Nick's EDC blog

Lifestream content from this week has focused mainly on my readings and initial forays into the world of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) communities.  Towards the start of the week I joined a MOOC, facilitated by Coursera and delivered by the University of Michigan, on basics of computer programming using Python.

I chose this MOOC because (a) I’m interested in Python and (b) the course embodies some of the wider issues and tensions we are focusing on this course i.e. An Ivory League University is delivering a free/open course on the development of a computer language that is rooted in the open source movement.  As such, it exemplifies some of the tensions highlighted by Stewart (2013) and Lister et al. (2009) e.g. surrounding the capacity of the internet to generate wiki knowledge, and of the differences between cMOOC and xMOOC philosophies.

In subsequent lifestream content this week, I included some of the typologies and taxonomies of online communities, as outlined by Kozinets (2010). I’m particularly interested in the identities and the stages of participation models, and whether we can talk of a single MOOC community or, alternatively, to what extent the aims of purposes of the community may be diverse and contested amongst the membership (e.g. contested between teachers and learners).  Surely the more massive the MOOC, the more diverse, complex and contradictory the community?  Some of my latter posts, showing the search MOOC members were undertaking to find other students from their own geographical locations, were included as examples of this.

MOOCs provides a useful site to explore the tensions between digital literacies/ participatory culture and the (established) role of the academy to act as a gatekeeper to knowledge.  It promises to be an interesting experience!

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