Click here to return to my main portfolio page.
At the time I submitted my third Digital Dialog, I was drafting a dissertation chapter focused on massive open online courses (MOOCs) and claims that such courses radically reconfigure the structures of education, including the nature of classroom communities. My submission focused on such claims, so I placed this Digital Dialog under the heading of “collaborative strategies in the digital classroom.”
As a way to experientially research MOOCs’ potential benefits and limitations, I signed up for The History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education, a MOOC hosted on the for-profit platform Coursera and led by Duke University’s Cathy Davidson. Davidson promoted “#FutureEd” as the hashtag for Twitter discussions about the course. Alongside that, however, the digital journal Hybrid Pedagogy moderated a weekly Twitter discussion under the hashtag “#MOOCMOOC.” That discussion was occasionally resistant to MOOCs, occasionally laudatory, and generally positioned as a space to push the boundaries and assumptions that guide contemporary education and educational institutions. I jumped in to the chat on February 12, responding to questions about assessment, authority, and agency in the classroom. In order to capture this dialog(ue), I used Storify. This was my first experience with Storify which—apparently thanks to Twitter’s idiosyncracies—I found a little clunky: tweets can only be pulled en masse into Storify for a week and so, because I was putting my narrative together a month after the actual chat, I had to pull the individual URL of every tweet rather than doing a general search for the hashtag, etc. The Storify itself is located here.