Tag: Featured Course

MOOCy Monday: Imagining Other Earths on coursera

by GHLearner

Warning: What you are about to read may sound like the newest infatuation of a teenage girl.

otherearths-logoIn a sense, that’s what I feel like whenever I find something as exciting as the course ‘Imagining Other Earths’ on coursera. And that’s why I have to talk about it. It’s the best course evah 11tyoneone!!!

Seriously, all the MOOCs I’ve seen so far, on different platforms with different themes, were carefully designed, interesting, educational, and mostly well presented. But there are some that are outstanding in the good crowd. Imagining Other Earths is one of them.

Can you imagine being confronted with topics and themes that always seemed somewhat dry when you learned or read about them? Watching long and complicated mathematical formulae certainly isn’t exciting for people who aren’t mathematicians, physicists or astronomists, right? Wrong!. Professor David Spergel from Princeton understands to present these themes in a way that make every new bit of information interesting and captivating. Watching how he ‘plugs in’ data into formulae and determines distances, the power of impact and the speed of objects all of a sudden makes you want to  brush up on your algebra and follow the calculations. These, certainly, are the attributes of an excellent teacher.

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Curanderismo: Mexican Traditional Medicine on Coursera

by GHLearner
cheotorresasheninkamino
Dr. Eliseo “Cheo” Torres (right) and Asheninka Mino. Copyright © The University of New Mexico. All Rights Reserved. (http://www.unm.edu/legal.html)

Just for the fun of it, I signed up to “Curanderismo” on Coursera. It is already in its fourth week of, in total, an eight week course. It is presented by Dr. Eliseo “Cheo” Torres and his colleagues from the University of New Mexico.
If you are interested in holistic medicine, herbs, and treatments, then check it out. It may be a bit late to do the quizzes and get a certificate, but for getting an introduction in what Curanderismo is about, watching the videos alone is educational.

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Whoa! And: Another MOOC

by GHLearner

Here I was, planning a post where I whine about my inability to abstain from more MOOCs, lovelyawardand then Debra from C-Dog & Company comes along and nominates me for this: The Lovely Blog Award.

First of all: thank you so much, Debra! And, friendly reader, go to her blog immediately and check it out if you haven’t yet, it is lovely, informative, moving, funny — everything a good blog should be.

Second of all: Wha? I mean… I’m so new to this blog thing here on WordPress, that I just don’t know my way around yet. I mean, saying thank you can never be wrong, but the rest of the bloggiquette still escapes me. I shall follow Debra’s example and post the rules and my own nominees a month from now.

In the meantime, I signed up for Blogging 101 on The Daily Post. This will hopefully teach me Netiquette and the ins and outs of the blogosphere, it looks very promising to a Newbie like me who just started a blog, wrote along naïvely, thinking to be on my own mostly, and was amazed at the interesting people who already found me — I don’t know how — and are already introducing me to a completely unexpected experience. And this to me, who doesn’t really have much to say (that’s why the posts are so long).

It’s odd to call myself a Newbie, I’ve been on the interwebs since 1995 and done a lot of things. I even had a fandom related place you could call a blog. This here, however, is more personal and hence all new, and will hopefully be less stressful since I’ll not commit to anything that forces me to post more than once a week. I set this as a minimum for myself. I aim at three posts per week, I think that much I can manage.

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English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

by GHLearner

From my Portfolio:

English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

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English Composition I: Achieving Expertise “English Composition I provides an introduction to and foundation for the academic reading and writing characteristic of college. You will learn to read critically, write effective arguments, understand the writing process, and craft powerful prose that meets readers’ expectations,” (Denise Comer, coursera Syllabus). I tried to write my assignments in … Continue reading English Composition I: Achieving Expertise

Creativity: The Branding Exercise

by GHLearner

I can’t believe, this is the last exercise already. This course was fun and it just flew by. And it will give me the last certificate I’ll probably ever get from coursera since rumour has it that they don’t give out free certificates of achievement any longer. That seems to have been a rumour from angry participants in a course that doesn’t give out free certificates any longer. So there may be more. Not that I need them, but they are nice and always an incentive.

But anyway, back to Creativity, Innovation and Change. The exercise requires:

This exercise is about BRANDING!
BRANDING is about what you and your project or product or service do and stand for.
BRANDING is many things, such as name, logo, product or service, marketing and many more.
With this exercise, we want you to make a tangible, authentic and relevant item that will be part of your Branding, for example, a logo, an ad and a website or all of the above.
If you don’t have a project, you can draw a color-filled personal logo that represents your true self or selves, or you can write a poem that represents what you stand for in your life and/or career.
You can use different media to produce your branding item, such as drawings, writings, music, video, etc.

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Creativity: The Action Map

by GHLearner

This assignment almost made me give up on the assignments. But I’d hate that. Once I start something ( other than a multiple choice quiz), I want to finish it.
The requirements were:
1. Watch three possible pains/needs and try to understand them thoroughly.
2. Talk with the people and try to find out what they really want.
3. Make an action map and show it to at least three people to get their ideas/feedback on it.
4. Chose one

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BAD – Bold Act of Defiance

by GHLearner
1984 Mac commercial
1984 Mac commercial – linked from http://www.heise.de

The MOOC Creativity, Innovation, and Change is getting more and more fascinating, mostly because we all learn interesting things about ourselves. To me this means looking at things in a very different way than I used to. I find the course very inspiring.

Here is this weeks exercise. The assignment was: Complete at least one “Bold Act of Defiance.”

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My Life Ring

by GHLearner

The Life Ring assignment is an exercise, where you put a driving force in your life at the center and surround it with key categories. These contain outcomes and strategies to achieve the outcomes. There is also a WIG, a Wildly Important Goal which you set yourself for the next quarter. The BIGs are Building Blocks of an Important Goal and can be done in a few minutes or a day… in any case, they help you to get where you want.

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The Shoe Tower Project

by GHLearner

Coursera addict that I am, I spontaneously signed up to the highly recommended coursera course Creativity, Innovation and Change.

The assignment for the first week is to create a shoe tower. The assignment is thus:
Build the tallest free-standing tower you can make entirely of shoes. Also think aesthetically, how beautiful is your shoe tower? How much art can you add to it (shapes, colors, etc.)? No other materials are allowed besides shoes (i.e., no string, tape, glue, etc.).

The first problem arose: I don’t have that many shoes. And: I live in two places and the shoes are not all in one place. This is my meagre resource:

schuhe

shoes and paper