“I have noticed that emoticons are not displayed on the forums. When I conduct a search for ‘:)’ it returns 735 results but none of them show the emoticon; this makes me assume that they have been stripped out by the Coursera platform. Indeed there is evidence from a Coursera Capstone Project that this may be happening, “remove “bad characters” that might interfere with analysis (e.g. emoticons)” (Farmer, 2014). But does this have the unintentional consequence of removing the social ‘feel’ of the forums, and making them more formal than intended? Does it hinder the development of a “personally enriching social world” as described by Kozinets (2010, p.23)?”

The Farmer article appears to refer to a need to ‘clean’ discussion board data for for the purposes of running analysis on it – this wouldn’t really explain a lack of appearance of emoticons within the discussion boards themselves. It would seem very odd if so! Did the emoticons appear in the forums, but not in the search? Do you have any more thoughts on this? Such a surprising finding would need a bit more explanation I think, so I’d be interested to hear more at some point.

I looked at the ‘weekly discussions’ forum, which was linked to the activities. These were mainly content related. There was another forum for ‘Introductions’, as far as I looked, this comprised of brief biographies/profiles detailing job titles, locations, prior experience of moocs and what they hoped to achieve from the mooc; there were very few contact details supplied; I only saw one profile with a facebook address on it. A general search of all of the course forums for the keywords twitter and facebook did not find any suggestions that people may wish to extend conversations / network outside of the mooc.
I have completed a more detailed analysis on this subject on Smore (https://www.smore.com/fqwrn-metaliteracy-mooc) if you would like more…
Jin

How much focus was there on the content of the course and how much on the discussion side? Obviously there wasnt a social media elemant so most of the discussions took place in the designated forums, did participants initiate a ‘breakout’?

Ben

Some of the points you raise in the comments would be great to elaborate on Jin. Your Storify is good, but I wondered if you could say more about the community, rather than just the structure and resources of the MOOC. Perhaps the conversations around ‘gaining confidence with social media’ would be good to interrogate some more, as would your suggestions that some people are concerned about the workload. It is a shame that the sense of community wasn’t very apparent, however you could perhaps show that in some way. For example, were particular forum posts that solicited more social responses ignored? Where were the silences and ‘black holes’?

Clare turned me on to Ghazala Bhatti’s short 4-page chapter on “Ethnographic and Representational Styles” in the (MScDE) Research Methods & Methodologies in Education textbook (Arthur, Waring, et.al). Above you say: “I am trying hard to appreciate the effort that has gone into the mooc. I do find it hard though,…” You may be experiencing what Bhatti describes as follows: “Many ethnographers
have felt the tension which is inevitable when they have to be insiders and outsiders simultaneously.” (p. 82).

I predict the ‘Meta-‘ prefix may, indeed, catch on with advent of big data, ‘internet of things’ and the ‘internet of everything.’ In fact, it seems like a good Lifestream blog topic for this week, after I finish my own micro-ethnography. Cheers, PJ