Boy, am I looking forward to this course! I stumbled upon this a couple of weeks ago in this blog post, and I immediately signed up for the course.  It is going to be about theories and methods of connectivism and connective knowledge, an area which I’m especially interested in since I teach a course here at the RheinAhrCampus in “Interconnected Thinking (or Vernetztes Denken in German)”. In this course I make use of the method developed by Frederic Vester, who is widely known in this field of work. Besides that I think that this way of thinking is the only way to cope with and in a world which is becoming more and more complex every single day.

So today I received an email from George Siemens, who is facilitating this course together with Stephen Downes.

Hi,

Thanks for your expression of interest in the upcoming Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course. We have 650 that have expressed interest in participating in some manner. I will provide more information in early July on how to enroll in the course if you wish to receive credit for, and feedback on, your work.

We’re taking a “many points of light” approach to this course. We’ll offer a wide variety of options and tools for participants to use including: Moodle, Twitter, Pageflakes, blogs, Elluminate, Wikis, Google groups, Attendr, tags, and so on. Content aggregation tools now allow learners to work in their own space rather than come to one set by the university. If you have a blog, blog there. The conference tag is CCK08. Tag it with that…and we’ll find you :).

Obviously a course of this nature will have a very diverse group of learners. Some of you will be very familiar with different tools and technologies. Some of you will feel like you’re just beginning. That type of diversity is most desirable!

Rather than forcing learners to participate in a space and manner that we deem appropriate, we will leave things as open and flexible as possible. You may have this feeling of “what if I miss something”. This is the new normal feeling online :), particularly in decentralized learning environments. We will happily trust the network to filter and highlight important concepts and ideas.

Do you have ideas on how we can improve the participant experience of this course? How can we extend access? (We’ve had one person offer to translate into Chinese and another to translate into Spanish). How can we push the boundaries of teaching and learning?

Final point: we hope to use this experience as an opportunity to research the impact of a large online open course. We’ll be sharing our design approaches on the blog (link provided above) as well as soliciting your input/reactions to what we’re planning to do.

Please let us know if you have any questions. Looking forward to a unique, motivating, and engaging learning experience!

George

Does this sound exciting or what? I think this a perfect way to handle a course like that, and I’m so much looking forward to it to start! The course will begin in September 2008, but I’m pretty sure that by that time there will have been a lot of activity among the participants. Well, guys, I can hardly wait…