I created this site on Reclaim Hosting, the hosting service for ‘educators and institutions’ (and, I guess, for learners in general) co-founded by Jim Groom. Jim previously gave the world the word Edupunk and he facilitated the digital storytelling course ds106.
Learning with Moocs is all about connected learning and more specifically about a number of more technical experiments.
IndieWeb
For now these experiments are being suggested in the course E-Learning 3.0 (#el30, facilitated by Stephen Downes). The course is about learning in a decentralized environment, where learners work on their own projects and own their own data. I posted about this course on my other blog, MixedRealities. In that context I got interested by the “IndieWeb”, that should be a people-focused alternative for the ‘corporate web’. My new site uses the IndieWeb plugin(s) for WordPress.
This bundle of plugins helps to send and receive comments, likes, reposts, and other kinds of post responses using your own site. I’m not sure whether these plugins play nicely with my older MixedRealities site and I’ve no idea about the security aspects, so these and other experiments will be done primarily on this new blog, Learning with Moocs.
OPML
Not visible here is a smaller intervention I did using my site aggregator Feedly. Stephen Downes suggested to use the course OPML-feed to subscribe to the course feeds. I use Feedly a lot, as it helps me to keep track of many sites in a very efficient way. It’s a pity that aggregators never got mainstream adoption. I guess it’s just too hard and too time-consuming for the average web user to get involved with these tools (same applies for social bookmark sites).
As you can see in Downes’ instructional video, finding the OPML-import button in Feedly was not totally self-evident. Stuff like that makes it obvious why adoption of these technology is limited to a niche audience of information professionals and geeks. Anyway, OPML is a useful thing.
gRSShopper
I’ll use Learning with Moocs also for installing Downes’ gRSShopper, “a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing.” I’ll report more extensively about that experiment, as soon as I manage implementing it.
PS – If you have a look at the comments section, you’ll see some IndieWeb-magic taking place there, with me talking on my own site to Matthias who talks on his own site.