Big data and analytics now seem to pervade our everyday lives but after studying Learning Analytics last week I can see how we need to be very careful how data is accessed, retrieved, stored and interpreted, and what we will actually do with it. Am very much looking forward to weeks 8 and 9 in EDC when we examine algorithms and learning analytics from a digital culture point of view.

Studying virtual ethnography in Research Methods this week provided some very useful background to ethnography and helped me better understand the MOOC task. It was reassuring to discover that ethnography is approached with an open ended question, which may well change as new ideas come to light as interesting aspects of the community come to light. Virtual ethnography is fundamentally an “adaptive ethnography which sets out to suit itself to the conditions in which it finds itself” (Hine 2004).

Initially I was reluctant to participate in the MOOC activities as I felt it was unfair to the other participants but now realize that ethnographic research emerges from the researcher being a participant in the field. As Bhatti says it’s important to be aware and reflexive and to have the capacity for both empathy and distance.

I hadn’t really thought about the chronology and geography of ethnographic research and it was interesting to consider the blurred boundaries between field and home and how the leaving the field in virtual ethnography mean means breaking the routines and practices of fieldwork. This must be much harder to do when you feel you are part of an online community and ‘going back’ is so much simpler.

I’ve also further developed my thoughts on online community and found the anthropological introduction to Youtube useful in examining how after massive suburban communities and TV led to a loss of community and a sense of disconnection, but new forms of community have emerged online. There seems to be a cultural inversion where we seek individualism but want to remain ‘networked’ and connected. Today we express individualism, independence and commercialism but value community, relationships and authenticity.

Arthur, J., Waring, M., Coe, R. and Hedges, L. (eds) (2012). Research Methods and Methodologies in Education. London, Sage.

Stewart, B., (2013). Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation? MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Technology, 9(2), pp.228–238.

An anthropological introduction to Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

When further researching MOOCs this week, I was surprised to come across an article from the BBC website (dated September 2013) about SPOCs (small, private online courses). SPOCs are still free but access is restricted to a much smaller number of selected candidates. The smaller class size allows “much more rigorous assessment and greater validation of identity” and I can see how this more ‘customized’ type of course would probably lead to the issue of credits and the introduction of fees. While Harvard’s metaphor of Russian dolls does make sense in theory, I wonder whether SPOCs are nothing more than online courses and potentially undermine the value and point of MOOCs.

Walther (1997) suggests that we can understand much of online community behaviour by referencing the ‘anticipated future interaction’ of participants. It’s interesting that if participants can foresee future interaction, they will act in a friendlier way, be more cooperative, self-disclose, and generally engage in socially positive communications. This couldn’t be more true from what I’ve seen on the Gamification MOOC this week. As well as the community building aspect, I was also fascinated by how a group of participants resolved an issue with peer marking assignments which were not written in English and how one person asked for feedback from peers on his own assignment which had missed the submission date (and received it!).

Balfour’s ‘Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated and Calibrated Peer Review’ is very interesting and I was surprised to learn that AES reached commercial viability in the 1990s by being indistinguishable from human evaluators for short essays with a specific focus (Attali, 2007). In a review of AES applications Shermis et al. (2010) found that machine evaluation of essays actually correlated more highly with human raters than the human raters correlated with other human raters. So machine evaluation is only distinguishable from human evaluation because it is more consistent!

The following chart is a useful comparison of AES and CPR:

And on a final note – am intrigued by the whole discussion on technological determinism and thought that Kozinets’ summed it up quite nicely: ‘technology does not determine culture, but they are co-determining, co-constructive forces – with our ideas and actions, we choose technologies and adapt and shape them. Culture does not entirely control the technologies we use either. The way technology and culture interact is a complex dance, an interweaving and intertwining’.

Balfour, S., Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated and Calibrated Peer Review, Research & Practice in Assessment 06/2013; 8(1):40-48

Coughlan, S., Harvard plans to boldly go with ‘Spocs’ 23/09/2013 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24166247

Kozinets, R. (2010) Chapter 2 ‘Understanding Culture Online’, Netnography: doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage. Pp. 21-40