Week 4 marked the start of a new block which I was quite excited about. Although we briefly dipped into MOOCs in IDEL, I’m looking forward to exploring the community aspect a bit more. In the MOOCs I’ve taken so far I never really paid much attention to the discussions so it’ll be interesting to see what I can find out in my ethnography.
I started the week off with looking at and commenting on other visual artefacts. It was really impressive to see such creativity and wide range of media used to explore different themes.
I then began to look at different MOOCs for my ethnography. Since I recently started Chinese classes I thought a Chinese beginners class would be great but the forums weren’t very exciting. There wasn’t much of a discussion – students just wanted to know whether their homework was correct. I then come across this course on Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs by edX. I find the topic very interesting but also found the discussion boards quite lively. I’m not sure what angle to focus on yet but I’m hoping to narrow it down next week. As I mentioned in one of my posts, I found the constant advertising by the provider very distracting and wondered what the real purpose of MOOCs is.
While reading some of the literature for this block, I also explored some key terms such as ethnography, netnography and communities of practice. I found it hard to find the time this week to do much reading but hoping to catch up next week.
