E1n1verse

I recently successfully finished my first massive open online course (MOOC). It was the 6-week Gamification course on the new Coursera platform, presented by Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t the first MOOC I’d ever started but it was different in its underlying approach than the others. This post contextualizes the Coursera MOOC platform prior to discussing whether it succeeds or not in a later post.

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[slideshare id=7316197&doc=persistordie-videofree-110319095225-phpapp01&w=425&h=315]

Back in March 2011, I gave an invited keynote at the JISC Scotland/Consolarium Game To Learn: Take 2 conference in Dundee, Scotland. The abstract read:

All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.
—Weird Al

My mother told me cleaning toilets builds character if done repeatedly. The other night five friends spent more than three hours dying over and over again while playing World of Warcraft (WoW). She never said anything about dying. I found cleaning toilets only gets you clean toilets. Dying and playing, however, teaches you important things. Demons, dragons, dwarves, and possibly folklore, you could see, but learning, love, and leadership?

Sounds crazy, but it’s true: World of Warcraft has something to say about learning. Prepare yourself, because everything you thought you knew is wrong.

The talk went very well and the slides were available shortly after the talk via SlideShare, but I was somewhat remiss in preparing a version for my blogs. This version was originally posted on my WoW Learning Project site.

You have a choice of formats:

1. The original slides (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
2. The original slides and notes (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
3. A downloadable PDF version of this blog post (from copy at WoWLearning).
4. This blog post.

This post is a written version of the original talk with the more important slide graphics incorporated. It can therefore be read without the original slides. Enjoy! If you have any comments, feel free to leave them.

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I have a number of books I can only read and annotate easily using the Kindle software on either my iPad or my Mac. Their reading software does not have a built-in easy way to export the notes or highlights, so you need to do some mucking around to get them in a usable format.

First step is to install NoteScraper for Evernote. Once that’s done, I use the following steps:

1. Log into your Kindle account at http://kindle.amazon.com/ using Safari.
2. Click on the link to your books (https://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading).
3. Locate the book with notes you want to export in that list and click the title of it.
4. Scroll down to where notes start and choose “show your highlights only” (this also shows your notes).
5. Assuming NoteScraper for Evernote is correctly installed and the Apple global Script Menu is visible on the top menu bar, choose “Export Kindle notes to Evernote”.
6. You’ll be asked for some tags, a notebook to add it to (Kindle Notes), and whether you want each note to have its own note.
7. Done. It’s in Evernote now.

It can then be copied and pasted into DevonThink (the tool I use) or other electronic journal or writing tools you may use.

Don’t use a Mac? You can perform the first four steps and then manually copy the content from the web page to wherever you like, but formatting and appearance won’t likely be as nice.

I’ve quickly posted this based on my how-to in my own research journal in response to a Twitter question by Catulla. I’ll add some illustrative screenshots later.