Before shifting to community cultures, the week began by focusing on the artefacts. I was overwhelmed at the quality and diversity of all artefacts and commented on many via Twitter and blog comments.
@c4miller this is brilliant- you managed to capture 3weeks worth of discussion into a single video, inc the mandatory dystopian rain #mscedc
— Clare Thomson (@ClareThomsonQUB) February 6, 2017
Moving on to community cultures my lifestream, as usual, was mainly fed from Twitter and I have been thinking about why. I have connected several other systems with my blog but I keep coming back to Twitter as it is the most straightforward and accessible. Twitter allows me to have conversations with my classmates as well as the wider world, instantly add metadata and is the one element that displays correctly in my blog.
My stream is full of conversations about artefacts, visualising data and MOOC choices with others on the course. As well as conversations with a wider audience about MOOCs and books. Very much a community culture that I feel a natural part of. I also started a learning journey into digital ethnography and my notes on Michael Wesch’s interview was an attempt to begin the visualisation process.
Turning to the readings this quotation stood out:
Ultimately, the centring of community in education problematically positions web technology as the passive instrument of our predetermined educational aims. (Knox, 2015)
I don’t see that community is centred in education. Currently, in higher education, student numbers are increasing and the traditional didactic model, more than ever, is centred. So whilst community exists in the sense of student-student interaction I wouldn’t go as far as thinking community within the learning is centred.
On the flip side of that I don’t see the online community as a technology to “enhance conventional social life” (Knox, 2015). I struggle with offline community and it takes me a long time to voice my thoughts/feelings and therefore technology does not enhance, it revolutionises community for me – not in any way passive.
Reference:
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
Great reflections on your lifestream here Clare! Twitter does seems to be very popular with a lot of people in the group, and the ability to post quick additions to the lifestream, as well as engage in conversation with others, may be part of that.
It does produce a fairly one-dimensional lifestream though. I suspect Twitter will be quite important in this block, particularly if it is able to provide you with a sense of community, however I’d recommend looking around for some other feeds that might help in different ways. Are there any other community activities, beyond conversation directly, that you could signal with lifestream feeds?
good to see you critiquing the community cultures definition too.
‘I don’t see that community is centred in education. Currently, in higher education, student numbers are increasing and the traditional didactic model, more than ever, is centred. ‘
I think that is right, and particularly with the hyperbole around MOOCs that we have seen in recent years, there seems to be a lot of attention given to the video lecture. I think my point was more about technology that community, and that, when we do centre community in online education, we tend to take a social determinist view of technology.