#EDCMOOC: ELearning and Digital Cultures Rocks: First reflections from week one

ELearning and Digital Cultures Rocks

This five-week online course is cleverly embedded within Edinburgh University's MSc of the same name - so we are exploring EDC and we are part of EDC for that student body. Fine by me - I like it. 

We started with much pre-course activity - lots of postings in FB - and some people very active in Twitter - and now more happening in Google+. This is still a bit over-whelming and I can still imagine the less self-confident student finding all these spaces over-whelming and being in an increased state of anxiety in case they 'missed something vital' in another space. Another stressor is if, like me, you still do not know how to do what are still apparently the most simple things: setting up an RSS feed (I think Andy Mitchell has sorted that out for me) - or where we are really supposed to post our reflections on each week's activities (I have posted mine in Google+ - and I'm sort of posting again here in my blog - I don't think that is at all right!)...

I really enjoyed and was so impressed with/by all that posting, contact, discussing... I have not managed to keep up with it all - but I have felt part of a vibrant community - I have felt engaged - and I have felt joy. How cool is that?

After such a leisurely run in to the course - my work week exploded this, the first week of the course proper. I have not been able to join in until today... so I have been reading instructions, making notes, watching videos and reading stuff - all excellent. And as we have a Google Hangout in a little while - I thought I'd post my first notes/reflections on the course so far, here in the blog - hoping to communicate at least with my other quad-bloggers!

The readings:

This is ‘my’ Noble http://brentmblackwell.com/courses/engl210_StealThisUniv_Ch2.pdf 

This 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’. 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 – and which at some point I shall shamelessly plunder for a blog post!

Chandler paper: https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/edc/readings/chandler2002_PDF_full.pdf

Felt resistant to this text – but will use as a primer with students interested in Sociology or sociological perspectives…

Reading Dahlberg ATM:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue3/dahlberg.html

Handwritten notes only really – but already liking the introduction and references to the Frankfurt School & kulturkritik … pessimism and focus on high culture; Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, oppositional politics and popular culture (Kelnner 97); and Audience reception theory – Fiske (1987) and polysemy – drawing on Barthes = a text when read… More to follow.

The video clips

Bendito Machine

This short animation took a long time to paint a picture of technology falling from the sky – reified – polluting – worshipped: entrapping, awe-ing & enslaving us. I did not like the fact that the characters were portrayed as primitive people (sic). We 21^st century westerners are the ones who create and inhabit this landscape…

Inbox

Short film of a FB relationship between an ‘Indian’ (?) man and woman – enacted via post-its and bags instead of FB proper. I do not see how we can ignore the context and sub-text of this film. In the west we hear that this is a culture that abhors free mixing. On the one hand that suggests that these FB encounters are potentially liberating – allowing individuals to escape social conventions that constrain and inhibit them. BUT – he is half naked and she is on a bed… absolutely not a problem and nor should it be – but it also seems to me that this would reinforce repressive prejudice in a traditional viewer: this free mixing, even virtually, is pernicious! He seems to propel most of the action – she is very sweet – and ultimately so is he.  Hmmmm.

Thursday 

I loved this animation which has two inter-twining story lines: the blackbird feeding the chicks and the two people inhabiting the inhuman landscape. Their lives cross over when the blackbird takes essential wiring in mistake for food to the chicks – thereafter the chick seems slightly connected to the techcity… and the power cut that ensued from the initial, natural mistake allows the female human to contact the male – and they go on a date – despite techno failures – up up up onto a space station by a carbon filament lift (assumed) to get a bird’s eye view of the world (that the birds get anyway). Life goes on – hints of big brother and the failure of a palm print just snip at your unconscious… The world that is painted is bleak, unappealing and inhuman – you would not want to live there. But nature as with the birds seems to have agency still – and love – as with the people – seems transcendent (even if again only the male character is seen naked.)

New Media 

I loved this eerie portrayal of a completely dystopian landscape – with strange creatures floating by – reminiscent of evil unearthly jellyfish – or the aliens from War of the Worlds. Harsh and broken sounds emerge – there is no joy – no life – nothing human or loving can live here. We are invited to compare this with ‘Bendito’ – but I prefer to c.f. with ‘Thursday’. This is the world that emerges if the people in ‘Thursday’ do not get up and fight for their love and their humanity.

Popular Culture

I am a devotee of post-apocalyptic drama – loved ‘Jericho’, ‘The Walking Dead’ – and many films from the Zombie genre. Currently for very light trashy fun, I am watching ‘Person of Interest’ – an American TV series on a UK channel (Channel five) – where the builder of an all-seeing anti-terrorist surveillance system – horrified that alerts to ‘normal’ human murder are going ignored – hires his own vigilante to step in and stop the chaos (shades of that Tom Cruise movie with the same theme – name escapes me at this moment). Trashy as this is – I do enjoy the hope that flutters there: yes this world is evil and monetised and we are powerless within these inhuman currents – but at the same time – down these mean streets a man (and a woman) will walk who is not themselves mean… Yes powerlessness is being reinforced – ‘victims’ are being rescued not in anyway at all taking agency – but …

On Channel 4, UK, I am watching ‘Utopia’ – a very dystopian view of a just about in the future world where conspiracy theories are told in comic books, where evil monetised power seeks to manipulate everything – and where we do not know and perhaps will not ever be quite sure in whom we might trust. Very bleak and full of torture and death at the moment: captures the zeitgeist of a planet destroyed by bankers who still get their bonuses whilst the poor are further punished for their poverty…

Big popular culture point!!!

I am writing this on an old laptop that has an old version of Microsoft Word – one that still gives you an animated Help character – and I do still love the Paper Clip. What a wonderful thing is that Paper Clip! It keeps me company when I have to write – it has taken me through several publications including three editions of our student textbook and one of our staff textbook – and of books that I have edited or contributed to. Given how inhuman this world can feel at times; and how isolating the writer’s task; and how distracting online social spaces can be… how did we let them get away with getting rid of the paper clip?

I know he was loathed by many – but they could turn him off (yes, my companion is a he) if they did not want him – why did they have to turn my paper clip off as well? Bah humbug – and bring back the paper clip!

Social Stuff:

There will be a Google Hangout hosted by the course teaching team at the end of week one. To watch this live, visit the Announcements page of the Coursera site https://class.coursera.org/edc-001/ on Friday 1st February at 17:00 GMT. The session will be available for viewing later on YouTube and on our G+ page, which you’ll find at: https://plus.google.com/104505101854214069712/posts

Twitter Chate Saturday 02/02/13 21.30 GMT:

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/  with the hashtag #edcmchat.

Onwards and upwards!

E-Learning and Digital Cultures

I have just started participating in my first MOOC (mass open online course) – it is a free course offered by the University of Edinburgh entitled E-learning and Digital Cultures: https://www.coursera.org/course/edc  I’m mentioning this because…

Firstly, the course itself does not begin till the 28^th January – but many of us having received our welcome email have been speaking with prospective course members in our FaceBook Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/edcmooc/  since late November. Given how hard it can be to get our students to engage in Web 2.0 even on courses that are under way  it is intriguing to see what can happen when engaged and motivated people are linked this way. I am inspired – but wonder how to transfer this to my own students at a later date…

AND, given that if I want to tackle an issue from the student perspective, I find the best way is to set it as a question for students to answer…  I have already offered my students the opportunity to work this problem out for me, as an assignment question on my new Peer mentoring in practice module, viz.:  Is there a role for online peer mentoring? How can we create online communities? If any students choose that topic, I can feed back their responses here.

Secondly, I am going to take the opportunity to blog about the course – its ups and downs and learning opportunities – here in Last Refuge rather than by setting up a specific blog for that purpose and that purpose alone. So for my convenience – and yours if you follow – here are quick links:

Space to think & try some new ideas:

•           Keep a wish list with pictures on Pinterest

•          Join our QuadBlog experiment

•          Study Group for the course

•          Feel overwhelmed? Vent here

We can add ourselves to the

•           Google Map

•           Blog list and:

•           Read the rules

Staffroom:

•           edcmooc course page

•           course members who themselves are tutors: Group page

•         http://edc13.education.ed.ac.uk/

Student room:

- Twitter

- Twitter course list

•         Facebook group

•         https://plus.google.com/104505101854214069712/posts

•         Twitter people on the course

Tech Tools:

•           Tech tools for education

•           What’s your recipe?

 Library

Journals, articles and videos all related to this course, and to the wider field of MOOC’s and technology:

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=E-Learning+and+Digital+Cultures+-+course&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=FXjhUIaKC4jI0AWmnYHQAw&ved=0CDsQgQMwAA

The library is online at Diigo; we can add ourselves to the group. Tag any link with edcmooc so it’s easier for us to search: Diigo

First question posted in our ‘classroom’:

Q: What is your definition of “Digital Culture” ?

So – on becoming an on-line student:

1: How sensitive are we: First of all I leapt into the FB group – introduced myself – read other people’s introductions and ‘liked’ them as a way of saying hello… Then I got upset that no one liked me back (one kind person did – but only one). A younger me could have felt so rebuffed by this that I might not have come back again. I mention this not to celebrate my new maturity or to sigh over my poor weak former self – but to note that this sort of unintended ‘rebuff’ could be exactly the sort of thing that ‘tells’ our tentative students that this on-line space is no more welcoming of them than the traditional classroom… So what’s the solution? Set ground rules e.g. Don’t bother ‘liking’ anyone – just browse around and get involved when you want to… Be warned – there are more lurkers than active participants at first – don’t be upset if no one ‘likes’ you are what you say?

2: How overwhelming it can be:

Web 2.0: We have been invited to communicate with each other via Blogs, QuadBlogs, FB, Twitter, Google+ and probably more… I stopped even being able to think after those were mentioned. I have joined the FB group – and I will keep this Blog – but the thought of multiple conversations going on in all those different spaces does my head in (as we say in the vernacular). Solution? With a small group – I think offer just one main dialogic space – though of course people would still be free to take forward their own conversations in as many other spaces that they wanted. With one space everyone knows where the discussion is taking place – and everyone can be connected with everybody in a targeted and time efficient way. In a mass course – perhaps divide people up by on-line space of choice – so some will be dialogic in FB and some in Google+ - but you don’t need to feel that you have to be in all of those spaces to keep on top of things...

FaceBook: I have my FB linked to my work email – I do a bit of Web 2.0 as part of my job… Every time anyone posts in the #EDCMOOC FB group – I get an email. There are about 135 of us in the group at the moment, but already there are 32,000 course members. If everybody joins and posts my in-box will be even more overwhelmed. Today when I was brave enough to look in my in-box there were over 200 emails – and it is the holidays. I don’t know how to divert these #EDCMOOC FB emails to a separate in-box: they come from different contributors linked by subject – not by correspondent. Solution? Warn people that this will happen – and suggest a positive frame of mind. Perhaps another idea would be to get a separate email account for situations like this – and not to use one’s everyday one at all. That way all the alerts can go into that one account and they can all be deleted at a stroke: no in-box need ever feel so deluged again. Too late for me for this MOOC – but something to think about for another time.

People: There are so many people posting in the FB already before the course proper starts; how do I manage this? Some time has helped here; after a while I can see the people whose posts interest or intrigue me, so these are the names I will look for first – and these are the people whose Tweets and Blogs I will also try to get a handle on. Sadly these are not the people I am likely to be quadblogging with – because so many of them, being all proactive and engaged, have already formed quadblogs with other people. Solution? Be philosophical this time – and snap up the interesting proactive people quickly next time!

Twenty-six days and counting till the course actually starts!