Looking back over this week’s posts I realise that there seems to be quite a mix of different themes. At the beginning of the course I was concerned about this lack of continuity but have now decided to see my lifestream as a symphony and any apparently random posts as ‘solos’.

The first theme relates back to last week and asks whether technology is making us touch each other less and driving us towards a Solarian world. I did wonder that with fewer human interactions and more touch screen technology there was some truth in this but after watching the video clip on hugging, I think that part of being human, is human contact and without it we can’t survive.

I posted the Transhuman Declaration as I found point 3 interesting: ‘although all progress is change, not all change is progress’ – we must be aware that ‘humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies and that there are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable’. (Wonder whether our dystopian fears are subconsciously connected to our misuse of technology rather than AI itself…)

I’m still reflecting on what constitutes an online community and what kind of discursive and behavioural strategies define communities. (Am hoping that Kozinets’ article and the MOOC research will help to answer this).

After doing my IDEL assignment on online identity I found Lister’s comment on how our profile page allows us to type ourselves into existence amusing.

The Coursera TED talk provides a useful background on online learning and there were several interesting points made on the effectiveness of peer grading, students’ response time to each other’s questions (22 minute average), and how data can help tutors review questions and provide feedback in cases where many students had made the same error.

The BBC article is interesting as it provides a good link back to TEL with the ubiquitous Mark Prensky commenting on how the curriculum and theory have changed little since Victorian times, and ‘most of the education products on the market are just aids to teach the existing curriculum based on the false assumption “we need to teach better what we teach today”. He feels a whole new core of subjects is needed, focusing on the skills that will equip today’s learners for tomorrow’s world of work. (Also of interest is the part on Sugata Mitra and flipped classrooms).

There are several images commenting on MOOCs. The first ‘McMOOC’ is a response to Baggaley’s article, which asks if the techniques used in MOOCs are comparable to supersizing in the food industry and whether the MOOC is all ‘hype’.

The Forbes article in contrast focuses on the positive aspects of MOOCs and how they can offer crowdsourced insights into business. As the article says, the value of MOOCs lies directly within the students that take them and, like Web 2.0, much of the knowledge is generated by the users themselves.

Baggaley, J., 2014. MOOCs: digesting the facts. Distance Education, 35(2) pp.159-163

Lister, M. … [et al.], New media: a critical introduction pp. 163-236, London: Routledge