Category Archives: clmooc

Context Matters – views from around the world

clmooc, Contexts Matter, EdConteXts, pedagogy

By Maha Bali and Tanya Lau (EdContexts Facilitators)

As facilitators of EdConteXts, we tend to notice when others speak about context in sensitive and thoughtful ways, and we thought we would share some of our “picks” this month for posts we’ve come across on the web that showed sensitivity to context in education. This is like what CLMOOC call “Find 5 Friday” (#f5f) – so here are our five for this month.

Hybrid Pedagogy (open access journal)

We like the journal Hybrid Pedagogy for many reasons, including the fact that they published a couple of articles by two of our facilitators (Shyam and Maha) just before EdConteXts was launched. A recent article we liked on Hybrid Pedagogy by Janine deBaise debunks the myth of “best practice” in education. She poses the problems of using any best practice guidelines universally and regardless of context, without considering individual student needs, abilities and interests, and gives examples from her own teaching.

Continue reading Context Matters – views from around the world →

Memes, Contexts, Connected Learning

clmooc, EdConteXts, MOOCs

Shyam Sharma and Maha Bali

Shyam and Maha wrote this post as a reflection on MakeCycle#2 where participants made their own memes as an assignment in #CLMOOC. -Ed

Imagine going to a party where you know everyone, but when the conversation begins, you are lost. You dig out your cell phone to look up the definition of what everyone is talking about, going on to skim through a Wikipedia entry. You also ask one of your friends to explain one of the sample images that you found on the web. But the more you learn about the subject, the more you struggle to understand what everyone is saying.

philosoraptorOne of us felt something like the above when first reading about memes as the focus of the second week of clmooc, a connected learning community/course that we participated in. Having lived in the US longer where he also studied popular culture in graduate school, Shyam knew about memes as an internet phenomenon. But for Maha, the subject was new.

Derived from Greek “mimesis” (imitation), the word “meme” refers to “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture” (according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The Wikipedia entries for “meme” and “internet meme” also highlight that memes act as units “for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices.” Indeed, memes are understood as cultural analogue to “genes” in biology in that they “self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.” Thus, memes can be hard to understand for anyone outside of particular cultures and contexts. Continue reading Memes, Contexts, Connected Learning →