Today is the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist. (We only celebrate three birthdays in the church calendar – John the B, his cousin Jesus and Mary, Mother of Our Lord and Aunty of John the B).
I’ve been on retreat for the last week – something I last did 2 years ago. It has been very good too, looking at wounded healers – Henri Nouwen, Brother Roger, Mychal Judge and John O’Donohoe.
The town that I’ve been staying in goes rather large on celebrating the Eve of the Feast of St John, so we got a firework display just before midnight, a big fire by the sea and the local population all turning up to dip their feet into the water at midnight.
Anyway, here are a few firework photographs. It was a great retreat week and this was a rather spectacular conclusion.
3 responses to “Listen up! Moocs are the future”
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Great stuff – peer assisted learning and peer assesvent to boot. The feedback you get from peers is incredibly motivational as well as informative and powerful in stimulating further learning. Have a look at Sugata Mitra’s work on Self Organised Learning Environments for further evidence of the power of a heutagogical approach to learning. I call it Knowledge Grazing! And it’s lifelong, isn’t it…
The certificates and the open ‘badges’ for learning like this are great on a cv or profile. They demonstrate a self-motivated desire to learn for lesrning’s sake. We need to use thus approach more in schools to re-engage kids with learning and turn ‘schooling’ into real meaningful education.
Well done you…and the thousands like you 🙂
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One of the things that interested me was how much of a learning experience it was assessing the work of others. I’d thought it would be a bind but in fact it was incredibly interesting seeing what other people had made of it.
There was an option to assess extra students than the three one needed for credit. An interesting concept – that marking is fun, interesting, educational and not for teacher.
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As a graduate of the Open University I have to say that a lot of this sounds very familiar in essence, if on a much greater scale. However, I would nitpick (it’s my job) that moocs are PART of the future. Not such a snappy title, though.
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