Some thoughts on edcmooc, three days in…
- the huge number of postings in the forum are almost as frustrating as postings on a sports or politics blog. Hell, Reddit is more interesting and intellectually challenging.
- the huge number of postings in the forum also means that I don’t have to worry about my job (with no more than 20 students in a class) any time soon…most college students would hate this format, I’m guessing…hell, there are times *I* hate this format, as I don’t know if the professors are even looking at the class anymore.
- the most interesting place in my mind is the Twitter channel, with the hashtag I listed in the title to this post. In it there are a bunch of folks who are linking to their own blogs, and the blog writing in general has been compelling.
- I’m really curious about how quickly established borders for discussions got set. Everyone seemed to want to critique everyone else’s choice of Wall-E or The Matrix as either dystopic or utopic, and the critiques were definitely not talking about films in interesting ways. There was almost no mention of literature, and very little mention of games.
- There was very little (until today) critique of the dialectic at all. The professors primed the pump by linking to a brief rundown technological determinism, but the resulting discussion became more about placing films along this continuum rather than questioning the binary at all. Do people automatically fall into being good students? Does being a good student mean that folks simply go along with the established boundaries set up by the professors? Are students who drop out the sort of folks we actually want in?
- Are professors like me elitist douchebags? I think the answer is probably obvious – yes!
While I can’t say whether I’m enjoying this or not, I find myself checking it more than I thought. Because I opted to have an email sent to me every time someone comments on forums that I posted in, I’m getting regular reminders to check in on the class. These have prompted me to, well, check in.
I’m not sure of the ramifications for other e-learning classes. MOOCs are definitely their own cup of tea, but there are possibilities in them. Interestingly, this type of content might not be the best – I’m wondering if science classes are actually perfect content for MOOCs, and I can see possibilities for math and statistics. The openness of the questions asked might not be the best approach for MOOCs, because the conversation is so wide-ranging, from banal to interesting, but without a chance to make compelling arguments of any sort, or at least in a way that starts a discussion. I’m guessing that some of the best conversations will be small ones, possibly ones happening in Google hangouts or + sessions.