Category: visual artefact

Micro-ethnography of Mooc

artefact, Block 2: Community Cultures, Education, ethnography, Lifestream, visual artefact

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.

 

Week 3 Artefact Adrienne

artefact, Articles, Block 1: Cybercultures, Lifestream, machine learning, visual artefact

A short clip on some of my musings for this block 1 of Cybercultures

https://media.heanet.ie/page/2be5a5d9a18d4b79908482d1cd8ff7aa

 

This clip is gathering of thoughts…..if there is a theme then it is networks.

A.I blurs the boundaries between robot and human. I found myself drawn towards the positive aspects of transhumanism and networked humans- where the augmented human may become an assemblence of biological intelligence merged with machine intelligence.

The theme of network came up a few times for me, we are networked in a web of ambient intimacy  (Amber case), and partial connections– (Harraway and Glabau). The cyborg helps us be comfortable with partial identity and contradictory standpoints, neither human or animal, male or female. However I pulled in images of male and female cyborgs because popular culture still depicts the male cyborg as strong and the female cyborg as vulnerable.

It is important to remain critical of how culture influences our use of tech- “information technology often presents itself to us as potentially liberating when in fact our actual interactions with it often reinforce conventional social structures of domination”. (Carl Sylvio). This applies too with the partial networks in education. The need for regulatory oversight over who benefits in the network, and who is victimised.

“The cyborg is a creature of social reality as well as of fiction” comes from Haraway’s paper.

Mainstream computer games, you tube and social media offer more realistic learning environments than our current classrooms, and VR headsets are additionally incorporating touch. I could have brought a last slide in there about VR but I ran out of time for this artefact.

Learning is a multisensory experience that the educational sphere could to well to observe how our young people are operating in the above arenas.

References

Sterne J, The Historiography of Cyberculture in Silver, D., & Massanari, A. (Eds.). (2006). Critical cyberculture studies. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from ed on 2020-01-13 02:09:03.
Haraway, Donna, (2007) “A cyborg manifesto” from Bell, David; Kennedy, Barbara M (eds), The cybercultures reader pp.34-65, London: Routledge