Monday 3 November 2014

Who's afraid of the big, bad MOOC? #EDCMOOC

Does 'the vigilance of intersecting gazes' (Foucault) mean that MOOCs disempower?  Hyper-visibility of our exchanges where we don't always know who, if anyone is reading our posts may mean that the consciousness of the gaze of others makes us self-censor more than in other media. New technologies are  frequently represented as bringing equality, opportunity, liberation and untrammelled good. Perhaps they each carry utopic and dystopic potential: not bad but dangerous, not to be responded to with apathy, nor smashed luddite-fashion but treated with 'a hyper- and pessimistic activism' (Foucault cited in Rainbow, 1986: 343), expecting harm but seeking to ameliorate it.

Foucault.s Panopticon

In this way, rather than feeling the need to decide between the uses, technological or social determinism described by Chandler, we might conceive of these three alternative possibilities being in constant dialogue with one another.  This dialogic conception of the relationship between the technological and the social is present, for example in Raymond Williams' work on the social significance of TV in the 1970s.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Cheryl!

    Great to see the panopticon brought up in relation to MOOCs, and I really like the call for ‘hyper and pessimistic activism’. It really resonates with the idea of critique for me, which is precisely what I think doing EDCMOOC is about – actively engaging *in* this field, questioning notions of ‘equality, opportunity, liberation and untrammelled good’ by doing a MOOC and being *in* one.

    I’d be slightly cautious of assuming the ‘gaze’ comes from a central figure though – one of the most interesting things about MOOCs, particularly those with really ‘massive’ enrolments, is that it is impossible for a teacher to know what all participants are doing. That of course doesn’t mean the panopticon isn’t useful, I think we just need to understand ‘observation’ as not emanating from a teacher, or necessarily from each other, but perhaps from ‘the digital’ – the persistent recording of data from our activity of the web, something that isn’t necessarily ‘human’. But, yes, that stil may mean we are conscious of the gaze, and adjust our behaviour.

    ‘we might conceive of these three alternative possibilities being in constant dialogue with one another’

    This is a nice way to think through the deterministic positions, and a good link to Raymond Williams, very useful! The problem I’d see in the dialogic though, is a reduction to language or discourse? When I think of the ways that the digital interacts with the social, through algorithms, I’m not sure we can reduce that to the linguistic – for me algorithms, which often operate on and with huge arrays of other algorithms, seem to operate outside of that. Not sure if you’d agree?

    Great post! Looking forward to more…

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