Hi all…

lot’s of great stuff going on …. here’s the recap:

Participants
Getting more followers and buzz everyday!
(tweet about our course in Estonian)

This week’s topic
On the course description page a number of us have been drawing connections, or making explicit areas of disconnect, between CoPand open courses like ours.
We’ve also been having a lively discussion on the “Meta-Discussion about Course Components” page about possible goals for the course as well as artifacts that we can collaborative work on. More on that later in this newsletter.

Blog Posts
Rebecca C and Jennifer have both composed some really great blog posts about CoP’s (ya you know me!

This Week’s Resources
This section might become obsolete as we create a Zotero archive of references and annotations (unless there is a public outcry to keep it, of course!)

Papers/Publications

• Etienne Wenger’s thesis.
• Resnick, M. (1996) Beyond the Centralized Mindset Journal of the Learning Sciences, 5.1., 1-22.
• Resnick, M. (1994) Changing the Centralized Mind. Technology Review
• Dron, J. “Achieving self-organisation in  network-based learning environments” (Ph D thesis)
• Institutional Ecology, Translations, and Coherence: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939
• Stahl, G. & Hesse, F.(2010)  The CSCL Field Matures. 5.1.
• Joe’s own Paragogy Paper

Programs/Platforms

• Debategraph as seen in Rebecca’s blog.
• Zotero – Joe has set up a cscl-intro Zotero group. Here we can start compiling references and annotating resources
• Piratepad (as wiki) – people have been asking some important questions as to what we would like to create or produce in this course, and have also been adding information about their own work and personal motivations for taking the course in the newly created introcscl-goals page on the pad.

Other Important Stuff
As mentioned earlier, a conversation has started on the “Meta-Discussion about Course Components” page about where we want to focus our efforts. Lots of important stuff is going on there, so check it out. Also, a lot of discussion about possible artifacts and collective projects is also going on on the piratepad, so take a  moment and visit to get your two cents in about this. To get a quick glimpse of the ideas that have brought to the table so far, I’ve jotted down the possible artifacts people have proposed, along with some questions and comments people have made about a few of them.

Possible course artifacts

• create a viable piece of OER as an outcome of the course
  • A paper/publication – requires shared and well-formed research question(s)
  • Wiki – dealing with??

• perform a literature review and summarize it for future learners
  • Zotero repository – bibliography with annotated entries

• experiment with open/collaborative/online learning ourselves and report on the experiment
  • a document that is structured like a formal interview with questions posed to individual learners.

• create recommendations for specialized uses of CSCL (e.g. history, self-organizing systems, publishing, mathematics, computing) and assemble any crosscutting themes

I think that might be it for today… Thanks again all for your dedication and work