Unexpected bonus of being part of a MOOC

A "Massive Open Online Course". Sounds very educational, all about learning something new. My original expectations were centred around learning on my own time and space.  My very first MOOC, Elearning and Digital Cultures hasn't even started yet, but I feel like we've been particupating, learning, growing, sharing and creating so much already. This collaboration and discovering fellow human beings with similar passions has been an unexpected benefit and I believe will offer more long term value than the actual course itself.

Through some of the connections made, I discovered another complementary MOOC, ETMOOC (Educational Technology).  Although I joined this one late, there has been a wealth of learning and sharing taking place, and this blog post was inspired by the blogs found here:

Syndicated blog posts

Quadblogging and RSS feeds

QUADBLOGGING

The idea of a quadblog is for a group of people to write and comment on each other's blogs. As the name suggests it's usually 4 people blogging and in our case, it's 4 classmates from the elearning and digital cultures MOOC . My fellow quadbloggers are: Dan Lemay, Sarah Prentice and Brooke Hessler

Our facebook group for the course is where I first heard of the concept and there I found a useful link that explains the origins and more about quadblogging.

RSS Feeds

Having received the first email from the course organisers (since the original course email) I saw the request to add RSS feeds from student's blogs. I have subscribed to many RSS feeds before, mainly to do with tech news. I also subscribe for my students, depending on what course they are studying, which varies from public relations to sport to commerce. I teach all of these students some form of Information Technology so showing them the benefits of tech using something like RSS feeds makes sense. However I've never considered creating content before. This brings up many interesting possibilities beyond this course and is certainly something to consider on the future. Anything to benefit my students! 

What "deuze" digital culture mean?

Since this is part of the title of the course, I am following Dan's suggestion that we explore this topic and found it's not as easy as I orginally thought to define digital culture.

 

Digital culture is a complex term, involving different aspects of media, communication and IT. In my research I found one of the leading authorities to be Mark Deuze. He talks about 3 cornerstones of digital culture, which made sense to me:

 

"In the proliferation and saturation of screen-based, networked, and digital media that saturate our lives, our reconstitution is expressed as:

 

 1. Active agents in the process of meaning-making (we become participants).

 

 2. We adopt but at the same time modify, manipulate, and thus reform consensual ways of understanding reality (we engage in remediation).

 

3. We reflexively assemble our own particular versions of such reality (we are bricoleurs)"

 
This is what I understand by these three concepts:

   Improved and increased volumes of global communication produce a more participatory culture, where audiences are active participants in creating and disseminating meaning, and virtual communities, like Facebook, are producers and consumers of media. 

The mix of old and new media "means being deeply immersed in the system while at the same time attributing legitimacy and credibility to a self-definition of working against or outside of the system, as well as reforming the system from within"

 

 

 

Repurposing and reusing existing items, assembling and reassembling information and media. "remixing, reconstructing and re-using of separate artefacts, actions, ideas, signs, symbols and styles in order to create new insights or meanings."

 

It took a while to go through Deuze's paper but I now feel I have a deeper understanding of the theorectical underpinnings of: