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Comment on Eli Appleby-Donald’s Linked form evernote: My micro netnography by cpsaros

Eli, amazingly presented work and what an interesting area to focus on! You work has elicited lots of discussion and I find the ‘peer feedback’ you’ve received on this post very entertaining. 🙂

I think peer feedback serves a very good purpose both in online and face-to-face learning and it allows students to co-construct meaning together, but I wonder if it would ever be accepted in face-to-face classes to the extent it is being used in MOOCs. Would students who physically attended a course, even if it was free, be content with accepting final feedback from their peers? I don’t think so. I think, judging by the ethnography we’ve seen in MSCEDC, MOOCs are no longer as massive as they once were and if organisers are going to be continuing with the model and expecting people to engage in a meaningful way, the feedback methods will need to change.

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Comment on Stuart Milligan’s Micro-ethnography by cpsaros

Hi Stuart,

Great post, l like how you managed to incorporate lots of different kind of media for an engaging post.

It was really useful to do this course with you. Kudos for sticking with it! I don’t think I would have stuck with it as long as I did without your insightful observations. You summed up what it was like being on the course very accurately.

It was interesting to experience the different dynamics of the two courses (EDC and IoT) with the same person. I thought it was fascinating that we were never able to connect on the IoT. Had we not had the connection we did from EDC, we would not have been aware that the other was on the course. Although I did feel that we were guilty of a bit of ‘jiggery-pokery’ and colluding behind the scenes ;).

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Comment on Colin Miller’s My Micro-Ethnography and Week 6 round-up. by cpsaros

Comment on My Micro-Ethnography and Week 6 round-up. by cpsaros

Hi Colin,

Wow, it is evident you’ve spent a lot of time on this and observed your chosen MOOC really comprehensively.

Firstly, kudos for using NVivo! I have had some experience with it and tried to use the wordle feature for my own ethnography but found it wasn’t particularly useful in pulling out key concepts. I also keep forgetting how to do the things I want to with it.

A comment you made really resonated with me, ‘MOOC users are not here to form community in the way that the type of online communities referenced by Kozinets are which led him to draw up the various matrix and diagrams in his paper. ‘ This is something that sat with me during my own ethnography. I think the communities he studied were different because they were bound by a shared interest or passion, people joined those communities because there were limited opportunities to connect with others. MOOC communities seem to have ‘a try before you buy’ mentality. Participants might not be very interested in the content before they start so they don’t have the motivation to develop relationships within those communities.

Thanks for your insightful micro-ethnography.

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Communities. Week 7

The Indignados used social media to mobilise. Photo: @thecommenator

I attended a Digital Cultures seminar, The People’s Memes: Populist Politics in a Digital Society held at King’s College London. There were interesting comments about how political movements developed out of what were the inequalities and disenfranchisement felt by those outside of the political elite. Digital communities like the Indignados who were the birthplace of Podemos, a Spanish party to form a more accessible alternative. What I found particularly interesting about the research being done in this field, is that much of the hierarchical systems that these new movements were responding to with regards to inequalities and inaccessibility, is now being replicated online. I thought this example linked well to the Knox (2015) paper and how technology is seen to become ‘anti-institutional and emancipatory’ but in fact just continues to replicate what is already present in society.

After receiving feedback, I commented on other participants’ blogs, trying to get inspiration so I could link more feeds with IFTTT to my lifestream.

On Wednesday, a few of the participants had a Skype chat to share what feedback they had received about their lifestream. It was here, talking to others, that I realised that a narrative for my lifestream synthesis was more about what I had posted and less about what I was thinking.

This interaction with my peers and my dabbling within my MOOCs lead me to question how communities are built? Which is why I bookmarked the Abbott (1995) paper Community participation and its relationship to community development on Diigo.

Most experiences of MOOCs seemed to be negative which lead me to question if they are sustainable.

Finally, I browsed the ethnography posts within MSCEDC so get inspiration for exhibiting my own.

References

Abbott, J (1995). Community participation and its relationship to community development. Community Development Journal 30(2): pp158-168.

Knox, J. (2015). Community Cultures. Excerpt from Critical Education and Digital Cultures. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. M. A. Peters (ed.). DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_124-1

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Diigo: Community participation and its relationship to Community Development

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to define the relationship between community participation and community development. The paper illustrates the weakness of existing interpretations, arguing that they are flawed because they concentrate on the failings of community development without analysing why successful community development succeeds. The paper concludes that community development is actually a specific form of community participation, the success of which is determined by two key factors: firstly, the role of the state; and secondly, the complexity of the decision-making taking place at the core of the community participation process.

http://ift.tt/2lhhYS9

As I reflected this week, I wanted to find out more about what we mean by ‘community’. Is community a group of people grouped together by a commonality, like race, religion or ethnicity? Or ido individuals involved have to have some kind of shared value system or interest? What makes a community? Are those engaged within it responsible for community development or should it grow organically? This paper did quite answer all those questions but it added to my thinking on the subject.

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Instagram: Skype feedback session

Linzi, Dirk, Eli, Stuart and me having a chat about our blog feedback.

Our own community participation. #mscedc March 03, 2017 at 07:48AM
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As the Community Cultures Block is ending I’ve been reflecting on how communities are formed. This picture reminded me that there are sub-communities within communities. I wonder how these sub-communities support or detract from the wider community.