{"id":5221,"date":"2012-08-15T16:53:43","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T20:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=5221"},"modified":"2012-08-16T22:11:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-17T02:11:15","slug":"affordances-of-moocs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=5221","title":{"rendered":"Affordances of MOOCs"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a very cleverly-constructed MOOC about MOOCs this week, MOOC MOOC, and while my days are going to be crazy this week workwise, I’m trying to dip in as much as I can to get a handle on the chaotic discussion. At the end of the second day Athabaska University MOOC organizer\/connectivist George Siemens wrote<\/a>,<\/p>\n

pattern in every mooc: intro, chaos, self-organization, sharing images\/artifacts, sub-networks, frustration, dropout, core left #moocmooc<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Siemens’s “in every mooc” frame is very different from the split others are writing about<\/a>, between cMOOCs (which come from the Siemens-Downes<\/a>–Groom<\/a> “connectivist”\/chaotic perspective) and xMOOCs (the big ones of Coursera, Udacity, etc., often organized explicitly around a technical\/broadcast model). Siemens is\u00a0not<\/em> writing about the fundamental orientation of any individual MOOC (I suspect he’d at least be sympathetic to Marc Bousquet’s division of good and bad MOOCs<\/a>) but rather the responses to the affordances<\/a> of anything like a MOOC.<\/p>\n

Affordance<\/em> is an engineering-design term referring roughly to what a particular technology allows in terms of human action. In terms of a MOOC, Siemens observes how participants go off in different directions (not being choreographed by a teacher in the room), try to figure things out in subsets of the class, use social media in or out of an LMS to share media, leave, etc. All of these activities are made possible by certain technical features of online courses large enough to be called a MOOC. Those are not the only participant responses possible, but I am not surprised that there’s a certain subset of potential<\/em> actions that become modal<\/em> actions.<\/p>\n

As people talk about either the revolutionary potential of MOOCS or the potential traps of same, maybe we should put the actions of real people into a useful context that addresses both the technology involved and the social structures. After all, with a few hundred thousand participants in MOOCs in the past year, that’s a lot<\/em> of people introducing themselves, being chaotic, self-organizing, sharing media, connecting with some other participants, (attempting to complete (or completing) assignments, and dropping out. As Virginia Commonwealth University’s\u00a0Jon Becker points out, ed tech discussions all too rarely frame issues in terms of affordances. And yet if there are modal actions in MOOCs, we need to talk about affordances in the context of the bigger debates over higher education. ((Other bit of required reading here:\u00a0Melvin Kranzberg’s 1986 essay<\/a> on the social construction of technology.))<\/p>\n

Attractive affordances, from my experience at this meta-MOOC:<\/p>\n