, and Technology.
hoping to snag your blog posting onto #CMC11 with this in the reply
I sort of got lost in all the tweets, posts, motion sickness in the swirl of activity … glad the hookup finally was made. And now I can view the recording without any whiplash side effects 🙂 … it does show the power of networked connectivism, and for that alone, the whoooosh was worthwhile.
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I couldn’t get in at all to that big blue button. But I like to hear that you were empowered enough to figure out workarounds and alternative solutions. We need more of that in education.