Why
#edcmooc
If previous education ages positioned
students as (passive) consumers of knowledge, then the digital age with its
automatic ease and ‘right’ of publishing and 'narrowcasting' arguably has the
potential to position us and our students as producers of knowledge. Noble (02)
suggests that the over-arching ‘control’ narrative of education per se is
trying to wrestle that power away from students – and now from staff as well.
But resistance is not futile if we overtly and explicitly develop visual and
digital practices in and with our students as a normal part of our LTA.
So – this set of blogposts will be
about #edcmooc – the second run. I will perhaps mention how this course is
similar to and different from the first run of the course – and I will also be
able to reflect and post about my experiences as a CTA on a MOOC. If you’re
reading this, do make comments, do engage with me and the debate and take the
arguments further…
Each
week we are asked to produce images that sum up our learning
Since starting my MOOC journeys I have
been sketching robots in various attitudes of menace and friendliness – and of
menacing friendliness… They sum up this conflict between the utopian and
dystopian modes of responding to the digital – as does the collage inspired by
betrayal that I put together as part of #artmooc. They also represent the
smallest tip of the amount of visual practices that I have introduced into my
teaching since starting MOOCs. All students have to engage with information
rich visual discourses now. The more they can read and produce their own visual
messages, the more powerful they will also be in the digital education
landscape.
Why
#edcmooc – again?!
I did and blogged about #edcmooc last
year. Edinburgh University’s Coursera: ‘E-learning and
Digital Cultures’ was my first MOOC and I found the whole experience
exhilarating and joyous; also completely disorientating and overwhelming; and
great. I completed and passed that run of the MOOC but promised myself that I
would do it again in a more technological way. I would force myself to engage
with the various tools that we can use in Teaching Learning Assessment (TLA) in
a digital age… However – once I finished that MOOC, I leapt into another couple
of MOOCs (#artmooc, Penn
State’s Introduction to
Art: concepts and techniques and then #artinquiry, MoMA’s Art and Inquiry MOOC)
and thought that perhaps I should just move on. But then … I received the
invitation to be a Community Teaching Assistant on this second run of edcmooc –
and I was hooked. I chose this as my initial MOOC experience in the first place
because I wanted to explore TLA in a digital age by becoming a learner on a
digital course that explored digital culture. Many birds with one stone – yay!
And as said the course itself and the immersive experience that it offered
exceeded all my expectations. So I had to come back to experience being a
teaching assistant on a course that covered teaching and learning in a digital
age – no contest.
So
#edcmooc W1 – Introductions
This year the course opened with a
video from the whole course team that allowed us to appreciate them also as
physical beings – in the physical and virtual landscapes offered by Edinburgh University. There will also be weekly
Hangouts this year instead of just the two that we had last. (The first Hangout
can be accessed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDFO0ly1nk&feature=share)
On
the one hand this is just a great idea – a human way of entering a digital
learning space. The team also opened up the discussion: what is a University in
a time of distributed, digital and online learning? As I say to my students,
‘That’s something for us all to go away and think about…’
How
to survive and enjoy a more connectivist MOOC
Here’s the advice from the Edinburgh team:
How is the course
structured?
‘E-learning and digital cultures’ is offered in
two themed blocks of study. Each block is divided into two weeks, and within
each weekly block you’ll find a variety of course material organised into
clusters:
·
Popular cultures: a short ‘film
festival’ on the week’s theme
·
Ideas and interpetations: theory-based
readings on the week’s theme
·
Perspectives on education: readings
which extend the week’s themes into educational issues
What should I do each week?
There is quite a lot of content provided for
each week. Please don't feel you have to engage with all of it. In some weeks,
you might wish simply to 'sample' the films and one or two of the readings. In
others, you may wish to read more deeply and engage more fully. This is your
decision.
You’ll find discussion questions and pointers
provided throughout the weekly content, and we've also seeded the Coursera discussion
board with some of these. There's already a vibrant EDC MOOC community growing
through Twitter and in the various other spaces that course participants have
set up. We hope this will continue to grow in an ethos of collaboration, peer
support and mutual enjoyment over the coming weeks!
You should conduct the day-to-day business of
your learning in the way that works best for you. However you should aim to do
at least two of the following to ensure that you have the grounding you need to
successfully undertake the final assignment in week 5:
·
Contribute to the discussion forums.
·
Blog your responses to the topic,
putting #edcmooc in the title. Submit your blog RSS feed so that your posts
feed into our daily EDC MOOC News mashup (see below).
·
Create an image or other visual
representation of your response to the topic and post it in a social media
space. Tag it with #edcmooc.
·
Share your thoughts and links in
Twitter, using the hashtag #edcmooc.
How is the MOOC assessed?
There are no tests or quizzes in this MOOC. The
only formal assessment is at the end of MOOC, when you are asked to create a
"digital artefact". This is fully explained on the what you need to
do page. The assignment
submission page will open at the beginning of W4.
If you submit your digital artefact by the
deadline, on Thursday 5 December you will be asked to evaluate the artefacts of
three other participants on the course. Guidance for assessing digital
artefacts is given on the ‘how to give feedback’ page.
EDCMOOC is out of control! I can’t keep up!
The scale of the MOOC, and the variety of the
spaces in which discussion happens can be overwhelming at first. Please be
aware that it is impossible to follow every thread of discussion, or to
interact with every blog post or Twitter comment being generated. Instead, try
to focus your interactions within one or two spaces which you enjoy being in.
For example, you might set up a blog to record your thinking over the coming
weeks, link your blog to the EDCNews (see below) and then use Twitter to
publicise your blog posts to your fellow learners. Or, you might initiate a
discussion thread within Coursera on a topic of particular interest to you. Or
you might arrange a meetup with local colleagues or friends also studying the
MOOC. There are may ways of taking part.
Last time we ran the MOOC, some key strategies
emerged on how to manage it as a learner:
·
Read selectively: you are not expected
to engage with every single area of course content
·
Choose one or two media streams only to
focus on: you can’t be everywhere at once
·
Let go of the notion of ‘being on top of
things’ – this is also impossible – instead, enjoy the serendipity of the
random encounter
·
Relax, select, investigate, think, write
when it makes sense to write, and write in a space that you enjoy
·
Forget traditional online teaching
methods: there are around 17,000 people on this course, only 5 teachers and 8
Community Teaching Assistants…
All excellent advice – some of which I
thought had been my own unique insight into the MOOC experience - bummer!
Shape
of the course
Dystopias: W1: looking to the past; W2:
looking to the future
Block 2: Being Human: W3: Reasserting
the human; W4: Re-defining the human
Assignment
W5: Submit assignment; Assess other
assignments.
Resources
The Team tend to use open source videos
and publications to seed our study – so we can all access that which we need –
at the click of a button. I will add some links here in this blog for you to
follow up if you wish. But do not forget – #edcmooc has only just started –
it’s not too late for you to join in!
It’s
that journey word again!
We study popular culture alongside
academic textson this course for it is popular culture that shapes and makes
us. We shape our culture – then our culture makes us. W1 therefore introduces
us to utopias, dystopias as narratives that may shape our approach to digital
teaching, learning and assessment:
“The purpose of exploring digital
and e-learning cultures in this way is not to suggest that e-learning actually is
utopian or dystopian - though you may of course wish to argue that it is -
but to understand how these common kinds of stories of the web,
technology and online learning shape and influence our understanding of what’s
possible and desirable in our own practices as learners, students and teachers.
Hand and Sandywell (2002) describe
three utopian claims about information technology, and three dystopian ones.
These will help you think about how our films and readings in this block are
positioned in relation to issues of democracy, access and resistance.
|
Utopian claims
|
Dystopian claims
|
|
Information technologies based
on electronic computation possess intrinsically democratizing
properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with
‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).
|
Information technologies possess
intrinsically de-democratizing properties (the Internet and/or
worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic
properties or dispositions).
|
|
|
|
|
Information technologies are
intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to democratizing
global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.
|
Information technologies are
intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing
forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic
control).
|
|
Cyber-politics is essentially a
pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the
hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in
question.
|
Cyber-politics is essentially
one of resisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the
technology in question.
|
Hand, M. and B. Sandywell. 2002. E-topia as cosmopolis or citadel: On the
democratizing and de-democratizing logics of the internet, or, toward a
critique of the new technological fetishism. Theory, Culture & Society 19,
no. 1-2: 197-225. (p.205-6) “
(Oh the joy of cut and
paste! No wonder it seduces our students!)
The films: I focus on just two:
Seven minutes of animation illustrating
the power of human beings and nature to transcend even the most de-humanising
of work and living landscapes. A great watch.
New
Media:
http://vimeo.com/33193443# - two
minutes of total dystopia: a devastated landscape, ‘War of the Worlds’-like
tentacles emerging from crumbling buildings… the all hearing big brother. Grim,
compelling and compulsive…
The
readings (more cut and paste!):
Core
Perspectives on Education
We
were offered David Noble’s (2002)
Digital Diploma Mills – but this is my Noble:
It covers the arguments in the
Digital Diploma Mills article to which we were linked; but for me this is more
cogent, punchy and powerful – and it has more passion. It also discusses
notions of ‘education’ versus ‘training’. I love it! And it influenced our: ‘A
journey into silence: students, stakeholders and the impact of a strategic
Governmental Policy Document in the UK’ in Social Responsibility Journal,
Vol. 5 No. 4, 2009 pp 566-574 – which critiqued the UK government e-learning
policy…
CTA
bits
I did manage to pop in to a couple of
Forum posts about the course and offer comments – I also read and responded to
posts by the other CTAs: quite low key ATM. I did notice a few people bemoaning
the fact that there are no quizzes and that they cannot see how this course
tackles E-learning when in fact it all seems to be about (digital) Culture.
Last year displeasure was expressed as: ‘Where is the teacher?’, by those who
expected nice didactic video lectures to follow.
Of course rebellion, confusion and down
right fear are quite normal reactions from any student at the beginning of any
course. For me, it was the sheer chaos of so many people studying ‘with’ me:
the thought of keeping up with the posting of all their thoughts? Over-whelming.
But if you go with it – you do ‘get it’ and start to enjoy it for what it is –
instead of being disorientated by what it is not. I love the fact that there
are no quizzes to test that we have learned the ‘right things’ from the course.
I respect that we are supposed to set our own goals within the framework of the
course itself and navigate our own route, have our own adventures and make our
own contacts with information and with people. I have seen that called
heutagogy – which reminds me of Jools Holland and his News Year Eve
‘Hootenanny’ – so I have to shout it at people. It surprises my students. I
have also read Jeremy Knox, one of our tutors, arguing that the chaos of MOOCs
is part of the point: absolutely!
There was discussion about the
dystopian narratives that surround the digital. There is the invasion motif –
‘War of the Worlds’ – and the tragedy motif – that dystopia rests not with the
technology but the flaws and problems that emerge from within us flawed and
fallible human beings. Martians may terrify but our inner flaws are harder to
tackle. Another set of positions that surround technology: technological
determinism versus luddism versus technology is ‘only a tool’. Hamish
interjected with first we shape our technology and then our technology shapes
us – and that technology is neither good nor bad neither is it neutral… ‘That’s
all folks!’
