What is expected of you

We expect you to learn! The modern view of learning sees it as the ability to make connections: between ideas, artifacts, people, theories and so on.

You probably know, intuitively, that memorizing things is not the same as learning. It probably bothers you when an exam for a course simply tests your ability to recall facts that were memorized. And you know that when you apply things, you don't rely on memory but on finding things when you need them (mostly by Googling, yes). If you already know how to program, for example, you probably learned by attempting to solve problems and looking things up as you went along to create a program that does what you wanted to do.

The same applies to all learning. You can't get new knowledge from sitting and listening to us telling you: you have to practice, discover, connect things with your previous knowledge and apply them. In fact, we (as instructors) cannot "give" you knowledge; you have to create it yourself by this process of interconnecting things (in a network) and having conversations. Knowledge is distributed.

If knowledge is built from connections and conversations, your role as a learner has to be to participate, to be an active member of a network, a community that shares your interests.

This also means that you can't just consume the content that the instructors have put together for this course: you have to * create your own content. The course materials are just a skeleton, and you have to put the flesh and blood to bring it alive.

So, this is what is expected of you: engage, start conversations, ask and answer questions, solve problems, create content and share it, review the content created by others and comment on it, modify and remix, dig deeper and share what you found, etc.

It's very important that you don't be a troll

We won't accept troll behavior in the discussion boards. The success of the course depends on good interactions, so we have to establish some ground rules: be curteous, constructive, and understand the wide diversity in the group of people participating in this course.

We encourage you to use any and all the online media or platforms that allow you to engage and connect, but we especially will be using GitHub, Twitter, Google+, and of course the Open edX platform.