I found out about the Connected Course taking place at connectedcourses.net via Paul-Olivier Dehaye’s own introduction post for it. And I discovered his blog via his @podehaye twitter account – which I’m following because when I read about his having hidden his Coursera Teaching goes massive: New skills required course, I thought it was such a brilliantly economic way to incite the students to apply what he had been advocating in his videos for that course.
I signed up for the Connected Course because I’ve been interested in the connective learning approach since Stephen Downes lead a discussion about a document he entitled “Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge” in the Instructional Technology mailing list in 2006, and also because I enjoyed and learned a lot from the connective workshop/MOOC Laboratorio di Tecnologie Internet per la Scuola #ltis13 lead by Andreas Formiconi for Italian University Line last year.
Something fun happened right at the end of #ltis 13 in June 2013: one of the participants, Fabrizio Bartoli, had reblogged a post of Vance Stevens in his learning2gether blog, and Vance Stevens then invited some of us to present #ltis13 in English there: see Fabrizio Bartoli, Lucia Bartolotti organize a discussion of the cMOOC ltis13.
But perhaps the most important thing about #ltis13 is that it continued after its administrative end, morphing into a permanent workshop, #loptis, with Andreas Formiconi’s blog at its hub. So in a way, my signing up for this Connected Course is part of my participation in the #loptis workshop – and vice-versa 😀
As to who I am: a former teacher of French and English as foreign languages, presently a pro translator and an accessibility advocate. Oh, and given my misleading first name: I’m female.
Bloglillon 
September 11, 2014 at 6:47 pm
Bienvenue, Claude! It’s interesting to see how participation+networks can grow participation in something like this. I’m hoping that dozens, hundreds of participants in #ccourses will want to morph this into a permanent workshop. We’ll see.
September 11, 2014 at 10:54 pm
Thank you and the other organizers for these #ccourses, Howard. The great thing about the connected structure you set up is that whether or not they formally become permanent workshops, participants will remain able to find others for further projects afterwards.
September 11, 2014 at 10:57 pm
Making connections with people and networks is definitely a big part of the connected in Connected Courses, IMO, Claude.
September 12, 2014 at 5:13 am
Bonjour Claude! I struggled through French in college, but I can still read quite a bit! It’s funny how much stays in our brains! I am joining connected courses as part of my graduate program in Educational Technology. I’m interested in exploring how online and technology education can support students who are non-native English speakers and/or speak multiple languages. Will be interested to hear about the MOOC topics from your perspective as a translator!
September 12, 2014 at 8:34 am
Wow, it’s great that your postgraduate studies include participating in a connected course! Do your postgraduate studies concentrate on a particular aspect of connected learning? And are several students collaborating, perhaps in having related dissertation/thesis topics they share and discuss their in-progress research about?
About helping students who are non-native English speakers, the online automatic translation tools can be a great help for texts. For instance, in an Italian connected MOOC I participated in in 2013, a small group collaboratively translated an English help document of the social bookmarking tool Diigo, using the Google Translator Toolkit, which lets you co-edit the automatic translation, and discuss each translation string. And later, when that cMOOC had changed into a permanent workshop, a wider group translated together an essay, Ron Tinsley and Kimberly Lebak (2009). Expanding the Zone of Reflective Capacity: Taking Separate Journeys Together. Networks, 11(2) – but this time we used a wiki, so that a few people could grab a part and start a new page for it.
Videos are a greater challenge, but there are also online subtitling tools to tackle that. Shall we see if some volunteers would be interested in trying with the videos of this course? Short blog post + tweets?