Mia and #edcmooc – Sunset Observer #21…by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture | @MDWorld

November 14, 2013 Whitney Farmer 6 Comments

Before logging off from the class website at 2:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, I did the math to see how long I would be able to sleep before logging on again for the live hangout broadcasting at 4:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

Not long enough, but it was Friday. A person can survive anything if it happens on a Friday.

With mud-thick coffee, almond buttered toast, birdseed, and freshly cut apple slices, Mia the Sun Conure and I settled into the yellow velvet wingback chair at my desk. I checked and re-checked all settings to verify that no one could see me or hear Mia if she decided to squawk. I put a piece of tape over the camera lens on my computer as a low-tech security measure.

Class was in session. Gratifyingly, the professors have names that bear hefty Gaelic weight: Hamish…Sian…Macleod…Ross…Knox…Bane…Sinclair…in various combinations.

With almond in talon, Mia was entranced by what moved across the screen as communication platforms responded to the responding humans throughout the globe.

The hangout closed with the team of professors announcing that it was Haggis Time (GMT), and TGIF. In Surf City, USA, the work day was beginning. So Mia and I both went back into our different types of cages, mine symbolic and hers gilded.

Despite little sleep, I feel awake. There are perhaps a billion enrolled in the class, but being a student is delicious. It won’t matter if I toil in obscurity through the hours when even the bad guys are dreaming dreams. If my forum threads aren’t honored in Antwerp or if typos bring me from obscurity to infamy, these are at least mistakes that I didn’t have an opportunity to commit yesterday. Today, I am learning something new to me, even if no one ever will know.

The media platforms that are integrated into the coursework make me shudder for all the right reasons. But the benefits of knowing how to display or be splayed on the grid are the reasons I enrolled. Navigating these waters wherein there be dragons will mean that I can show someone else the way.

The topic we are assigned this week is the future. Can we design how it will look? Like Noah’s Ark that carried the future through the Flood, this had better be a big boat. Only the big boats can navigate through big storms in deep waters. On the rainbow side, the bigger the boat / the bigger the cargo hold and the potential to bring treasure from distant places.

While historically the challenge was to acquire knowledge, the emergent question now must be how to dive into a pile of information and come out holding a diamond rather than a lump of coal.  The metaphor ‘Time is money’ isn’t a metaphor. Money is a unit of measurement that a community has agreed has equal value to time in our lives that we dedicated in an exchange. Think on it: The word ‘currency’ even reflects the notion of time.

Students are used to spending their time in exchange for the currency of degrees written with twirly fonts on a rolled up paper – the same instrument of discipline that causes bad dogs to cringe at the sight of it but without the stigma. But every student has a story about which classes they aced but learned nothing. Getting the degree and THEN starting an education was a phrase that I learned from a professor. Acquiring skills rather than titles are the goal. I don’t care if my doctor got an ‘A’ in Upper Division BlahBlahBlah. I care that s/he can cut me open and put everything back the right way before giving me a tasteful scar for bragging rights.

So I anonymously logon and have been feeling my brain stand up and pay attention. I am learning how to do new stuff. I am doing what I want kids to do who don’t have a chance to go across a threshold and sit at a desk and hear the recess bell. It’s only fair that I give it a go, even if no one cares.

But then, I posted a selfie of Mia and me at class with coffee and almonds because it made my sister laugh when she saw it. And in the midst of the perhaps two billion students that are enrolled in this MOOC, Mia the Bird gets noticed. Now she has a Twitter account that got her 5 followers in four hours in the middle of the night.

I am now competing with my bird to get attention at school.

Rather than be jealous, I am realizing the power of orange/yellow/lime green plumage. If this stuff is going to work, the importance of being earnest isn’t enough. These media/communication platforms are stages. I need to capture eyeballs and keep them there. What did some actor say about kids and animals, to never work with them? I say different. Use the clever or the adorable or the beautiful as wingman to close the deal. This gives me an idea for my final project…

But the tape stays on the camera lens.

NEXT TIME: Old Dog, New Tricks…

Pic of Mia and I, logged on for the first live hangout of #edcmooc, from my cell phone.