This week we started exploring block 2 of our course on community cultures.

My first lifestream entry this week was a tweet that I signed up for MOOC on Songwriting by the Berklee College of Music which just happened to begin on Feb 4 and runs over the course of six weeks. Ideally, at the end of the MOOC I will have written a song – a challenge I set myself for new year’s and which I’m also documenting in my Understanding Learning in the Online Environment course of this MSc programme.  Over the following few weeks I will be exploring this MOOC’s community as part of my ethnography assignment for block 2.

While technically still related to the last block (and possibly the next one) I also posted an extremely fascinating video by Ray Kurzweil in which he talks about his preditctions for the future and how it will likely change society.

Regarding last weekend’s visual artefact, I was very impressed with my colleagues’ creative works such as Jin’s artefact on Pearltrees. I furthermore elaborated my thoughts on my own visual artefact in this comment.

Covering this week’s topic of MOOCs, I found a great TED talk on Twitter by Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera – one of the most successful of these platforms. Her bold vision for the future is truly captivating but this profile on Sebastian Thrun, a competitor of hers, shows that reality has not quite matched the founders’ initial expectations.

Finally, my last post was a wonderful video I found on Twitter – a digital ethnography by Michael Wesch summarising the characteristics of students in today’s system of higher education.