Thinking about MOOCs and the Individual

[ScottJohnson]

As a sometimes blogger I don’t necessarily disagree with George on the concept of participation through your own blog or other “personal space” in order to create a record of your own [our college saves grade records then erases completed online courses including discussion forums contained within them. After two years any contribution you’ve made is gone]. As a personal record, we recommend keeping text a copy of discussions, especially if a student has been active or performs well in this learning venue.

Discussions and social learning have always formed a part of the on-campus experience. Being a natural outcome of gathering to learn may have held less status compared to mastering content and being awarded individually. The collective assembly of understanding that students do amongst themselves, in the hall after class or even over a beer on the weekend has always been a background benefit assumed as part of “being there”. This quality of being-in-school can be lost online and for this reason I think discussions have to be considered as legitimate evidence of learning and to be saved and recorded in the students’ files.

To my mind, making it the responsibility of the student to put their comments and observations in blogs may be useful but also replicates the notion of the individual as an isolated learner and a kind of original vessel of knowledge when in fact we are all parts of a greater community. This significant that students add may not suit the institution to acknowledge as exalted “provider” of learning yet it does matter. Also without recognition of shared knowledge and shared effort our culture can be reduced to nothing but tiny islands scattered about where education becomes a personal “advantage” over a common value. That sounds a bit grandiose except many of us live in areas where local politics is actively destroying education in favour a kind of car-salesman mentality of society being modeled and spoken of as an “economy.”

Anyway, I disagree with George on applying individual values of private interest in a connected world. I interpret Connectivism as the creation of value and meaning within the process of discussion as opposed to claiming ideas as unique to their “owner” in the form of an individual mind. It may be the reality that proprietary ideas sustain the interests of professors or make institutions unique from each other but how will we create needed change when it works against our interests to share? (See cultural ratcheting)

One final note. As someone living in an isolated location it is necessary for me to know the world through the internet and distance education. In a sense the only way I can know I exist is by responding and being responded to online. If online learning is to be more than distribution of content by robots then we have to develop an understanding of what it means to be in a true system of exchange and not simply receive and respond like an electronic switch.

[Tim Herrick]

Thanks for this, Scott, and I agree with a lot of the points you make.  One keyword that jumps out for me, and which I think does pose some challenges to some of the thinking underlying MOOCs, is community.   As you suggest, much of the important (indeed, life-changing) learning that takes place within educational institutions relates to the innumerable levels of community that develop within them, rather than to the delivery of content; and it is because of the apparent banality of many of these engagements that I am yet to see them effectively reproduced on a digitised, global scale.  Do you care if I eat a stinky blue cheese sandwich for lunch?  Only if you’re sitting next to me, and the smell takes you back to a trip you made to France, and that gets us talking, and it turns out we could write a great book together.  I may well be looking in the wrong places, but aside from commercial advertising for mobile phones, I’m yet to see this micro-level of social interaction flourish at a distance.

I guess a slightly more pointed version of this discussion would note that we are yet to realise in face-to-face contact idealised concepts such as the agora, or Habermas’ public sphere; and, as you identify, the needs of private capital have tended to be in conflict with desires for a genuine commons.  If we’re struggling to do that in the full richness of our everyday lives and experiences, is it reasonable to expect only one aspect of those lives – technology – to replicate and enhance all the other aspects?

[Ruth Johnstone]

I agree with some of what Scott says especially about the value of what are really communities of practice. However i would disagree with his remark about the requirment for students taking responsibility to post comments within their blogs. I think students are being prepared for the real world where they will have responsibilities to employers , to collegues etc to record certain things. I dont believe it is an either or situation. It is not corridor conversations OR posted comments to blogs – its about having an assessment system that can accommodate all of the ways in which people learn?

[ScottJohnson]

Hi Tim and Ruth,
Didn’t mean to suggest that hallway and blogging conversations need be separate activities. My only access to education is online and discussion areas built into the course are the equivalent of in-class or hallway conversations that bring life to an otherwise empty space. Also work at a college that is falling to pieces where the tradition of top-down “command control” has left people with no resources to gather and support each other and what bloggers we have seem to live in a world to themselves where everything is fine.

[Author]

Posts