Chenée's Education & Digital Culture blog
Just another Education and Digital Cultures 2017 site
from Diigo
Assignments and assessed work often leave me frantic and anxious about what to do. This text has really helped me with trying to understand scholarly processes much better. After reading it, I was able to reconcile that sometimes I just need to start writing to ultimately find out what to write about.
Hi Anne,
Really amazing visual artefact you’ve made! Very creative.
You seem to have engaged a lot more with the content and the other participants than I did on my MOOCs. Why do you think this is? I suspect it may have something to do with the emotive subject.
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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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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 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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"Micro-ethnography: Community participation and community development in two MOOCs" #mscedc https://t.co/7FGqWTwPx0
— Chenée Psaros (@Cheneehey) March 5, 2017
Comment on MSCEDC MOOC Ethnography by hwalker
Hi Chenée,
Thank you so much for your positive feedback. I have to say that I really struggled with the ethnography: firstly I became embroiled in ethical questions and then I wasn’t able to get permission to quote the course participants. Brilliant of you to make the connection with Sterne – I didn’t! And yes – anxiety and a sense of being disorientated by the hubbub and volume of activity are responses which I’ve frequently experienced both on the MOOC and in this module!
I had to be pushed by my partner to include the personal images: it sits uncomfortably with me to blend my private space with this public one (I know that this is something which you reflected on in your own lifestream (http://ift.tt/2lzTVtX)) but he felt that I needed to reference why the medium of the MOOC wasn’t working to deliver the sort of mindful experiences which I get from other areas of my life. I think it works but I still feel a little uneasy about this ‘collapse of context’.
And brilliant that you skate: are you in a roller derby team? If not, what sort of skating do you do (way, way back, I was a figure skater; that’s something Anne Powers and I have in common). We could start an MSc skating club…
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Comment on MSCEDC MOOC Ethnography by cpsaros
Hi Helen,
This is such a wonderfully rich artefact again. I really loved how you incorporated the themes around body from Block 1 into Block 2. You brilliantly supported Sterne (2006) by incorporating the sound of typing, breathing and a heart beat to demonstrate how over-whelming and anxious being involved online can sometimes seem.
I also loved that you gave a us a glimpse into your personal life too. I took up rollerskating last year and I saw you are able to skate, so that’s something we have outside digital education in common. I’ve found this block particularly interesting because communities seem to grow better by incorporating the personal. Really lovely work. 🙂
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This week has been such fun! I have connected with so many different people on the course in such a variety of ways. See if you can match the images below with whom I interacted. Each picture is a snippet of Anne’s, Stuart’s, Linzi’s and Eli’s lives that I wouldn’t necessarily have found out about had we stayed in the ‘educational spaces’ of EDC.
It started out with Stuart; we had a productive Skype chat to compare notes about what we had found doing the same MOOC. It was interesting see how he approached things so differently to how I did. As we chatted I noticed that the conversation changed from the academic to something much more like the banter that exists with my colleagues at work.
I had an interesting tweet exchange with Eli which made me question whether MOOCs are still massive and thanks to connecting with Stuart I know how massive the Internet of Things MOOC actually is.
Linzi proposed a Skype chat on Twitter, which Eli, Stuart and I signed up for. This gave us an opportunity to catch up in a less formal environment than we have before. We were able to compare notes about our musings on Education and Digital Culture and the MOOCs we are doing. Conversation flowed much more easily than it did in the Hangout tutorial, I think we agreed that it is more stilted in the Hangout because we are self-conscious of making a mistake in front of everyone and looking unprepared or silly. We could relax more. It was good to hear that others also felt ‘naked’, or rather awkward and embarrassed, about having their assessed work and feedback available for all to see.
Anne and I had a chat on our WhatsApp group while we were reading the comments of our MOOC together. This was so helpful and caused us to pick out exact exchanges that have been useful when formulating our ideas. Anne also found a WhatsApp MOOC group for two-hundred-and-fifty students on IoT.
It seems these secret groups are a thing in MOOCs, as Eli shared that she was invited to join a ‘secret’ Facebook group. I thought having a WhatsApp group was intriguing as I would classify this as private space. Anne and I continued our discussion via a WhatsApp phone call on Friday, providing support and chatter about our plans for our studies.
I persevered with the Internet of Things (IoT). I tried to become part of the community and searched for meaning in the comments. I did not find anything that was able to inspire me. I was bored and found myself avoiding the course. I did some of the activities to try and gain a better understanding but ultimately focused on participation or lack thereof. Whilst reading the comments in the IoT, I struggled to make sense of what was written. I was frustrated. I did not interact with others or actively participate in situated learning and I was not interested enough to apply critical perspectives to my participation (Stewart 2013).
I wondered why I found it so difficult to engage. I decided to try another course. I enrolled on to two other MOOCs; FutureLearn’s Teaching Literacy Through Film (TLTF) and Coursera’s Writing in English at University. I chose these because I have knowledge of the content and I could focus more on the community and participation. I realised quickly that Writing in English at University was a poor choice and not ‘open’ as participants are required to pay for interaction.
TLTF appealed to me as I have used films in class to assist with literacy. I noticed a difference in the course almost immediately, it was more transparent, participants were encouraged to share personal information, there was discussion between participants, the atmosphere was friendlier and community more generous with their interaction. I was surprised to find that I wanted to be there. It did not feel like a chore unlike the IoT.
By changing MOOCs I discovered:
Stewart, B., (2013). Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation? MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Technology, 9(2), pp.228–238.