Week 5 of our EDC course has  ended and we are well on our way exploring MOOCs. In my case, I’ve been developing ideas for my course on songwriting. So far I’ve been learning about a variety of tools I can use to write a song in a very structured process. As the course progresses people are using the discussion boards more and more which will be interesting to see over the following weeks as I work on my ethnography.

In our Hangout this week we discussed the ethics of researching within MOOCs as well as the chapter on netnographies by Kozinets  which I found particularly useful as reading it somehow felt like I was seeing knowledge I had intuitively gathered from my own experience verbalised in a very distinct fashion. My classmate PJ developed an excellent summary of Kozinets’ main talking points which I’ll gladly use as a reference in developing my netnography.

Considering the wider issues of the future of education I stumbled upon three interesting pieces online which I felt were worth sharing on my lifestream. One was a TED talk by Brazilian entrepeneur Ricardo Semler who has chosen to use wisdom has his guiding force in life, running his company very successfully with a radical focus on participation and transparency. With this democratic ethos in mind turned his attention towards education to improve the way schools are run and children are taught. The results so far seem to be very promising.

Another article I stumbled upon was about how Coursera has recently started to collaborate with tech industry giants Goolge and Instagram as accreditors for their online courses. While there are reasonable objections to be raised here – the most striking one being that the tech companies are essentially outsourcing business projects to students and paying with their good name. They’re profiting heavily from the vast problem solving capacity of crowdsourced MOOCs while the students are merely rewarded with an “accredited by Google” stamp they can put on their CV. Nonetheless, it is good to see MOOC providers finding revenue models to sustain their business without resorting to tuition.

Finally, I found a guest editorial by Bill Gates on The Verge about the future of online courses and their possible effects on the developing world – a well rounded analysis of the promises and challenges that lie ahead in trying to educate students in the third world by means of educational technologies.

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.