At the top headline level, the Tweetorial is of course the event of of the week and the sequence of posts created this week are exclusively constituted from the Tweetarchive strand, also found here on #MSCEDC Tweetarchivist.com. My eleven Tweets (I think), were really the reflection of the way in which the discussion led me to embark (pushed me in an interesting and relevant direction), as with others, in some fairly extensive play with search terms relating to algorithms (largely: education, Moocs, learning and technology, future learning, SEO, code; across google and google scholar) in rapid succession.
Therefore in a sense, this was itself a kind of exercise in an ‘interrogation’ of the SE algorithms themselves, only in so far as I felt (had a heightened sense of awareness, questioned why) I wasn’t getting the kinds of results that I wanted/anticipated, or putting it another way, felt I was being pushed along towards, as if by the tide in the wrong direction, contrasting with the compelling and positive (heuristic) driving effect of the Tweetorial discourse, which fortunately continued to drive me in my search for a number of hours. I feel this is testament to the value of debate and discussion, and the sharing of resources (references, and different kinds of content and of course critically comment and analysis) as a counterbalance to the “absolute” (sic) value of algorithms (which of course I now Know is “nonsense”). What ultimately defines or refines your search parameters or your heuristics in inquiry?
Whilst I felt I contributed reasonably effectively in terms of the first two above, I don’t yet (still!) feel I’ve mastered either the required technique of the ultra concise in Twitter text or the sharpened rapid response of the Twitter storm, and so for me it was much more of a reflexive exercise, in terms of where the narrative of of the rapid, but sustained discussion took me in my parallel on line searches. This concludes the Lifestream summary, as it is supposed to be brief. Below are some additional, more detailed comments, arising from the week.
Jeremy’s ‘From MOOCs to Learning Analytics: Scratching the surface of the ‘visual” (Knox, 2014) was a great read (actually I’m sure this article has been circulated before within the EDC, group, specifically didn’t PJ mention it in a blog comment strand regarding a Mooc artefact?). In fact I was skimming through so many articles I went straight to the text, and had read half before I looked at the writer credit and realized that Jeremy was the author, a fact Tweeted, when sharing the article (it got at least six re tweets, which was nice, and a positive unintended consequence of our debate, in terms of it making a wider contribution to knowledge sharing).
The paper itself was formative and created a bridge between Bloc 2 and Bloc 3, and was particularly fascinating and relevant as it dealt with the idea of the visual, content creation and sharing (and in general a theme of ‘user experience’ and its potentially designed passivity), of the role the visual (video) in particular within a Mooc and other fundamental processes, and the way in which the algorithmic plays in their construction and operation and the analytics thereof (2014). Also, there was exploration of the ethical and ideological issues associated with ‘big technology’, and that they should be taught alongside coding for example (2014), issues such as coders being sourced from poorer but technically adept economies: India and Indonesia being two examples (and in my final Tweet at 2:40 am on Saturday morning when I talked of ‘some people work 24/7 that’s code’, this is what I was implying). Similarly the huge power consumption which the underlying infrastructure of the technology for a Mooc requires, and the attendant environmental issues (2014). For me this was a recurrent theme during my Mooc ethnograph, as the film making Facebook group (collective) appeared to be at once engaged in exploring the technology and its application, but also exploring potentially some of the other integral ethical and ideological issues within their film project theme, in an authentic way. This seemed perhaps in part due to the demographic, geographical and cultural distribution of the collective. These themes (mentioned above) were both being explored in potentially the kind of way Knox (2014) critiques.
A final observation for the moment is that from the perspective of Sian’s repeated emphasis on the importance of ‘interrogating’ algorithms, Jeremy’s (2014) article would seem to shed much light, as a detailed account of how this can be done, and again highlighting the significance of this type of activity in the context of education and technology. The danger of an opposite state of affairs is highlighted in Dave Beer’s (2012) ‘Leave the Thinking To Us’, which I Tweeted in the course of our Tweetorial: ‘An App for Critical thinking’.