
Its been a another eventual few days of travelling for me this week, this time to a small town, just barely!, called Palapye which is situated an hours flight away from my home base of Johannesburg to Gaborone, capital of Botswana, and then a three hour drive north on the A1 highway, Botswana’s busiest transit route, to the north eastern interior. Apart from a small university (BIUST) there is a coal mine and an exceptionally large power station as well as single hotel (but with very poor wifi) so what little viewing, tweeting and commenting I could do was inevitably slow or did not in effect work at all, even after several attempts to reconnect.
I was however able to access the very detailed readings on the next phase of our programme. Kozinets (2010) and Fourniers (2014) insights have provided some excellent background on the ethnographic task ahead and the detail they have provided as a background to the process will make for a far easier study on the chosen OER.
I’ve decided to review a MOOC that involves Learning Analytics, partly due to my ongoing interest in the topic, but, also for the fact that I have some familiarity of the subject matter which will give me, in my opinion, the opportunity to study the communicative, collaborative and knowledge development and provision aspects more closely, separated from the subject matter itself. After a comment to this effect on Twitter one of my fellow students proffered if this was the right approach and if this could potentially skew my judgement? Hard to say really, time will tell but I don’t believe this will be the case. Ready to dive in~!