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Assignment!

The tumblogs have all been submitted – thanks everyone. It’s time now to focus on the final assignment. Most of you have been in touch with either myself or Jen to discuss your topic (and medium) – if you haven’t done that yet, please try to do so in the next week. Remember that you also need to submit your own assessment criterion (or two) to supplement the core ones – these are likely to relate to the form of your final essay, and you might find it useful also to run these past your personal tutor.

Assignments need to be submitted by midnight, Sunday 28 April.

Many thanks to everyone for the energy, commitment and rigour you’ve brought to the course over the last 12 weeks. It’s been a pleasure to work with you all, and Jen and I are genuinely excited to see what you make of the final essay. Best of luck with it, and keep in touch!

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It’s week 9….

Image by Philippe Caza from 50 Watts http://50watts.com/Caza-in-the-70s

Welcome to block 3 – time has gone quickly and this is our final course section.

The micro-ethnographies are looking really good, there has been some extremely impressive work achieved here, in a very short time frame. To do them justice, we suggest spending a few more days commenting on ones you may not have had a chance to see or discuss yet, alongside getting to grips with this week’s activities.

Overall, Block 3 is concerned with the over-arching theme of posthumanism, and we start with some readings aimed at orientation to this complex set of ideas. Hayles and Haraway are the classics, but you might do best to start with Pickering (listed in the secondary reading) for an accessible introduction, if you’re unfamiliar with this area of thought. Either way, you’ll probably want to spend a lot of weeks 9 and 10 just reading and thinking as you work your way through some of these readings. You’ll find some discussion questions to help you – blog your thoughts if that seems appropriate and post a tweet when you have a post to share with the group.

We’ll also pick up on these questions, and others, in the Skype chat next week – remember this is Monday 18 March, 7:30pm (UK time). It’s not compulsory to be there, but it’ll be a good opportunity to further discuss ideas and to clarify any areas of concern. Also a good opportunity to meet up and socialise a bit as the course starts to draw towards its close!

week 7: ethnography making week

Or not! Image from www.cafepress.ca/+sociology+gifts: yes, sociology gifts….

Welcome to week 7! The ideas coming through for the ethnographies look really great so far, so please do continue the talk in the hub  forum to continue to build ideas and get feedback as we enter the ‘building’ period. If you’re looking for inspiration, you can always take a look at the work previous groups have done during this week – from 2009, 2010 and 2011 – there are some terrific examples there too.

A few people have been raising ethics-related issues in the forum: it’s important to take these seriously, so please do check out our ethics guidance page, and if you’ve any doubts or concerns drop your tutor an email, or raise it in the forum. And one more quick reminder – there’s guidance on some of the media you might use to make your ethnography here. However, given the quality of what you produced for the MOOC responses, I suspect many of you won’t have any problem with this aspect! However, don’t hesitate to give your tutor a shout if you need more guidance.

Post a comment to the ‘Building your ethnography’ page to let us know where your ethnography is, once you’ve done it, and please tweet it too, to #ededc. As the ethnographies appear, try to spend some time viewing and commenting on each other’s – toward the end of this week and into the beginning of next if need be. We are really looking forward to seeing what you produce this week!

Week 5: a little breathing space…


First, a massive thank you to you all for the work you put in last week on the MOOC, and on making such a terrific collection of artefacts, and within deadline too (no mean feat given how much content there was for you to get to grips with). The page of responses is really hugely impressive, and as well as the portrait it has drawn of EDC MOOC week 2, I think it has been very useful to the MOOC participants who are thinking about ideas for their own digital artefacts at the end of the course.

It’s been wonderful to see the feedback you’re getting on the artefacts too, from the MOOC participants. The aim of this week is to start to gather some of this into your own tumblogs, and also to make some comments of your own on others’ artefacts, to reflect on the MOOC and so on – anything you can do to try to consolidate some of the work you did last week.

Jen will be in touch via email to see if anyone is willing to help with the MOOC hangout on Friday, by fielding questions in G+ and Twitter, much as Phil and Chantelle did last week. This was quite hard work, but fun – any help would be much appreciated!

So – thanks again everyone – you’ve made a massive contribution to the MOOC and produced some really great work. Next week we move away from all things MOOC and focus on something quite different (if you want to continue on the MOOC as participant, though, you are of course welcome!). In the meantime we hope you enjoy this relatively low-key week on EDC….

It’s week 3! Welcome!

The course has been really active over the last week, with some great blog posts – please keep them coming, and also keep up the commentary on each others’ postings too – a good culture of commentary is already emerging on the course, which is fantastic.

This week the activities are relatively low-key: to do some reading and thinking on multimodality and changing conceptions of literacy, and to start to look about a bit in the EDC MOOC, which launched last night. A bit of time spent familiarising yourselves with the MOOC will be handy for next week, at the end of which we ask you to make a visual, textual or multimodal response to the MOOC activity that week. As far as we know, this is a unique first attempt to bring students on an accredited course into contact with a MOOC  on a similar topic area as teaching associates, so we hope the experiment will work and that you will enjoy it!

Please note that we’ve changed the plan for getting you into the MOOC – rather than asking you to sign up yourselves, we will now sign you up and you should get an invitation into the course (there were some technical problems with Coursera we have had to work around). You will be registered there as ‘Teaching staff’. There are 40,000 participants on the MOOC.

So – please enjoy the week, and if you have any questions about any of this, please post a reply here or drop one of us an email.

hello to visiting #edcmooc people!

image by Eleni Zazani, Creative Commons license CC:BY:NC.

Hello and welcome to anyone visiting this site who is taking part in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC, starting on 28 January. We’re delighted to see you! Feel free to have a look around the course site (this one) and the participants’ sites. You might be particularly interested in the film festival page, since some of the films listed there will be on the syllabus for the MOOC (we won’t say which ones, to preserve the element of surprise!).

Please note that the site you are visiting now is not part of the MOOC – it is part of the MSc in Digital Education/E-learning. So the instructions and advice here are for students on the MSc, not participants on the MOOC! However, you’ll notice that some pages and posts on this site, and on course participants’ sites, are open for comments – you are very welcome to share your thoughts, questions and ideas with us.

Oh, and if anyone is curious, this course is part of the MSc in Digital Education (formerly the MSc in E-learning), a part-time, completely online Masters programme offered by the University of Edinburgh. (Applications for September 2013 are now being accepted, so if this is your kind of stuff, do check us out!)

Semester starts today!

flying kites

Welcome all to the official start of semester! It’s great to have you on the course.

Many of the tumblogs are already underway, so you should spend time this week getting yours started, if you haven’t already, and also looking at and commenting on other’s blogs. This course works best when people take time to comment on each other’s work – there’s no core discussion board, so we’re depending on that, and on twitter to build and keep the course community.

The first of our film festival chats is tonight - link to our film room on Synchtube here. Don’t worry if you haven’t done all the readings and so on by then – the main aim is to meet each other for a bit of semi-formal watching, discussing, virtual popcorn-eating and socialising around our movies. We are looking forward to it! Please just note that Synchtube can sometimes be a bit browser variable, so if your usual browser doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of it, please try a different one (Chrome on PC and Safari, Firefox and Chrome on Mac are OK – Internet Explorer can be a bit flakey but give it a go if that’s your browser of choice).

People are already tweeting using the #ededc hashtag, and the course lino is already looking good, so please continue to contribute to these.

See you tonight!