Week 1 #EDCMOO eLearning & Digital Culture - Utopian or Dystopian Experience

Lock Up You Data http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/1805590643/ Paul Downey

So I got through week one of the Coursera #EDCMOOC E-learning and Digital Cultures. Having completed a fully online MED a couple of years ago I was quite familiar with studying online and having that experience meant I had the skills to wade through the tremendous amount of digital traffic this course appears to be generating.Rather than focusing on the course theme of utopian and dystopia aspects of digital education and culture I thought I would reflect on the experiences of undertaking this course within this context. I think the Facebook exchanges reflect some the dystopian experiences of  engaging in online communication within the context of learning. Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter can streamline communication but with so many back channels the challenge, you have to decide what is meaningful, what is distracting - so a little direction and reassurance from the tutors would have been helpful. My experiences as an eLearner taught me to focus on the essentials and browse the rest so that is what I have been doing. I think the amount of people that are on this course makes it difficult to form any relationships especially with the time we have.  It is difficult to move beyond pure observation in the discussions because from my experience collaborative working online, it only works with a small group, with assigned roles, over longer period of time than 5 weeks. This is a pity because I found communicating and working with a diverse community very rewarding on my MED . In addition, I don't seem to have the patience for reading lots of text any more, unless I am using it for an article, report, qualification or my job but that's a personal thing. I think a word restriction on the discussions would be helpful and given the time I have I am going be quite pragmatic about how many articles I can read..

Finishing on a more Utopian note, it is really exciting to have a go at something I have not tried before. I think the resources that the course team has selected are excellent and the course is really well written and presented. Having a Sociology degree (although acquired over 20 years ago) has meant that I have visited some of the theoretical aspects before - so that helps. And it has made me realise with respect to eLearning and learning in general I think I want to focus in the future on developing my practical knowledge rather than my theoretical knowledge, so the Saylor Computure Science course looks really promising. The videos were engaging and thought provoking, illustrative of the issues and challenges associated with technology - here they are for your own pleasure

Bendiot Machine III (6.35); Inbox (8.37); Thursday (7.34)