The title *is* quite long! And perhaps it’s also still trying to do too much, which leads me to try to reinforce the message above about focus. Something tighter like ‘Digital culture and language learning: a critical perspective on “community'”‘ might work well for you?

Once your thinking has developed a bit more, please feel free to run your ideas for the medium of the essay and (if relevant) your nominated assessment criteria.

This is a really important point I think. QuillConnect has clearly predetermined a particular kind of ‘normal’ Twitter user, against which you have been judged. However, a corporate use of social media would seem to be more about marketing and being seen to be present, rather than participating with some kind of educational agenda?

‘my Facebook page displays prominently to me my incomplete profile (and by what percentage)- pushing me with suggestions of how many friends live in certain proximities and should I like to choose these as a current location, or as a previous life and so on. ‘

Indeed, and the QuillConnect report must have also made suggestions about the kind of future conduct you should be aiming for. Perhaps the number of tweets you should send a week, or the ‘sentiment’ with which you write?

‘part of a kind of intentionality which has an ontological as well as epistemic or cognitive value independent, or at least not reducible to me, or any other single individual or indeed potentially any single algorithm perhaps.’

Really liked this summary Miles. I guess I wouldn’t use the term ‘intentionality’, due to its focus on the human mind and its ability to represent, however I agree that a useful way to look at this is to consider a kind of distributed, relational ontology. I particularly like how you highlight the ‘for you’ – great point. It seems to emphasise a position that is entirely the opposite: that these algorithms are somehow discovering deep truths about us as individuals, rather than integrating our activity data with much broader societal behaviours.

I think your final point here is excellent too: what we ‘get back’ for our personal data (particularly with the Google suite of services) is easy of transition between things. Life is just easier when you are automatically signed in, and I think things are increasingly designed that way.

I wonder what the implications might be for the representation of data in learning analytics, as I share a general concern that the oversimplification of data visualisation in things like the famous Purdue ‘traffic lights’ system (http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/signals-applying-academic-analytics) reifies data that is already reductive, and reduces our capacity to interrogate and understand how that data is worked on algorithmically.

I like the way you construct a clear narrative here, which issues from your position within the MOOC as a participant/observer, and which begins to build a story about participation across two different environments – I wanted to hear more about these, and how they developed, though I realise this probably isn’t possible given the scope of the task.

What I did wonder was the extent to which the Futurelearn space, and the Facebook space, might map differently onto Kozinets’ notions of ‘building’, ‘cruising’, ‘bonding’ and ‘geeking’ communties, as it seems likely that the different ‘consumption activity’ with which each are concerned would have an affect here. Kozinets suggests that there’s a distinction between:

‘Building’ communities (central, unifying interest or activity);
‘Cruising’ ones (weaker social ties and low centrality of consumption activity)
‘Bonding communities’ (strong social ties but weak centrality of consumption activity)
‘Geeking communities’ (high levels of exchange/consumption but weak social ties)

I wonder to what extent the unifying task of creating the film might define the community as a ‘building’ one, whereas you might expect the less focused Futurelearn social space to constitute as something different?

Like PJ, I’d really like to know how this MOOC activity pans out – I’d love to see the final video once it’s produced. Thanks for a really intriguing ethnographic artefact.

This is a really interesting analysis, and the Facebook page sounds like one of the few ‘bottom-up’ community sites that seemed to work well (there was some chatter about a Facebook site in the MOOC I was looking at but it didn’t seem to go anywhere). I wonder why it was different in this case … passion for the topic perhaps?

Lovely film as well, wish I was there!