Category Archives: CCK08

Who cares about grades?*

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@timbuckteeth (aka Steve Wheeler) tweeted his Twitter grade today (and beat me to a blog post that I got to know about via Twitter while writing this one here). It was at 67. In his blog post, Steve brings up examples of edubloggers that score much higher or are not found at all for no explainable reason. Thus, I can happily refer to his work without coming up with my own list. :-)

However, while I was unaware of Steve’s post, I had already run the Twitter Grader on my account (yeah, I know, now it’s not only ego Googling but also ego grading ;-) ), and came up with a 47. That means that I “score higher than 47 percent of the other user profiles that have been graded.” Randomly running another account through the mill, I chose @gsiemens and he got a “0″. Wow. Surely, that must have been a mistake. After re-grading him because he can’t have such a low grade (and because I messed up my first 2 screencasts), he finally had a grade of 97.7. That is more like my perception of his Twitter activity. ;-)

Now I was curious as to the methods used for the grading. The website only gives the following general information:

The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. [...]

Your grade is calculated using a combination of factors including:

* The number of followers you have
* The power of this network of followers
* The pace of your updates
* The completeness of your profile
* …a few others.

The “a few others” are the bolts that make this interesting. What are these? How do they figure in? What were the selection criteria for the 36,133 ranks? What do these ranks represent? There are 3,134,420 accounts according to TwitDir (stats from today) that only lists public accounts. So how does it work? Or is it just a nice gadget that you try once, look at your rank, be (not so) happy and then never think back to it?

The grader does not return a pretty visualization to look at, but the final grade is already powerful in itself if you take it seriously and try to figure out what your grade actually means for your Twitter network.

I don’t really trust the calculations (which you should never do anyway unless you manipulated them yourself) because the ranking does not stop at 100. @Scobleizer, a high-flyer in terms of followers (34,968), following (20,991) and updates (14,402) got a rank of 100.3! Explain that to me please. ;-)

Scobleizers twitter grade

Scobleizer's twitter grade

On a lighter note and aside from statistics etc.: While you are waiting for the computing teacher to come up with your grade, you are treated to some human phrases instead of the usual “Loading…”.

The human in Twitter Grader (Flash required)

* … when it comes to Twitter?

It’s the end of week 1 as I see it

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The first week of the MOOC CCK08 (these abbreviations are already ingrained in my brain) is almost over. I still have a lot of work to do, but have to interrupt it after this post to prepare some stuff for work. Unfortunately, I cannot devote my entire waking hours to the course which I think would be extremely helpful at times to really follow up on interesting discussions and trying to contribute to them instead of just opening them in my tabs in Firefox. I don’t feel comfortable to jump into a very theoretical discourse if I still need to straighten out the basics in my head. Hopefully with time it will get better, my inner optimist encourages me. Of course, I don’t and can’t follow all discussions, but at least the ones that I am interested in should be possible. :-)

The “Mookies” (Stephen Downes coined that name for people who participate in a MOOC) have been producing a lot of writing, video, concept maps and other visualizations in this past week. The visualizations certainly help me to get a better idea of the connections among us all and to sort out the many participants.

Tom Whyte and Trevor Meister try to come up with visual representations of our networks. Tom has started on the Twitter connections and Trevor put forward his ambitious and awesome ideas in his blog entry “Visual Network Interactions in CCK08“. As of now, Tom had already nine Twitter networks connected and there will hopefully be added many more. There are common connections already within these nine networks, and the network map starts to become complex. Pretty soon, we will need to invest in screens as big as walls and have them multi-touch enabled to navigate through this visualization. :-)

I order to see where I have been active and to reflect on my sparse activity during the week, I collected all Moodle and blog posts as well as tweets connected to the the course and put them in the infamous Wordle. Of course, I already knew where my emphasis was in the discussions, but maybe I had missed something which could have come up in the visualization.

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Wordle of my participation in Week 1 in CCK08

Common English words as well as numbers have been removed by the program which leaves the most often used words in the visualization. As you can see, “course”, “can” (isn’t that also a common English word?), “use”, and “moodle” dominate the word cloud. I never imagined being drawn into a discussion on Moodle as much as a I was, but that is what happened and where I posted mainly. In hindsight, this forum, albeit I am not an expert on Moodle and there are participants in the course who are much more familiar with the software, was a safe place for me because I knew the topic, had read about advantages and disadvantages of virtual learning environment, had tried a few myself, have worked with them for several years now and was confident that I could contribute something. Although it was a safe spot, that does not mean that it was not challenging, just not challenging in the same way as if I had tried to wrap my mind around a less familiar topic.

My resolution for the coming weeks is to spread out more thematically to the discussions closer to connectivism trying to geet a better understanding of the theory. I am not sure yet, if the coming epistomological week will actually be the perfect week to start with ;-) , but I will try my best and stick with the discussions even though I may be a more silent observer.

For this week’s Wordle, I have tried several versions as the words are redrawn every time you select a different font. Finally, I chose the one above as it gives me hope for my New Year’s course resolution. “Connections” sticks out a bit from the rest of the words and I take that as a sign for the next weeks: Look out for new connections and foster the ones that have started growing and that I want to keep. Connect week 1 with the coming ones.

The gathering of the data I used to feed to Wordle showed me that I will need a different strategy if I want to continue doing that for the next weeks. It’s been only one week and I had to remember where I had posted. It was rather easy for Moodle because you can access all forum posts of one person in the profile. However, for the blog entries it would have been more difficult had I posted more. In the first instance I even forgot Twitter. So I went back there, got my tweets out with Tweetake, the service Tom uses for his experiment, and fed it to Wordle as well. Next time, I guess, I should also include Facebook. The only thing I can think of right now is to paste anything immediately after posting into a document to keep track of. That’s the disadvantage of the distributed discussions, but I would not change that for the sake of ease to gather data. That would be like adapting your teaching to the technology that is available and being unhappy about it.

To end this post on an optimistic note, I am looking forward to the continued discussions, (visual) experiments, live online sessions (I hope I can make the Elluminate session on Wednesday) besides starting the new semester and everything that comes with that.

Elluminate me

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A crowd of approx. 82 participants of the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, commonly known as CCK08, just met in a synchronous online session in Elluminate. It was quite an experience for me as that was my first live session in Elluminate. Previously, I was only able to watch recorded sessions of webinars.

Participating in this hour long discussion was challenging as I had to listen to the various speakers and watch the rapidly flowing chat. This time, the whiteboard could still be mostly looked at peripherally. Had the session been at the previously set time (2 a.m. in the morning for me), I would not have been able to follow for most of the time, I guess, as I am not a night owl. ;-)

I think I would have coped a little bit better even now if the chat window had been bigger. This little window was way too small for me to see the comments properly. I’m not talking about the size of the font, but rather the comments themselves. At times they just sped past and were gone beyond the scrollbar. Maybe I can increase the window size. I haven’t figured that one out yet. However, I still have 11 more weeks to go to either find a way to enlarge the text chat area or to get used to reading the comments in the small window without losing track of the speaker. :-)

This shows that I am not so good at multi-tasking. George Siemens, who moderated the session by himself for a few minutes before Stephen Downes joined, and was already there before the session, did a wonderful job of talking and reading the comments at the same time and getting back to them.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

Screenshot of an (empty) Elluminate session. The text chat box is way too small for my liking as a lot of stuff happens in there.

What is the role of the quality of connections?

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Over the weekend I read “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” by Clive Thompson in the online edition of the New York Times Magazine. The article deals with the value we gain or think to gain from social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter as well as explores whether we have become more social beings now that we have many more “friends” online than in the real world. Dunbar’s number is brought up which basically states that an average person can handle up to approx. 150 stable social relationships.

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.
But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. (Clive Thompson)

Although many of our acquaintances fall into the category of “weak ties”, they are nevertheless part of our network in some capacity because otherwise we would not follow them or friend them. Or if we became a weak tie in somebody else’s network without wanting to, we could block them or ignore their friend request.

As these weak ties are part of our network, I wonder how network theory and connectivism deal with them. As I am not yet very familiar with it, I do not know if George or somebody else has already addressed that issue.

I would assume that these weak connections may receive a different treatment than well-established connections that are rich(er) in meaning depending. Or does that only depend on the kind od structure that underlies the network, i.e. hierarchical networks display weak ties whereas non-hierarchical networks don’t? Does their importance increase the more weak ties of a similar kind are established? Will they become a different kind of tie when they become more important to me, e.g. because my weak ties can help me solve a problem much better and faster than my long-time friends could?

Certainly, I’ve gained a great deal from my weak ties. Not so much that many actual problems were resolved, but more in terms of learning about resources that I may have never or only at a later stage come across, of confirmations that stuff I posted was useful for others, and that we were on the same track.

YAP for the MOOC CCK08

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I love abbreviations. They allow to say a very long title etc. in just a few seconds. The heading in full reads as follows:

Yet Another Participant for the Massive Open Online Course “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008”

Fellow participants of the course know what will follow in the next lines: my introduction. As there are over 1,000 people registered for this course, which George Siemens and Stephen Downes humbly call “a rather large open online course…”, I will try to keep it short because we have read and will read a lot of intros until Monday when the course will start officially.

Currently, I live in Luxembourg and work as an assistant at the University of Luxembourg in the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education. I have put myself of the CCK08 map in case you want to know where our campus is located in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

I am interested in this course because I want to broaden my knowledge about connectivism, educational technology research and usage scenarios and gain more insight as well as connect with people who are active in this field.

This course has already started to be a success because it brought together people from many different backgrounds and countries who are all interested in the topics of the coming weeks. Even though we may not always be there and contribute to all discussions, we will be able to hear other voices that we might not have come across otherwise and learn from them and with them.

As of now I do not know if I can cope with the “massive” in this online course because even if everybody writes only 1 contribution a day that will be more than 1,000 close to 2,000 if more people than the 1,800 already registered participants sign up. I still have to develop an appropriate reading strategy to stay on top of my game. Do you have any suggestions?

Now on to the last point: random information. I have not yet participated in a course taught entirely online because I am more inclined to blended learning. Thus, this will be a big challenge.

Although I am not in the official Second Life cohort of this course, I guess, there will be opportunities to meet in that virtual world. Then I will be able to practice speaking, walking, teleporting etc. which is much more fun if there is a purpose behind it than simply testing.

I’m looking forward to the official start of the course and the things we will discover together.

Opening the windows for new experiences

Opening the windows for new experiences