Thinking about MOOCs and the Individual

[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]

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