Micro-ethnography of Mooc

Hi all,

This is a short microethnography on ‘community membership’ inside an EDX Course called Urban Sustainable development run by University of Wageningen (Netherlands) in conjunction with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS).

https://media.heanet.ie/page/266675d15f6d45c99e699d56f3f8d34a

Also included here is a transcript of the video file above.

Transcript of video-Microethnography of a MOOC community_AOMahoney

My conclusions:

The course is well organised and laid out in a clear, sequential way and provided a welcoming interface for early student on-boarding and discussion. Discussion questions were easy and did not require huge time commitment to complete. Yet evidence of community development is not really there on the discussion boards.

I did find evidence of community in the gamification element that took place in weeks 1 and 4, where students submitted images of their city onto a map of the world, and in week 4 they uploaded their carbon footprint image onto a map of the world. When students were asked to represent their city, their home, their community, this seemed to result in what Kozinet described as a central consumption activity.  It seemed to be an activity that users felt was important to them.

The greater the centrality of the consumption interest to the person, the higher the interest level and concomitant level of activity knowledge and skill. 

The lesson that I learnt from this Mooc was that the activities that resulted in the highest amount of community engagement were those that were personalising and linking the learning back to school, home or community.

 

An Engineering Anthropologist: Why tech companies need to hire software developers with ethnographic skills

A software engineer can create technology based on good programming, but an engineering anthropologist can humans observing humansbe an (anthropological) observer; they become a person that views the holistic systems, listens, communicates and engages with the client to open doors where none previously existed.

Article Complet : http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2016/06/22/an-engineering-anthropologist-why-tech-companies-need-to-hire-software-developers-with-ethnographic-skills/
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Week 4 Review

In this block, we are looking at community cultures, how we interact with other people using social web, and the possibilities for online education.

We will explore a micro ethnography as a research method; getting inside a culture and community, and reporting on the experience. I did some background on how to do ethnography research here. My article here about ethnographer Garret who embedded himself in a covert way whilst researching the Urban explorers group explores some ethical quandries.

In order to do the micro ethnography, I need to determine the problem that I am seeking to understand. What are my research questions in the micro ethnography of the Mooc?

The community culture’s reading for this block (Knox 2015) discussed “ the communicative potentials of the network are frequently positioned as the solution to the hierarchies, inequalities and in-accessibility of the institution”

So perhaps my research questions will focus on the following; “will the Mooc live up to the assumption that it is emancipatory- opening up education to the masses? Will this Mooc facilitate access to learning and enhance the human drive for social interaction and co creation in the learning process? How do I better understand the culture, relationships and interactions in this Mooc and their influence on education? How the culture is shaped by the interactions online? Are all actors in the network gaining from the Mooc, or does one party have more to gain? For example is it reaching educational goals or is it reflecting the Silicon Valley culture, which is motivated by data acquisition and profit?”

Finally, this week I responded to peer postings, and have started on the Lister chapter. It is 75 pages and very broad, and I am finding it slow going. It is about understanding networked media ecologies: the paper attempts to demonstrate how human creativity, technological affordance and economic advantage each contribute to shaping our own individual networked media experiences – as both producers and consumers.

I’ve neglected the Moodle discussion forum but will get to it today.

Reference

Knox, J. 2015. Community Cultures. Excerpt from Critical Education and Digital Cultures. In Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. M. A. Peters (ed.). DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_124-1

Mooc fans step out of the shadows

Thanks to JonJack for alerting me to this article;

It found that more men than women studied for Moocs – with a male to female gender ratio of indian student64:36. 70% of the enrolled students already held a degree, while more than a third (35%) were already enrolled with another education provider. The data suggests that…developing economies are not getting a look in.  I wonder why this is? Barriers to physical connectivity, language barriers, limited time, a greater need for teacher presence, MOOCS not designed to cater to diverse cultures? The article states that most students doing Moocs already have a degree and I guess that with that, a graduate’s confidence and study skills gifting an autonomy and advantage over a person who has been away from education.

Article Complet : https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/feb/19/moocs-online-universities-recruit-students
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