EDC MOOC assignment - the end of things #edcmooc

This is my final post and final assignment for EDC MOOC. The final visual product is here, the title is

5 Rules for being human in a MOOC

If you haven't just clicked on the Prezi above then you may want to read this explanation. The idea and text for the assignment is based on this blog, if you want to you can read past posts, but it isn't essential.

Images
The images were created with Fresh Paint using a touch screen, in other words finger painting with computers. Why, well it was fun, it created images that were copyright free and that were relevant to the topic in hand. If you like the images see also the Flikr stream for this project here.

Composing the project
The project uses multimedia. Sound, spoken word and music of a sort, text and images. All were generated using a computer in the spirit of EDC MOOC. Its important to understand that the piece is not anti technology, machines could meet some or all of these criteria, it is about preserving human qualities in interacting through the MOOC. The voices are different because I wanted to reflect the randomness of the sound quality of computer speech. I think I achieved the same effect by just choosing different personalties from the computer programme.

Music
Composed by me, rudimentary but of course computer generated and copyright free.

Technology used:

• Prezi [ www.prezi.com ]
• beatlab [ www.beatlab.com ]
• From Text To Speech - Free online TTS service  [ www.fromtexttospeech.com ]
• Fresh Paint from Windows 

I get by with a little help from my friends

A screenshot of the help I received through the #EDC MOOC Facebook Group ... thank you friends ...

You actually read War and Peace, Nick? #edcmooc

I will keep this short. Of course. A pre-internet joke. A hotelier offers a free stay to any guest who will read one page of his copy of Ulysses. When asked why he replied that he wanted to own the only copy that had actually been read. Most people have not read War and Peace. Most people are not stupid. Stupid people believe long and laborious activity means it is worth while. If you don't like brushing the carpet, then get a Dyson. Your cleaning universe won't collapse, it will give you more time and you will be more efficient. Before books, people told stories and talked more. Then they read books if they could read and get access to books, they learned to be alone and concentrate hard. Now they all search the net, interact frequently and can still tell stories or read books if they want to. Nick its your problem if you have a problem.

Five. Engage #edcmooc

They engage who also stand and watch. The question of engagement is interesting since it is a personal/private act. One might not know if a person has engaged until they show some sign a signifier, a post in a forum for example. There is the question that if a person has engaged with a topic and no one is there to see or there is no outward sign, does it matter.

How do we know a machine is switched on? Because the designers of the machine have added lights, green for on and red  for off. Lights are designed to flash to signify processing. The machine itself is indifferent to the lights but the spectators, the users and onlookers of the machine need a sign, is it on? Or if it fails to work as expected Can you see any lights?

In the MOOC, to read the resources and monitor the discussion boards has value, it is a personal engagement with the subject matter. Like a machine without lights we may suspect the spectator or onlooker is engaged but we have no way of knowing. Perhaps we should look at engagement as a Maslow type hierarchy.

I lead or initiate a discussion thread (Green Light Flashing)

I engage in a discussion, I signal to other participants I am engaged (Green Light is on)

I engage with the material of the MOOC (Standby Light)

I am engaged (No Lights)

"However you understand it, Engage"

Four: Additionality, bring gifts, links and clicks #edcmooc

Bring gifts. The best gifts for a MOOC are those of an intellectual kind. An interesting theory, website, book or video that is germane to the topic can have great and unpredictable value to some or many participants. The gift is not all in the link etc. but in the process of assessing and reviewing its relevance to the topic in hand, perhaps even adding a commentary.  In other words it has been through a human mind.

Google, even with its new Hummingbird algorithm is not good at giving gifts. Search is clever but it is not intelligence. It is uncritical, biased and unaccountable and its process secret, known only to a select coterie of Google managers.

Infinitely better is the crowd sourced resource base. Perhaps quirky, esoteric, open and  inconsistent but also relevant, informed and additional. Add something to your posts that extends the resource base. Surprise, extend and challenge.

"Extent to which a new input (gift of link, idea, theory, book, website or video) adds to the existing inputs (instead of replacing any of them) and results in a greater aggregate."

"Additionality, bring gifts, links and clicks"

Three. Support other people to learn #edcmooc

The temptation of the MOOC discussion environment is to post in isolation from other people. We say what we have to say but do not relate it to other posts or enter into a discussions. In a sense it is a form of personal advertising. Flashing up a relevant opinion and the rolling onto the next. The lack of interaction is dehumanising as it is only through interaction with other comments that we know another person has read, ingested and formulated a new opinion.

One might imagine a machine, a random opinion generator, spamming off preformed opinions gleaned form the web in response to reading a discussion topic stream and making an algorithmic match to something from another part of the web. It might not even be a machine but an instrumental student posting to make their quota. No one learns in these interactions. It is educational landfill, a horizontal line of valueless text in a landscape.

Help add texture and  build the learning landscape up. Take a comment and add some value. Call for a response form the poster. Help them to learn something new today.

"Support other people to learn"

Two: Civility in MOOCs #edcmooc

Being civil, is not the same as agreeing with those whom you secretly disagree in order to be polite. It means being able to disagree and yet maintain the tones and language of polite dialogue. This maybe easier for those who have infinite patience, generally machines and robots. The super market self checkout might continue to explain in the same tone any number of times that there is something unexpected in the bagging area and the best course of action is to remove it and start again. Simple repetition alone will not win arguments and may eventually provoke a breach of the civility rule.

There are, also, systems that seek to engage with us on the phone, who possess the qualities of civility and infinite patience as they invite us in near human voices to speak sentences into a voice recognition machine. They also have the knack of repeating back to us as if we were children. Did you mean NO. Without any inflection in the voice it is possible to know if they are being ironic.

Between human actors civility both allows and invites a response. Incrementally building a dialogue that is informative and instructive to participants and others who may read it. It creates an exposition of a subject that reaches far beyond the initial exchange.

"So be civil"

One. Be who you are #edcmooc

Scholarly endeavour seeks the truth, the genuine article, the original idea. It further seeks expose the fake and the fraudulent from art forgery to forged artefacts. Scholars are expected to be present as themselves and build reputations on their integrity their "genuineness" as researchers and teachers. The worst sin is to plagiarise, to pass off someone else's work as their own.

In the age of advanced web technology we have a new kind of fakerey, the fake human. The animated characters that haunt corporate websites offering to help and answer questions. Even if they were able to pass a Turing Test the only honourable course of action is for them to announce their fake human credentials. "Hello, I am xxxxxx and I am a fake human. I can appear to answer your questions but in fact I only process your question against an algorithm and select the most likely pre-prepared answer." 

In the world of the web, not being who you really are, or being someone else or stealing someone else's identity is relatively easy. A fake profile, a fake Facebook or Linkedin account would be a logical starting point. If you can't be bothered you could hide as the ubiquitous "Anonymous". 

I would argue that we need to be assured of the identity of the person behind those we meet, even in a virtual world. Fakery corrupts and degrades the quality of discourse. Fakery is the equivalent of shifting sands, build your house here and it will surely fall.

"Be who  you are"

Rules of engagement #edcmooc

Its technology Jim, just as we know it

Questions about technology and society, technology and education even technology and MOOCs to me seem to have become sterile.  They focus on process and effects (determinism) when they would be more productive looking at capabilities, benefits and outcomes. You won’t learn much that is useful about a Library and its contents by studying the machine that issues the books.

The point is that the MOOC like many (all?) things in life won’t work without technology. Lets get over it and move on. The real driving force behind the MOOC are minds that created it in the first place, the interaction/moderation of instructors and the engagement of students/participants.

Five rules of engagement

More interesting is how do you communicate your humanity through the medium of technology. It may be that we need some guidelines or rules to help us think about this. The following are proposed as a starting point.

ONE. Be who you are
No alias, no anonymous posting, be one hundred per cent genuine.

TWO. Be civil 
Treat each other with consideration, courtesy, politeness  and respect. See Wikipedia's advice to editors here.

THREE. Support other people to learn
You get back more than you give.

FOUR. Additionality, bring gifts, links and clicks
Crowd source the resource base.

FIVE. Engage
Don’t be a spectator engage on your own account.

The "ification" of higher education ... #edcmooc

There are few areas of important human endeavour where change is presumed bad not good. Better breaks on my car good, faster computer download speeds on my computer good, organisational change for improved services, generally good. Change to the organisation and delivery of education, bad. 

Why, is it because we cherish the education of our childhood, a phase of life that can't be repeated. See others get a better version, perhaps makes us jealous or nostalgic. In the UK this debate is played out over standards. Standards have slipped, exams are easier, grades are inflated. It is most definitely not like it was in our day, but is it worse?

This discourse in higher education is conducted through successive theories aimed at denigrating progress or change. These are in more or less chronological order:

dumbing down or comprehensivistaion (to many students with a comprehensive education or simplified for lower quality students) the idea that education is being simplified and packaged to make it easier, too much "meja" and Golf studies and not enough courses taught through the medium of Latin. I may have over stretched my point, 

comodification  a close friend of massification anyone with money can get an education, students are now customers and university courses are now products,  

now we have gameification and Disneyfication the idea that education is entertainment, imitating the screen based world of networks, mobile devices, apps and computer games. One might speculate that this is a reaction as surface deep as the screens it opposes, based possibly on the basis that a blackboard and chalk is better than what follows, more traditional more "real",

Where is the real debate about new technology?  Is it a new medium to deliver the same old stuff, faster and with pictures? Does it deliver in new ways and develop new skills (sometimes called literacies) connections and interaction, debate and creativity?  Does it complement, enhance or replace traditional higher education? Perhaps we need to MOOC it over.

Dystopia and street lights ...

Speaking to an African student I ask him to explain what the real differences were between the UK and his home country. It was winter and the street lights were on outside. His reply was pessimistic, nothing works, he said. "In my country there are no street lights." This is also the topic of a story running on the BBC [ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24641409 ], fighting the fear of night by getting the street lights to work in Lagos. This is a real dystopia. Creating an urban society that needs a basic technology/utility, electricity generation > distribution > street lights, but without the social frameworks to make it happen.

Today our phone lines are down, I have mobile broadband so I can go on working from home. If not I would have to travel to work and use that network. Its not typical of our phone system and the phone company is actively working to repair it. However, I have built my life for the moment around working from home and travelling to meet people when needed. Of course it is only sustainable if the technology is reliable. Otherwise I would have my own personal dystopia to deal with.

Dystopia is living in a society that needs technology to function but cannot organise itself to deliver a reliable/any service. Utopia is living in a society where you never miss a beat in turning on your computer or a light switch. Of course you never know what you have until you don't have it.

Fears of a dystopian control through technology are the fears of affluence, built on the presence of reliable technology from communication satellites, massive computer power and ultra fast networks.

Higher education tourism and the MOOC #edcmooc

The anecdotal evidence is it is the educated, the technically literate, those who are comfortable in an online environment, those whose jobs involve(d) processing information. They are people who have time to fill or those who see a benefit in adding a MOOC to their CV or Continuing Professional Development (CPD) file and will make the time. The sort of people who might like to, actually, or aspire to travel.

The MOOC is a kind of virtual tourism with commitment. Many start on the journey but less than 50% are committed enough to go the whole distance. It is demanding. Going over land to foreign parts, but not to exotic destinations. This is a tour of the worlds ivory towers, of Harvard and Yale. This is a Grand Tour for fast improvement, less than six weeks each stop. To get a sample, a sniff of what it must be like to be one of the elite, to study at an elite university and, yes, get a certificate with a paragraph of disclaimers at the bottom. Perhaps the MOOC equivalent of getting a stamp on your passport.

The cultures we sample are the different varieties of academic domain, form critical theory to calculus. Our tour guides are the professors and teachers we meet along the way. The physical environments we can sample on Google Street view, or the virtual tour of the University Campus. Best of all in this tour party are our fellow passengers. very talkative, international full of ideas.

Its activity travel. Not for those who like to sit on the beach.

Bring me your myths, and I will debunk them #edcmooc

Don't aggravate. Integrate!

It is a affectation of academic discourse that things need to be set against each other to provide enough contrast  for the basis for an argument. No point in arguing if it is one sided. The term for this is Binary Opposition. It is a very clever version of I say it's black you say it's white. A slightly different version of this game is the territory grab. To build your own ivory tower you must first dynamite someone else's to make room for your own. The point of this preface is this. In order to construct an argument you must find something to oppose or destroy. Something like this is going on in the MOOC debate:

• cMOOC vs. xMOOC 
• the elite vs. the mass (ification)
• commercialisation vs. altruism/democracy
• technology being the master of administrators of universities vs. being the servant of professors 

This list is not exhaustive, but I hope this illustrates my point. My thought is that all these may be true simultaneously and that the need to bring things into opposition of necessity ignores some of the other moderating factors.

MOOCs Technology and the end of Universities, not.

I don't have the research but all these facts are probably true: 1) at this moment all but a tiny minority of students/lecturers/professors are carrying one or more Internet connected devices; 2) more communication takes place electronically between them than takes place face to face; 3) all the resources used on their course are either born digital or have been digitised and can be accessed right now through those internet connected devices.

While universities are undoubtedly changed by technology, things that act on universities such as the behaviour of students with regard to technology have also changed. Not to mention the small business of the transformation of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The MOOC to my mind is not technology changing the University but the University trying to adapt to changes technology has already created in the society it serves. It embraces the things that we have already been embraced in every other aspect of life, communication over networks (eMail and synchronous or asynchronous messaging of all kinds), being members of large diverse electronic communities (Facebook?) and being comfortable with accessing content online (YouTube?). Of course the scale is massive, networks do that, they scale up the numbers, and its open a bit like the Freemium model of every internet start up. Try before you spend 30 000 GBP on higher education or cash in if you have already done this.

The MOOC in effect is a brand extension, but it cannot replace being there in the room and getting the full deal. Most MOOCs I have seen are cut downs of the best courses delivered in person. MOOCs far from cannibalising the Universities "in person offering" are selling it. The Freemium aspect is something I and 10 000's of other have joined in with. Even if we will never attend an elite British or American university. If I were to go I will know which "superstar" professors I will meet. Seen them online of course!

Lets also not pretend this is a zero sum game for the professors and teachers. They are not loosing their audience but gaining a new one. In the part vanity game that is academia, MOOCs can make reputations in the real world as well as the virtual. How to exploit and manage reputation in virtual space may be a new skill for many, but not too challenging I suspect for those who have made a career out of standing and talking to large groups of people.

So MOOCs are not going to change the world, MOOCs have been created in response to a changing world. They may extend but not replace the role of the University. Perhaps they will reinvigorate extramural departments. The interplay of the pedagogy between the MOOC and traditional University might crack the age old problem of the 1 hour lecture where the only real challenge is to maintain the will to live to the end. Students who have experienced a MOOC might make better and more informed choices about their education. The very able might extend their education through an additional MOOC? Universities night find a channel to reach a wider audience and meet any philanthropic remit they might have. Professors might find new and challenging ways of teaching and developing their own personal mission/reputation.

Infrastructure as metaphor #edcmooc

Metaphor is a powerful device because it a/effects the way we think about the web. It opens up some spaces to imagine the intangible nature of the Internet and closes down others.

Information Superhighway

The metaphor that comes to mind most readily is that of infrastructure. The superhighway, the road that carries Internet traffic around the network. The network itself represented as a road network, with major roads or superhighways and smaller roads and side streets. We can imagine data zooming along the wide smooth superhighway, battling with choke points as the traffic piles into over loaded and unsuitable road junctions. It reaches its destination and parks up on our computer hard drives.

Its not a metaphor loaded with emotion, its not pretty, its not really visible architecture. It is an  invisible utility imagined as tarmac. We won't be able to park at the side of the road and see a wonderful and graceful suspension bridge made of data or admire the arc of a fly over. It is a metaphor that focuses on efficiency and capacity. On economic benefit, the information economy driven by the net and operated by knowledge workers.

Inside the metaphor

However, it can take on a more interesting dimension if we start to inhabit the metaphor. In Aliens, alien beast live in the darker recesses of the cargo bay. In the Matrix the metaphor is reversed. It is made to appear real, but isn't. As occupants of the metaphor we may have to leave the well lit information superhighway and travel down the dark alleys, where virus and monsters and evil doers live. Our network, our information superhighway, carries with it our darkest fears of living in a dysfunctional place, the crumbling inner city, the derelict housing estate, the crime ridden streets/network.

Are we even safe in our metaphorical houses when something evil can hitch a ride right into our computer, right into our homes. Be careful what you metaphor.

Who is Lincoln Dalhberg? #edcmooc

Who is Lincoln Dahlberg?

This might be a question being asked by Wiley (publishers) content editors as a potential 20,000 Coursarians access his article (Dahlberg 2004) sending him to the top of the most downloaded articles in their data verse. Of course there are things about this article that make it attractive to link to:

1. It is published as Open Access so there are no barriers to anyone accessing it if they know it is there. 20K Courserians do of course. 
2. It is a review, synthesising previous research in a clear and simple structure with an integrative approach to a diverse number of theories, writers and models. Always handy to have one of those.
3. It is a methodological paper, which tend to have longer life spans than other types of articles as methodology is not as a rule a popular subject for articles. More often it is covered in depth in books.

These combine to make it a good choice for the the EDC MOOC. They are not the first to notice its good and useful qualities, it has been cited according to Google Scholar 45  times, which is high even by the inflated standards of Google. In any altmetric measure which includes the number of references in social media and downloads, Lincoln Dahlberg is going to notice an exponential increase in his profile. Perhaps, unless he reads this blog, with no obvious cause for him, but pleasing none the less.

What do we learn? Free is not free of value to everyone. For those included in the MOOC verse it can raise profiles and enhance reputations by delivering or directing massive volumes of readers to a single place or artefact. In a word of automated measures, rankings and algorithms the MOOC has collective power and the MOOC creators the power to add value to the free to access by shining the spotlight on it or perhaps by directing their tidal wave of click through's at a specific object. Whichever you prefer. 

For the record, I found it informative, well written and helpful. 

Reference

Dahlberg, L. (2004), Internet Research Tracings: Towards Non-Reductionist Methodology. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 9: 00. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2004.tb00289.x [Accessed 10 Accessed].

MOOCs reinforce digital divide #edcmooc

An interesting question, having completed two MOOCs is do MOOCs break down the binary divide between the educated the non-educated or do they simply globalise it?

Education, education, education

Can you really understand MOOCs or even conceive of the idea of doing a MOOC without a certain level of education. A Professor leading one MOOC expressed surprise at the level of contribution and the level of education of participants [1]. But should that be surprising? The view of the democratising effects of MOOCs from providers is, from experience, miss-placed. Instead it provides a renewed educational opportunity for the educated, perhaps with the frisson of "attending" universities they could not possibly have attended, or afforded to attend in person.

Technology

To complete a MOOC you need expensive technology, access to high bandwidth networks, and a clean power supply. These are the preserve of First and Second world countries, although some parts of the rural UK would struggle with a high bandwidth connection to a network. So we add another limiting factor, those living in urbanised societies or within and urban environment where economies of scale make access to the prerequisites of a MOOC possible.

Time

To complete a MOOC you need time. Time is probably available to the information workers of the cities and the First and Second world. However, all other things being equal it is not available to the agricultural worker who works 15 hours a day, or the poor factory worker. To them time to complete a MOOC would be inconceivable even if they had the vision and technology.

Internationalisation

This I would argue is different. MOOCs break down barriers of distance, translation software breaks down barriers of language and possibly the widespread use of common second languages in MOOCs such as English and Chinese also breaks down language barriers. So MOOCs represent a globalisation of inequality, form local roots in Western and East Asian Societies (those with a developed University system such as China, S. Korea, Singapore, Malaysia) to the rest of the world.

[1] Youngman, O., 2013. Massive open online courses: a first report card. Guardian, 17 October 2013. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/17/massive-open-online-courses-report-card [Accessed 10 November 2013].

Theory for today - technological determinism #edcmooc

I find the position of technological determinism, with it's associated terminology, theories and definitions easy to accept in an age when technology permeates almost every aspect of our lives and almost all communication is processed through some form of computer network. However, I can remember the pre web/internet age when I could be persuaded that I was some other kind of determinist, or perhaps many kinds of determinists in one person!

This discussion reminds me of Jean Baudrillard's ideas of hyper reality. For a brief moment in time, around the time of the First Gulf war "The Gulf War did not take place" [1] there seemed to be a perfect fit between theorist, theory and the (un) real world. Perhaps this is the same with Technological Determinism. It has a brief but perfect fit with a world engulfed by technology. Once new technology is digested and integrated though it may seem out moded?

[1] Baudrillard, J. 1995. The Gulf War did not take place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Do we understand enough about technology to have a view of it's deterministic nature #edcmooc

Near half way through the Chandler essay. The overview has a fascinating layer of terminology that provides a interesting patina of words and phrases that I have been half aware of for years but never really engaged with. The paradox is that Chandlers essay is divorced from discussing any actual technology. Of course he deals in ideas which we are invited to discuss through the medium of technology.

My observation is this. As I am using Google Blogger, now integrated with Google + how will the Google algorithm respond to me. How will my search results be subtly skewed? What adverts would I see (I have turned off behavioural ads)? How will my profile be reconfigured on YouTube, now part of the Google + family? Is this technology determinism or is technology really creating who I am to you?