Welcome everyone to the third and final block of Education and Digital Cultures 2020!

Hopefully you have now completed or are finalising your micro-ethnographic artefact – do try to wrap this up as soon as possible so that you can focus on the block 3 tasks this week. There is a course page here for all artefacts, so please tweet or email the link to your work and I’ll add it.

You will find an introduction to the algorithmic cultures block here, with a break down of activities across the next 3 weeks. Essentially, you have two weeks (this week and next) to engage in some ‘algorithmic play‘ with an algorithm of your choice somewhere on the web (perhaps your Netflix recommendations, or a Google search). You should do this alongside reading the core literature for this block (and as many of the secondary as you can) to give you some context, and some ideas for getting critical about the algorithms you are playing with. You should complete and share your ‘algorithmic play’ artefact by the end of week 9.

A little like the first block, we are working largely outside of more established themes in education, so your underlying task is to make links between the kind of algorithms you find in social media and the kind of algorithmic technologies were increasingly finding in education. The readings from Williamson (2019), Knox et al. (2020), and Bayne et al. (2019) will help you to do this.

In week ten, we will try to pull everything together by commenting on the artefacts, Hanging out in our tutorials, and completing and submitting your lifestream for assessment!