[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?

[Tim Herrick]

Thanks, Terry, for starting this group – and I am very interested in many of the areas you identify.  My house-cat side involves working in a university and, metaphorically if not literally, having a cosy fire to return to every evening – while my feral cat side means while I’m here, I’m teaching adults often from non-traditional backgrounds; researching and teaching stuff about the de-schooling movement of the 1960s and 70s; and striving to be as engaged as possible with creative methods of learning and teaching.  And, coming back to this MOOCy business, am interested in the potential for these more social-media style learning environments to genuinely open up the goods of higher education to a wider sector of society.  I look forward to exploring with this group as the course goes on!

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