Category Archives: lifestream

lifestream

Songwriting MOOC – An Ethnographic Song

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post of mine I signed up for a MOOC on songwriting 4 weeks ago. While talking to Sian and Jeremy in one of our Hangout sessions she suggested (halfjokingly or not) that I pack my ethnography for block 2 into a song and well, that’s what I did :)

We haven’t gotten to the point in the course yet where we compose a melody but I’ve taken the knowledge I’ve gained so far with respect to lyrical composition, rhymes and rhythms and wrote the lyrics for a song about the MOOC and its community.

While peer reviewing my colleagues’ lyrics as part of the homework assignments I’ve noticed that if you try reading the lyrics rhythmically your mind might create a melody as you go along, so whatever melody you hear in your head that’s the right one 😉

Songwriting MOOC

(Verse)
This MOOC helps you learn how to write a song
Berklee College of Music, six weeks long
Rhythm, rhyme types, melody
Line lengths, boxes, prosody
Doesn’t matter what you write, you can’t do it wrong

(Chorus)
Coursera’s MOOC on songwriting
A place for creative flow
Who knew that it could be so exciting
To write a song like a pro

(Verse)
What’s great about this MOOC is its community
Where feedback is a learning opportunity
Discussion forums, peer reviews,
Quizzes, lecture videos
Created with a lot of ingenuity

(Chorus)
Coursera’s MOOC on songwriting
A place for creative flow
Who knew that it could be so exciting
To write a song like a pro

(Bridge)
The songs you learn from are all up on YouTube
And on there’s always comments from your peer group

(Chorus)
Coursera’s MOOC on songwriting
A place for creative flow
Who knew that it could be so exciting
To write a song like a pro

lifestream

Recap: Week 6

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Another week has ended and we are three quarters through the second block on MOOCs and community cultures.

My course on songwriting is going really well and I have started writing my first lyrics according to the structural framework provided in the course. It will be interesting to see how the elements will come together further down the line.

My lifestream this week once more had a focus on MOOCs. After last week’s news that the tech industry is accrediting Coursera courses I was drawn to this article via Jin’s tweet which is a fascinating in-depth analysis of the MOOC industry from a couple of months ago. While the jury is still out on whether MOOCs can create a sustainable business and stay relevant in the marketplace, it is great to observe the creativity with which this nascent industry is coming up with experimental business models.

As my previous how to manual was well received by my colleagues I followed it up this week with another little guide on how to make your lifestream more effective with the help of tags which I also announced on Twitter. As the lifestream grows it can look a little cluttered at first sight after a little while. Tags can help to put some order back into things.

Lastly, my colleague Ed tweeted a fascinating network analysis of reddit which analysed 84 million comments by 200 thousand people. It gives a very real overview of what topics are of interest and are being discussed within the reddit community.
Analysing large datasets to generate understanding is one of the main approaches in artificial intelligence and this topic ties really well into our first block and likely the third one too. I’m already looking forward to it.

lifestream

How To: Add Tags to Your Lifestream and IFTTT

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A great feature of WordPress is the ability to tag posts by their topic, their origin or whatever else commonality it might have with previous posts. As you build your lifestream with various content your collection of tags becomes more and more useful.

If you add a Twitter tag to all of your tweets you can display all your tweets (and only your tweets) simply by clicking on the Twitter tag below a post. Similarly, if you want to see all the videos that you shared via YouTube, simply clicking on the YouTube tag will display every lifestream post that was tagged as a YouTube video. The great thing about tags is that you can assign more than just one tag to every post.

For example, let’s say you find an interesting video about artificial intelligence on YouTube and want to share it on your lifestream, you can assign the tags “video” as it is a video, “YouTube” as it is a video particularly from YouTube and “artificial intelligence” as the topic is about artificial intelligence. Once you’ve used a tag before WordPress will automatically suggest an existing tag after typing its first few letters in the Tags box on the right hand side of your WordPress dashboard.

tags

As you are probably using IFTTT to automatically populate your lifestream you can edit your recipes so that the posts are tagged automatically. Just add the tag name right into the recipe. My Twitter recipe automatically tags all posts with “IFTTT” and “Twitter”.

twitter tag

The YouTube recipe tags the posts with “YouTube” and “video”, the Pinterest one with “Pinterest” and “article” and so on. You can always edit the tags to remove or add additional tags after the fact by simply editing your posts in WordPress.

Keeping tags is a simple and straightforward way to organise your lifestream content and will make navigating through it much easier as you build up your collection of posts.

lifestream

Recap: Week 5

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Week 5 of our EDC course has  ended and we are well on our way exploring MOOCs. In my case, I’ve been developing ideas for my course on songwriting. So far I’ve been learning about a variety of tools I can use to write a song in a very structured process. As the course progresses people are using the discussion boards more and more which will be interesting to see over the following weeks as I work on my ethnography.

In our Hangout this week we discussed the ethics of researching within MOOCs as well as the chapter on netnographies by Kozinets  which I found particularly useful as reading it somehow felt like I was seeing knowledge I had intuitively gathered from my own experience verbalised in a very distinct fashion. My classmate PJ developed an excellent summary of Kozinets’ main talking points which I’ll gladly use as a reference in developing my netnography.

Considering the wider issues of the future of education I stumbled upon three interesting pieces online which I felt were worth sharing on my lifestream. One was a TED talk by Brazilian entrepeneur Ricardo Semler who has chosen to use wisdom has his guiding force in life, running his company very successfully with a radical focus on participation and transparency. With this democratic ethos in mind turned his attention towards education to improve the way schools are run and children are taught. The results so far seem to be very promising.

Another article I stumbled upon was about how Coursera has recently started to collaborate with tech industry giants Goolge and Instagram as accreditors for their online courses. While there are reasonable objections to be raised here – the most striking one being that the tech companies are essentially outsourcing business projects to students and paying with their good name. They’re profiting heavily from the vast problem solving capacity of crowdsourced MOOCs while the students are merely rewarded with an “accredited by Google” stamp they can put on their CV. Nonetheless, it is good to see MOOC providers finding revenue models to sustain their business without resorting to tuition.

Finally, I found a guest editorial by Bill Gates on The Verge about the future of online courses and their possible effects on the developing world – a well rounded analysis of the promises and challenges that lie ahead in trying to educate students in the third world by means of educational technologies.