Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Syndicated, Virginia Group

I’m Not Throwing Away My Shot

Last week I announced that I will leave a non-tenure track faculty position to build my own consulting business, Bandwidth Strategies. The transition from faculty to freelance suits who I am and how I work. It signifies one of several ways in which I am working to let go of “what people do” to be true to myself and the way I want to live my life. Just because it’s a good move – and I know in my heart it’s the right move – doesn’t mean that I’m not nervous.

My family and I traveled to New York this weekend to see Hamilton, the musical. My husband bought the tickets over a year ago, before I even knew I was going to have a faculty position that then I would be leaving.  Yesterday, my husband, my kids, and I were so excited to walk into the theater yesterday. Hamilton is brilliant art on so many levels, and as the lights dimmed, I suddenly realized that the timing of it all could not have been better. There are life and leadership lessons in Hamilton, and I needed to take some notes.

We know that I have a history of drawing inspiration from historical figures.  I’ve tweeted about my “Be like Abe” mantra. When Lincoln was angry he would write a hot letter and stuck it in a drawer. Invoking his name reminds me to wait before responding hastily in anger. Sometimes, it even works.

There are so many reviews and blog posts already written on Hamilton that there is no need to be comprehensive or even pedagogical in this space; it’s all been done. However, when I say “Be like Hamilton” I will be reminding myself to do the following:

“I’m past patiently waiting. I’m passionately smashing every expectation. Every action is an act of creation. I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow–for the first time I’m thinkin’ about tomorrow.”

Hamilton, My Shot

Aaron Burr wasted so much time marveling at Hamilton’s success rather than focusing on his own. He was a brilliant lawyer – Hamilton even said so. Where Burr hedged his bets, Hamilton was transparent. When Burr was reserved, Hamilton wrote with passion. While Burr was bitter, Hamilton sparkled.  Hamilton sparkled – that is how he caught the eye of George Washington, whose mentorship was essential to Hamilton’s success. People are drawn to and influenced by honesty, passion, and joy.  I can be Hamilton. I can sparkle. You can too.

Open Participants, Syndicated

A few threads…

My apologies for making a very brief post containing little more than placeholders and breadcrumbs. I’m pressed for time, but want to be sure to come back to these items. Someday….

Ideas to pursue:

  • humans’ evolutionarily shaped propensity for learning
  • humans’ evolutionarily shaped propensity for cooperation and democracy

 

Resources / sites / pages to take a closer look at:

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

When you are a muse

Being a muse isn’t easy. It seems like it should be, as you aren’t the one actually doing the creative work, but it takes a certain amount of courage to be willing to relinquish control and accept what other people do with you.

I have a friend. He’s a very dear friend. He has my best interest at heart, always.

Tod paints, or at least he used to and he does now.  He painted, then he played golf, then he painted. All of this is documented on his blog. But when Tod started painting this last time, he collected selfies of the people he loves and he used those as inspiration. He’s painting a lot of people, but he painted me almost first.

I take a lot of selfies. Most of the time I take them to mark changes in my life. Educational degrees. Jobs. Seasons.  There was a time I was taking one every week because the changes just kept coming.  I happened to be working for Tod at the time.  He has since remarked that he never knew what he was going to see when I walked into the office, and there was some truth to that;  I looked like an entirely different woman every day.  I think it threw him for a loop in real life, but in retrospect I think he sees it as an opportunity: the documentation of a woman in transition. He chose one of his favorite selfies that I took (in our shared workplace at the height of my midlife crisis) and he painted that.

Selfies are self portraits.  I’m good at them. I know how to use composition, shadow, light, and most noticeably my HAIR to hide what I don’t like and to emphasize what I want. I intentionally use my hair to hide the intensity around my eyes – I’ve never liked the way it looks. It looks too hard or hungry or masculine to me. I don’t like it but I can’t shake it and the only time I can erase it is when I’m have a beer and take the selfie laying down.

When Tod painted me, he took my hair out of the equation.  He literally took my hair completely off my face. All that intensity is staring back at me and there is nothing I could do about it. I can’t reframe or retake. I can’t vignette or tilt shift.  I can’t tilt my head to let my hair fall forward from behind my ears.  But I can’t deny it either. I can’t tell him Tod got it wrong, because in reality he got it very very right. Fuck it all, there is no way for me to hide. I’ve never felt more publicly naked in my entire life, but I’ve also never felt so accepted or valued either.  It’s a unique sort of tension to it all.

 

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs, Motivation and Me

I am intrigued and inspired by Steve Greenlaw’s observations (in two parts) on motivation in the OpenLearning17 cMOOC and on motivation and MOOCs more generally. For OpenLearning17 specifically, I have an additional theory. Like Steve’s observations, mine are based on my own experience. I don’t have the data in hand, so I’m relying on Steve’s interpretation of it and simply adding to his insightful comments.

I am particularly intrigued with the notion that some participants who did not continue through the whole course may have gotten as much as they wanted from it. MOOCs are not the same as credit-bearing courses. No one is paying to be in the MOOC and no one will receive a degree based on their completion. MOOCs do require a different kind of motivation, a more intrinsic one. We have to want to complete it to do so and in order for that to happen, the MOOC needs to have priority over other things. Steve addresses this issue in Part 2 of his reflections.

The reality is that for many, the MOOC cannot be the priority. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way.  OpenLearning17 was an opportunity for professional development, primarily for those of us working in higher education. As Steve suggests, maybe the motivation isn’t there because we’re not held accountable for our own development in the same we are for other parts of our professional lives. Professional development is about self-development and therefore focuses on the self, not on others. Here’s my theory, it seems to me that self-development often ends up towards the end of our list of priorities because we put the needs of others first. We do this even when we know that our improvement will positively impact others (e.g. teacher development improves teaching, thereby improving the learning experience for students). Most of the participants in OpenLearning17 were educators, or involved in higher education in some way. We are “givers” as a breed and therefore, we tend to put the needs of others before our own. We start out with good intentions about improving ourselves, expanding our knowledge, and then the needs of others creep into the space we had carved out to focus on our own development. I know that for myself, during the weeks I couldn’t participate at all, it was the needs of others that took priority: the needs of my team, my institution, my family. I just didn’t have time for me, which meant I didn’t have time for the MOOC.

There are comments that suggest that participants who had to drop out due to competing priorities would try again. To help give participants and organizers a sense of completion, we could try offering a different approach to the content. If 14 weeks is not sustainable for focusing on one’s own development, perhaps a shorter time frame might be more manageable. Perhaps the same course content could be reorganized into smaller parts that could be offered sequentially with each part requiring a smaller commitment of time. The parts could be offered back to back for those who want a more immersive experience, but each part would need to be able to stand on its own so that those participants who can only commit to that part can begin without prior knowledge needed.

The course content is still available, so of course past and new participants can access the information, but we know that the synchronous (Twitter chats and Google Hangouts) and time-bound asynchronous pieces (Hypothes.is annotations) had significant value for participants. The activity of the course is what brings connection and community to it and the course (or perhaps some other event?) must be active in order for that element to occur.

I hope that in the next iteration we can intentionally design the experience for participants who have a limited amount of time to devote to the cMOOC and I look forward to helping figure out a way to do that. For those of you hoping to participate in future iterations, what would you like to see?

 

Image courtesy of Addison Berry “Changed Priorities Ahead” via Flickr.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs, Motivation and Me

I am intrigued and inspired by Steve Greenlaw’s observations (in two parts) on motivation in the OpenLearning17 cMOOC and on motivation and MOOCs more generally. For OpenLearning17 specifically, I have an additional theory. Like Steve’s observations, mine are based on my own experience. I don’t have the data in hand, so I’m relying on Steve’s interpretation of it and simply adding to his insightful comments.

I am particularly intrigued with the notion that some participants who did not continue through the whole course may have gotten as much as they wanted from it. MOOCs are not the same as credit-bearing courses. No one is paying to be in the MOOC and no one will receive a degree based on their completion. MOOCs do require a different kind of motivation, a more intrinsic one. We have to want to complete it to do so and in order for that to happen, the MOOC needs to have priority over other things. Steve addresses this issue in Part 2 of his reflections.

The reality is that for many, the MOOC cannot be the priority. Life gets in the way. Work gets in the way.  OpenLearning17 was an opportunity for professional development, primarily for those of us working in higher education. As Steve suggests, maybe the motivation isn’t there because we’re not held accountable for our own development in the same we are for other parts of our professional lives. Professional development is about self-development and therefore focuses on the self, not on others. Here’s my theory, it seems to me that self-development often ends up towards the end of our list of priorities because we put the needs of others first. We do this even when we know that our improvement will positively impact others (e.g. teacher development improves teaching, thereby improving the learning experience for students). Most of the participants in OpenLearning17 were educators, or involved in higher education in some way. We are “givers” as a breed and therefore, we tend to put the needs of others before our own. We start out with good intentions about improving ourselves, expanding our knowledge, and then the needs of others creep into the space we had carved out to focus on our own development. I know that for myself, during the weeks I couldn’t participate at all, it was the needs of others that took priority: the needs of my team, my institution, my family. I just didn’t have time for me, which meant I didn’t have time for the MOOC.

There are comments that suggest that participants who had to drop out due to competing priorities would try again. To help give participants and organizers a sense of completion, we could try offering a different approach to the content. If 14 weeks is not sustainable for focusing on one’s own development, perhaps a shorter time frame might be more manageable. Perhaps the same course content could be reorganized into smaller parts that could be offered sequentially with each part requiring a smaller commitment of time. The parts could be offered back to back for those who want a more immersive experience, but each part would need to be able to stand on its own so that those participants who can only commit to that part can begin without prior knowledge needed.

The course content is still available, so of course past and new participants can access the information, but we know that the synchronous (Twitter chats and Google Hangouts) and time-bound asynchronous pieces (Hypothes.is annotations) had significant value for participants. The activity of the course is what brings connection and community to it and the course (or perhaps some other event?) must be active in order for that element to occur.

I hope that in the next iteration we can intentionally design the experience for participants who have a limited amount of time to devote to the cMOOC and I look forward to helping figure out a way to do that. For those of you hoping to participate in future iterations, what would you like to see?

 

Image courtesy of Addison Berry “Changed Priorities Ahead” via Flickr.

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs and Motivation: Part 2

This post is a continuation of the previous one, but digs deeper into the question of why participants fail to complete MOOCs  It is speculative and personal. It’s possibly based too much on my own experience, so take it for what it’s worth.

The most frequently expressed reason for dropping out of #OpenLearning17 was lack of time. While I accept that at one level, I also wonder if there are deeper reasons. Let’s start with some thoughts specifically on MOOCs; then we can explore deeper issues of motivation, comparing the experience of students with the experience of instructors and professionals.

I’m assuming that participants joined #OpenLearning17 because they have an interest in and want to learn the subject. There was little or no extrinsic reward for doing so. This has been the case for all the MOOCs I’ve participated in.

MOOCs often include a great deal of work in a given week. Some weeks #OpenLearning17 certainly did. The idea is that those who have a particular interest in the subject can dig more deeply than those who don’t. I found that when I had worked through a certain amount of the work, I felt like I knew enough to participate. I didn’t have to do all of the work to reach that point. During some weeks, I wasn’t able to do enough work to reach that point. This made me less able or less willing to participate publicly.  As one participant indicated in a survey response,

“Yes, as the semester went on my schedule got much busier and I couldn’t fit the OpenLearning activities in. Some weeks required a lot more than others and then I felt like I couldn’t really do the week justice.“

MOOCs tend to be based on a cohort model—they are not self-paced. If one finds one can’t keep up with the ostensive pace of the course—if, for several weeks in a row, one finds they don’t do enough of the work to reach that level of understanding of the subject mentioned above, I think there’s a tendency for participants to feel like it’s not worth coming back, even if the course is not vertically building.   If this process spirals out of control, the MOOC participant may drop out.

Could it be that the (arbitrary) pace of the online course doesn’t match the time availability of most of the students? What then? (And what does this say about the learning experiences of the students in the courses we teach?)

Is the problem of failure to complete a MOOC due to the lack of accountability?  Students more often than not stay with a course because of the grade and credits that will be earned.  Is that a bug or a feature? One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that relatively few students plan well for the end of the semester. Final papers and exams are often worse than I would expect from students, given the quality of their earlier work. This seems due in part to the fact that students are stressed beyond the level that makes them productive, and some students seem to give up, just to be done with it.

When I engage in a scholarly project, I work at it until it’s done to my satisfaction. Often the only deadline is my own. When I have an externally-imposed deadline, I tend to adjust the pace of my work to meet that deadline. I can do this because I have a lot of experience and a strong sense of how much time a given task or set of tasks will take.  [ For a related discussion, see John Warner recent piece.]

When I’m teaching, the schedule is external—I have to turn grades in by a certain date, and I make that deadline. Sometimes that results in a difficult couple of days and I may end up wishing I had a bit more time. In the case of determining final grades, again experience has taught me about how long something will take, though ultimately the need to meet the deadline may make me less sensitive to how good a job I’ve done. It’s probably true that final exams and final grades are, to a certain extent, like sausage making.

How is a student’s experience taking a class different from an instructor or professional completing their work? Many students don’t know how much effort it takes to complete their assignments and/or what a good result is or how much time it takes. In other words, students lack self-efficacy and the ability to self-regulate their learning.  I see this particularly with first year students, but also with some upper level students.

When I do something professionally I typically want to meet a standard of what I consider good work. When I was an undergraduate, while I wanted to do good work, I wasn’t always sure what that would be. When push came to shove, I turned in what I had, for better or for worse. While I had a grade at stake, the lack of experience and understanding of my learning process meant that I didn’t always achieve my goals.

When I do something professionally I have a good understanding of process I’m about to engage in. As a student, I had an imperfect understanding of that process and, at times,that   led me to undershoot.  Why didn’t the uncertainty lead me to overshoot? Because there’s nothing higher than a A? Because I wasn’t as motivated as a student as I am as a professional?  I’m not sure. As a student, I had a lot of what I thought were important things competing for my time. As a professional I do also, but I also have a better sense of what’s important, and how long things will take.

What about when I take a course or a MOOC? My participation in #OpenLearning17 asked me to do some things that I wasn’t all that familiar or comfortable with.  These including annotating documents with Hypothes.is, Creating Storify(s), and participating in real time twitter discussions when I hadn’t done enough of the assignments to be able to contribute much. I felt self-conscious about embarrassing myself publicly.  As Sarah Rose Cavanaugh said in a recent Chronicle piece, “To participate is to risk a lowering of one’s status.”  In short, during #OpenLearning17, at times I behaved like a student.

Is there a tendency as a student to give up agency to the instructor, falling back on our learned behavior of school? I just know that when I take a course, I don’t feel as responsible as when I teach one, or as when I do some other professional task. I wonder if I’m the only faculty member who feels that way.  More importantly, how can we encourage our students to get beyond this artificial barrier to learning?

 

Image courtesy of tamahaji “The Motivation” via flickr.com

Syndicated, Virginia Group

MOOCs and Motivation: Part 1

One of the criticisms of MOOCS has been that while they enroll a large number of participants, only a few finish. We had this experience with #OpenLearning17, but I wonder if it’s a bug or a feature. In this post, I present the data, while in the next I will speculate about what it means.

Let’s start with the data. Our constructivist MOOC went on for 14 weeks during the early part of 2017, roughly the same time as my semester. Since one of the goals of the Faculty Collaborative project was to create a sustaining resource, I extended my look several weeks past the end of the course. Two forms of engagement with the course that left a record were twitter and blog posts. The following two charts show total tweets and posts (by week) from the beginning of the course thru six weeks after.

The pattern of blog posts and tweets is similar. The numbers start large and then diminish over time. The blog posts are strictly diminishing through the end of the course. There’s more variation in the tweets, probably based on the topics of the week, but the trend is also diminishing. While the most tweets were in the first week, there were local peaks in Week 5 (Digital Literacy) and Week 8 (Open Pedagogy). Note also the surge of tweets during the ODU Summer Institute week (The week labeled +3), after the course was formally over. Twitter is a common backchannel for communication during conferences and similar events. Note also that the conversation continues with at least 12 tweets per week since the course end and an average of 5 blog posts per week since then.

The pattern of declining activity from the first week of the course is consistent with the claim that only a small fraction of participants finish, and by extension, that MOOCs are a failure. But is that the only takeaway?

When I mentioned this to David Wiley, he proposed alternatively that maybe people got what they wanted from the MOOC and then left. Not everyone is interested in every topic. Perhaps they tuned in for those topics and not others. Some of the tweet data is consistent with that hypothesis with surges and declines around specific topics.

We also surveyed participants about why they didn’t complete the course. According to the survey results, there were two reasons for people dropping out: The most important was lack of time or time conflicts, given one’s other commitments. There were also respondents who indicated a lack of interest in a some topics.

With respect to the first reason, here is a sample of responses:

  • I loved the week or so that I was actively participating in OpenLearning17. The topics and associated readings were thought-provoking, the chats, etc. stimulating. Facilitation and collegial sharing was great. I had been looking forward to the experience and it did not disappoint. Unfortunately I did not have the time to continue.

 

  • The intensity of my workload meant I couldn’t keep up with the reading, and I certainly couldn’t keep up with the writing.

 

  • Yes, it was mainly a time issue as my participation decreased…although I did catch all of the web hangouts with Randy and Bret, and did some tweeting during those sessions. But my blogging certainly dropped off, which I regret.

 

  • I apologize for disappearing from the class.  Student draft-conferencing season hit, and I’ve been swamped.

 

  • For me it was totally a time thing. I had to parse out my hours and minutes diligently and just kept having to hope there’d be time for OpenLearning17- but it kept vanishing.

 

  • As the semester went on, my schedule got much busier and I couldn’t fit the OpenLearning activities in. I could probably do something like this more effectively over the summer. Or with more flexibility (do multiple lessons in one week, none another week, if that worked better for my schedule).

 

  • I was excited about the course and kept up with the reading for a number of weeks past when I stopped blogging/tweeting about it, but I noticed myself tapering off and I was disappointed that I couldn’t make it work. … I really WANTED to remain engaged with the cMOOC as the term went forward; I even tried to time-limit my engagement so that I could do a thing within the context of the time constraints I was working under. I just literally ran out of time to do so. I needed every second.

 

There is some evidence that individuals continued to participate, even if they didn’t have the time to blog.

  • It all interested me– it was time– I tried to follow, but I didn’t have time to write and engage. Between travel, all my work projects and my dissertation, it was just too much. Content was actually more of interest toward the end for me– and I have lots of things in my head, just no time to get them out.

 

  • I actually intended to write a wrap up to that effect a couple weeks ago when the course ended, but you know how the end of spring semester can be.

 

Some participants expressed a lack of interest in particular topics:

  • Thanks again for organizing the OpenLearning17 course. I will continue going over the readings and on occasion blogging about them. I dropped out because of time, and the openlearning project, which I found highly stimulating but marginal to my current job responsibilities (which focus on faculty career planning), had to be cut. (emphasis added)

 

  • Honestly, it was a combination of factors for me. I really appreciated the academic exploration of open-related topics, but sometimes they simply were just too theoretical for me. I am a librarian at a community college so I spend a lot of time thinking about and working toward what will help our students today, and while I appreciate the need for academic exploration, practical takeaways and insights help keep it balanced for me. But it wasn’t that the later topics didn’t interest me; in fact I think some of the topics in the week I missed would have been more relevant to me and my role in open learning, and I will hopefully get a chance to explore those this summer. (emphasis added)

 

Several participants expressed an interest in continuing the conversation in the future:

  • I very much appreciated the opportunities presented by the course, and hope to remain part of the conversation going forward.

 

  • I really appreciated the format and many ways to engage in the course! I would definitely try again with something like this!

 

  • There’s still a host of things I want to review from how the thing went down, and a whole lot of learning I can take from the thing. But this spring turned out not to be the time for that at all.

 

  • If you all are willing, I am planning a bit further ahead now and I think that will insure that I have the time for OpenLearning18.

 

Next, what might this evidence mean?

Open Participants, Syndicated

Full Course OER via a LMS

When well-designed full course Open Education Resources (OER) like OpenUpResources about to be released Illustrative Mathematics are used with a learning management system along with the professional development and training for this type of learning all kinds of possibilities open up for teaching and learning. Assessment of learning is powerfully transformed. Here’s a potential CBE scenario. Approaches like Project-based learning can be leveraged allowing students to not only learn new facts, but to apply them as they will someday be required to do in their careers. In addition to gaining social learning experiences with their classmates, the digital learning experience opens the world to the student, allowing them to converse and learn from people around the world. Imagine, in the middle of a cold winter in Minnesota a snow-day is turned into a learning journey to another part of the world from the comfort and safety of the student’s home.

All current generation Learning Management Systems allow districts to report the results on any kind of assessment as frequently as they want. More importantly, students can be  given immediate and specific feedback about their responses by their teachers. Teachers can use this type of tool combined with their experience to quickly correct misconceptions and provide students a better understanding of concepts. This is already available; districts just need to decide to start doing it.

Until now there has not been a way to take the money that’s currently being spent on textbooks and divert it to paying for teachers to acquire the training and skill to make all of the possible customization a reality.  The Stone Arch Bridge Initiative for Education Resources, SABIER, was created to supply that missing element consistent with the U.S. Dept of Education’s #GoOpen Initiative and similar efforts being articulated in most states. SABIER’s recommended implementation refines the #GoOpen Launch Packet and tailors it to each team in a district. SABIER works with school districts to make the changes necessary so that all of the customization and personalization is realized. Districts are able to use existing money and available philanthropy dollars to pay for the initial teacher training that’s necessary to become proficient at using open education resources.  It’s the next step in transforming ‘how kids experience school, how teachers teach and even how classrooms look.’

 

Featured, Syndicated, Virginia Group

From Novice to Node in One Semester or Less

When I started out on this journey with the Faculty Collaboratives Steering Committee and the OpenLearning17 cMOOC, I found out that in order to fully participate, we needed to have a blog and a Twitter account.  We would have weekly Twitter chats (whatever those were…) and our blogs would be linked to the main site for all to see. I definitely felt like a novice. I had played with eBlogger sometime back in the noughties and I had created a Twitter account a couple of years ago, but hadn’t ever tweeted or retweeted and I rarely logged in. I was using other social media pretty actively in my downtime (I’m a Pinterest junkie with nearly 2,000 followers; librarians love to curate!), but I hadn’t yet wrapped my mind around how I could use Twitter in my professional life. I had talked with colleagues who use it to keep up in their field or with the news, but it just seemed like noise to me.

I dutifully started a blog and found the hashtag #OpenLearning17 on Twitter. A couple of people from the cMOOC started following me and I followed them back, pretty sure that was the polite thing to do.  Then came the “share your space” OpenLearning17 Twitter chat that our Connected Learning Coach, Laura Gogia facilitated. It was into the fire pan chaos! It was like my first tango lesson, lots of missed steps, a few sweeping moves where I almost thought I was getting the hang of it and then it was over before I even knew what had hit me. By the time it ended, I was already working on my strategy for next time (Refresh, refresh, refresh! Shorter tweets! Don’t forget the hashtag!).

By the time the Open Access week rolled around in week 7, I had already won an award (in the form of a Minion meme–thanks for the encouragement, Amy Nelson!) for “most improved” and my Twitter activity was working its way towards the top of the charts in the cMOOC. When Gardner Campbell pulled up the network map showing the participants and their activity, I was stunned to see that my name wasn’t a spec as I had expected it to be. It was actually legible, a real deal. Even though I didn’t feel like I was participating enough, I was a player, just by making an effort and building a strategy.

Then came Open Access week. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have co-facilitated the week with Maha Bali, who is one of the most networked people I know . “I’m pretty good at getting people to agree to Hangout,” she assured me as we started our planning together. Great, and I’m pretty good at finding good sources on topics (I am a librarian, after all). So off we went on our tasks. I found the Peter Suber text and knew it was just right for the week’s reading. We’d use Hypothes.is to annotate the text. “Oh yeah, Suber is great. I’ve met him,” she said. And the next thing I knew she had talked him into joining our Google Hangout.Suber tweet

Dang, she is good at this! We agreed that I would handle the chat while she asked Suber the questions. He’s really delightful in that down-to-earth, brilliant sort of way. So I hammered away in the chat, adding links and catching questions from the participants. I was working the chat like a champ.

Then we had an amazing VirtuallyConnecting session (cut to me Googling VirutallyConnecting–oh, what a cool idea!). Uber-networked Maha set this up with folks from around the globe who were attending OEGlobal in Cape Town, South Africa. I was going to let Maha take this one solo and watch the video later, but then I decided I wanted to be there in the moment, even if it meant getting up at o-dark thirty (have I mentioned that I am NOT a morning person?). I was only on my first cup of Joe and I was hitting the chat hard and they were liking what I had to say. That was the moment when I decided to join the revolution.

I found them all on Twitter and followed them; they followed me back!  So now I’m connected to those amazing educators who are pushing the Open movement forward all around the globe. I retweet them, they retweet me.  It’s getting to know you on the Net.

The cMOOC wrapped up with an empassioned Google hangout with Gardner, Amy, Steve Greenlaw and Susan Albertine (even watching the recording is moving). I didn’t want the cMOOC to end!

The opportunity to have a panel about the cMOOC came along, thanks to ODU’s Faculty Summer Institute on OER and Stephanie Blackmon’s initiative in writing a proposal. Over lunch during the conference, I met some of the other Faculty Collaboratives Steering Committee members for the first time. In talking about my journey in the course, Gardner Campbell told me I was now a node and had the responsibility to keep it up. What? Me, a node?! I felt like I’d become a Jedi knight (use the Force, Sue) after being an apprentice for months. Node you are, connect you will.

I started the cMOOC with no followers on Twitter. I remember Maha noting that she was my first. I’m up to 30 followers and 239 tweets and counting. 15 weeks from zero to thirty, novice to node. It’s that easy, folks, but you do have to make an effort. You have to be present and active. You have to want to be part of the conversation. You might have to leave your comfort zone behind. And you might have to get up in the dark to chat with passionate people doing amazing things, all for the good of students and the power of learning together.