This post will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources, introducing five critiques:  1.) An under-theorisation of ‘openness’, in which the concepts of positive and negative liberty will be used to suggest a neglect of coherent theorisation concerning the practice of self-directed learning.  2.) ...

Continued work with Twitter data from the September to December period of the change11 MOOC course has got me thinking about what kind of interpretations might be made from particular forms of visualisation.  With the proviso that the simplest is sometimes the best, I have become increasingly attracted to the...

Some initial visualisations emerging during September – December 2011 in the online course changeMOOC.  These were developed using NodeXL.  Vertices are participants, edges are connections between: mentions are coloured blue, while ReTweets are in maroon.  Click each image for a higher resolution (500×500). 1....

While I enjoyed some of the first section of Susan Greenfield’s recent talk on ‘The Internet and ‘mind-change’, drawing some relations between the theories of plasticity in neuroscience and notions of learning and development, the later phase appeared to contain an inordinate number of questionable...

A recent article about the proposed MITx published some of the issues raised by academic staff about the new open education project. Interestingly, these concerns included some questions about how potential students can be authenticated: ‘Well, you want MIT to give you a certificate, how do we know who the learner is? How...

Re-reading the excellent paper ‘Objectivity in Educational Research’ by Elliot Eisner has got me thinking about how the tendencies in educational research relate to antihumanism and posthumanism. In particular, a reference to the correspondence theory of truth has interested me, in terms of how it relates to ideas...

Diagramming the assemblage: a blog post on...

How is the MOOC presented, and what can this posture tell us about the perceptions of education, knowledge and technology?  The following video from Dave Cormier outlines the educational ethos of the MOOC, and the choice of language reveals much about the theoretical and philosophical stances that underpin this course...

The Open Course Ware project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is acknowledged as the prime example of the OER movement (Atkins et al., 2007)⁠. MIT pioneered the strategy of making course materials freely accessible on the web, and remains the academic institution most committed to the open courseware strategy. ...

This post is hopefully the start of some more succinct thinking about the assumptions prevalent in the presentation and marketing of distance and digitally mediated education by educational institutions and learning providers. There appears to be a particular focus for the marketing of ‘e-learning’, comprising of a...

After some recent discussions about the use of documents in social science research, I have been reconsidering what might be useful to classify as a ‘document’ of the web. Given that web is itself predominantly a mass of hyperlinked ‘documents’, in the traditional sense of two-dimensional representations...

I thoroughly enjoyed the Social Media and Academia panel on 21st September, as part of Social Media Week in Glasgow. The event was arranged masterfully by Edinburgh Beltane, Nicola Osborne at Edina, and hosted at the University of Glasgow Library. The panel members put forward some fascinating projects, and a useful discussion...

The question of how to conducting research online, whether qualitative or quantitative in nature, remains a pertinent issue. I have been reading Virtual Methods by Christine Hine (2005) this week and pondering the complexities of approaching a project that involves the collection and/or analysis of web-related data. For Hine,...

A reference to the preface of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady in Hayles (1999) has proved intriguing in relation to notions of posthuman embodiment. In a particular section, James provides an analogy of fiction via the model of a house with infinite windows, where countless individual perspectives are each oriented...

photo credit: Abode of Chaos Hayles (1999) makes reference to a ‘cybernetic epistemology’ (p286) (attributed to Gregory Bateson, quoted, I guess, by Mary Catherine Bateson), which considers randomness as that which is exterior to the system in question. This randomness is viewed as an expansive complexity, an unfathomable...

The conclusion to ‘How We Became Posthuman’ (Hayles 1999) provides a succinct summation of the posthuman seriation that hints at the possibility of fruitful avenues for epistemological analysis.  For Hayles, the fundamental revolution of posthumanism is the shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness, where...