Digital Campus » 2012

15 May, 20125 comments

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “mook” (with a ‘k’) as “An incompetent or stupid person”; apparently it’s a word that achieved notoriety from its use in the 1973 film Mean Streets. But we’re not discussing that kind of “mook,” no sir: on this episode of Digital Campus, we’re discussing Massive Open Online Courses with Audrey Watters of Hack Education. We argue that there are MOOCs and then there are MOOCs, speculate about the purpose and future of MOOCs, and (at least in Audrey’s case) relate our own experiences as MOOC students. It’s a MOOC-a-palooza. (And don’t forget that Dan predicted that 2012 would be the year of MOOC-o-mania last December: we’re proud.)

P.S. As promised at the start of podcast, Mills has now revealed the educational hoaxes perpetrated by his students in his course “Lying About the Past.” Well played, all.

Links:

Running time: 44:24
Download the .mp3

Episode 85 — Book ’em, Bezos

In this edition of the podcast, Dan, Amanda, Tom, and Mills are joined by Tim Carmody, senior writer for Wired, and it was very refreshing to record what we called a “fact-based” podcast for a change. At the top of the show, we got Tim’s take on the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Apple and several of the major book publishers. Sharp-eared listeners will remember that we discussed this topic in the previous podcast–when it had first arisen. This time around, we were able to take advantage of Tim’s deep knowledge of this complex topic. In particular, we discussed why the average ebook consumer should care and whether the end result would be Amazon.com taking over the world. In addition, we discussed rental fees being recommended to Canadian universities for the use of digital journals, and whether Google Drive (yes, we said “Google” this time) would become part of our lives, or would it end up in the dustbin of history along with Google Wave and other such fails by the search giant.

Links:

DOJ Announces Terms of Settlement With 3 Publishers in E-Book Lawsuit
The most expensive copyright insurance policy in Canadian history
Introducing Google Drive…yes, really
Google Drive: A step closer to no-fuss cloud storage?

Running time: 1:12:35
Download the .mp3

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