Jeremy Knox

This book is about the rise to prominence of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): its high-profile marketing and emerging approaches to research; the notions of participation and community bound up with its beginnings; its spatial ordering of university provision and online education; and the unprecedented number and spread of its students. However, this book is also about the human condition: a human condition that is profoundly and intimately entwined with the ideas and practices of education, of which the MOOC is merely one, albeit contemporary, manifestation. In this second decade of the 21st century, the MOOC may indeed draw upon the latest and most cutting-edge of digital technologies, and enfold itself in the broader transformations brought about through global connection and communication, yet a deep-rooted humanism not only endures, but powerfully shapes, and is shaped by, the kind of education on offer.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book—Artificial Intelligence and Inclusive Education: speculative futures and emerging practices. It examines the potential intersections, correspondences, divergences, and contestations between the discourses that typically accompany, on the one hand, calls for artificial intelligence technology to disrupt and enhance educational practice and, on the other, appeals for greater inclusion in teaching and learning. Both these areas of discourse are shown to envision a future of ‘education for all’: artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) tends to promote the idea of an automated, and personalised, one-to-one tutor for every learner, while inclusive education often appears concerned with methods of involving marginalised and excluded individuals and organising the communal dimensions of education. However, these approaches are also shown to imply important distinctions: between the attempts at collective educational work through inclusive pedagogies and the drive for personalised learning through AIEd. This chapter presents a critical view of the quest for personalisation found in AIEd, suggesting a problematic grounding in the myth of the one-to-one tutor and questionable associations with simplistic views of ‘learner-centred’ education. In contrast, inclusive pedagogy is suggested to be more concerned with developing a ‘common ground’ for educational activity, rather than developing a one-on-one relationship between the teacher and the student. Inclusive education is therefore portrayed as political, involving the promotion of active, collective, and democratic forms of citizen participation. The chapter concludes with an outline of the subsequent contributions to the book.

This Editorial describes the main challenges at the intersections between algorithmic cultures and human learning. It briefly analyses papers in this Special Issue of E-learning and Digital Media ‘Learning in the age of algorithmic cultures’ and shows that researchers in the field are still struggling with grand ideas and questions. It suggests that studies of algorithms and learning are in their infancy and emphasizes that they carry potentials to confirm our existing ideas and surprise us with fresh insights.

This paper asks whether assemblage theory provides a useful way of thinking through the challenges of knowledge production for social justice in the context of the relationship between social movement activism and the academy. We begin by describing the problems associated with spatial metaphors that reinforce reified generalities whereby ‘horizontal’ social movements are opposed to hierarchical higher education (HE) institutions. We then give a brief account of DeLanda’s (2006) interpretation of the assemblage, focusing on the concepts of immanence and difference, actual and virtual and deand re-territorialisation. Having described the problem and sketched out the theoretical context, we move on to consider the analytical value of assemblage theory, focusing on the merits of its materialist anti-essentialism. This leads on to a critical discussion of the ways in which speed and mobility are inscribed with normative value in some political readings of assemblage theory. We argue aga...

This paper will explore two examples from the design, structure and implementation of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera.  This five week long course (known as the EDCMOOC) was delivered twice in 2013, and is considered an atypical MOOC in its utilisation of both the Coursera platform and a range of social media and open access materials.  The combination of distributed and aggregated structure will be highlighted, examining the arrangement of course material on the Coursera platform and student responses in social media.  This paper will suggest that a dominant instrumentalist view of technology limits considerations of these systems to merely enabling or inhibiting educational aims.  The subsequent discussion will suggest that sociomaterial theory offers a valuable framework for considering how educational spaces are produced through relational practices between humans and non-humans...

The fields of eLearning and distance education are long established, as are cultures of openness in tutoring and institutional instruction. So what's new about MOOCs? This article considers what huge enrollment numbers and an increasingly global audience mean for education in the digital age.

The burgeoning field of learning analytics (LA) is gaining significant traction in education, bolstered by the increasing amounts of student data generated through educational software. However, critical discussions of LA are in short supply. Drawing on work in the cultural studies of data and critical algorithm studies, this paper begins by examining three central issues: the distancing and “black boxing” of LA disciplinary practices, the mythologizing of objective data, and the concern for future prediction. The second section describes the design and implementation of the “Learning Analytics Report Card” (LARC), a pilot project that sought to develop experimental approaches to LA. As such, rather than seeking to simply produce analytics, the LARC attempted to foster critical awareness of computational data analysis among teachers and learners.

This paper takes a view of digital literacy, which moves beyond a focus on technical methods and skills in an attempt to maintain a broader approach that encompasses a critical view of the learning subject. In doing this, we consider socio-materialism and its relation to aspects of literacy theory. We anchor the discussion in a consideration of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Coursera MOOC, which provided a tangible setting for theorising some of the practices of digital literacy differently. The profusion of multimodal artefacts produced in response to this course constituted a complex series of socio-material entanglements, in which human beings and technologies each played a constituent part. Two specific digital artefacts are analysed according to these terms. We conclude that socio-material multimodality constitutes a different way of thinking about digital literacy: not as representational practices, but rather as multifaceted and relational enactments of knowledge, spec...

This paper examines the concept of the ‘division of learning’, and the broader thesis of ‘surveillance capitalism’ within which it is situated, in terms of its relevance to education. It begins with defining the term, before suggesting two key ways in which aligning the ‘division of learning’ with perspectives from educational research might provide productive insights for both domains. The first considers the impact of increasing ‘datafication’ in education, where platform technologies are proliferating as powerful actors that both mediate and shape educational activity. Here the ‘division of learning’ offers useful insights concerning the disparities resulting from learning in and learning from educational platforms. The second explores the extent to which education theory might offer ways to develop the concept of the ‘division of learning’, through critique of the term ‘learning’ itself, as well as the foregrounding of questions of educational ‘purpose’. Here the ‘division of le...

This paper will explore two examples from the design, structure and implementation of the ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera.  This five week long course (known as the EDCMOOC) was delivered twice in 2013, and is considered an atypical MOOC in its utilisation of both the Coursera platform and a range of social media and open access materials.  The combination of distributed and aggregated structure will be highlighted, examining the arrangement of course material on the Coursera platform and student responses in social media.  This paper will suggest that a dominant instrumentalist view of technology limits considerations of these systems to merely enabling or inhibiting educational aims.  The subsequent discussion will suggest that sociomaterial theory offers a valuable framework for considering how educational spaces are produced through relational practices between humans and non-humans.  An analysis of You Tube and a bespoke blog aggregator will show how the algorithmic properties of these systems perform functions that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of either the teachers using these systems, or the authors who create the software, thus constituting a complex sociomaterial educational enactment.

This short paper describes an experimental radio-frequency identification (RFID) system designed to playfully explore the possibilities of object agency, in the form of ‘tweeting books’.  The use of web-enabled sensors is discussed in the context of the emerging field of Learning Analytics.  The analysis of the ‘tweeting books’ prototype challenges the idea of straightforward ‘non-human’ data and the isolation of specific and localised agency.  I will draw upon sociomaterial theory, which encompasses a broad reconsideration of the divisions between culture and nature, the human and the non-human.  As such, the production of data can be thought of as the entanglement of human user and non-human technology, rather than the privileging of human intention as the exclusive source of agency.  This will be suggested to have important implications for Learning Analytics, which is often premised on a commitment to the idea that data directly represents human behaviour.

As one of the instructors on ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’, a five week course from the University of Edinburgh which ran for the first time in January this year, I propose to share some insights from the successful completion of our MOOC.  ‘E-learning and Digital Cultures’ experimented with innovative teaching methods and experimental course design, including the use of open access materials and the incorporation of social media beyond the Coursera platform. 

This presentation will discuss:
1. Using social media to nurture a sense of community before the course begins.
Encouraging students to form communities and study groups using Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.
2. Curating open access materials.
Structuring a course around a set of copyright-free videos and articles, rather than pre-recorded lectures.
3. Involving students in the creation of course content. 
Supporting students to independently write reflective blog posts and engage in discussion around course themes.  This will also outline the ‘EDCMOOC News’, a blog aggregation system that automatically collects student blog posts together in one space.
4.  Fostering creative online practices for peer assessment.
Inspiring students to create a ‘digital artefact’, comprised of images, video text or sound, and encouraging critical thinking skills through peer assessment.

This presentation will critique the implementation of Open Educational Resources in higher education.  Open access has emerged as a prominent debate in the field of distance and digitally-mediated learning, in which technology is advanced as both the vehicle for widening participation and the solution to the perceived elitism of the traditional institution.  OER have been in the forefront of this dialogue with claims of social transformation and global deliverance from poverty; however they remain significantly under-theorised.  While OER literature often emphasises the removal of barriers to information, it fails to adequately address the consequences of open access in terms of education itself, tending to make assumptions about the capacity for individuals to act purely in an autonomous fashion as ‘self-directed’ learners.  This paper will therefore problematise the ways in which the OER movement imply particular notions of freedom and independence in the advancement of their educational agenda.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has received overwhelming media attention in the last year.  MOOCs, such as those offered by Coursera, Udactiy and edX, ostensibly offer the prestigious education of the world’s leading universities for free.  However, the question nobody appears to be asking concerns the learning ‘space’ in open access education.  MOOC providers seem to promote their platforms as transparent windows to the educational institution, and notions of geographical context, physical environment and learning space appear to be written out of the equation.  This ignite talk will therefore propose alternative ways in which we can *sense* the space of the MOOC, helping us to think about this educational activity as an assemblage of human, technology and place.  I will briefly outline an RFID system which allows books to automatically tweet their own content, GPS tracking and geofencing that logs the movement of participants, and sensors which record motion, temperature and light levels in learning environments.

"This presentation will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources (OER), exploring the implications of institutional circumvention and the promotion of self-directed learning in a digitally-mediated higher education. Three critiques will be introduced:

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. The OER movement presents the most significant and wide-spread implementation of open access education on the web. However, the OER literature focuses predominantly on issues of access, and the practice of free and open education remains under-theorised. OER is often posited as the solution to an increasing demand for higher education that surpasses current provision, yet much of the literature neglects to adequately consider how self-directed learning might actually take place in the absence of educational structure and pedagogic expertise.

2.) Humanistic assumptions of unproblematic self-direction and autonomy. Where no regulations are prescribed about how learning should operate in practice, it will be suggested that the 'free' and 'open' learning proposed by OER cannot in principle be predicted or assumed to function according to predefined ideas. However, this view of undefined openness appears to contradict many of the aims expressed in the OER literature. The prognostications of rational progress, emancipation from ignorance, and increased provision for the intellectually needy, appear to sit uneasily with the idea of a decentralised system that avoids predefined aims. In the absence of directives it will be suggested that proponents of OER assume an innate human ability to self-direct. A Foucauldian interpretation of subjectivity will be outlined here to propose that the human being emerges from structure and organisation, rather than being foundational.

3.) An alignment with the needs of capital, in which the Foucauldian concept of governmentality will be suggested to offer an alternative perspective on the notions of power and emancipation in OER discourse. Rather than a rational improvement to education, or a more humane and naturalised form of learning, the use of OER will be proposed as a further refinement in the exercise of power. While the use of OER might circumvent the more overt practices of discipline exacted by the traditional institution - regulating, organising and categorising the bodies of its learners - it is problematic to assume that such a form of open education is emancipated from regimes of control and subjectification. OER literature neglects to consider its own discursive alignment with the marketisation and commodification of education, and the ways in which this technology constructs the learning subject as human capital. In claiming a model of open, free and de-institutionalised education, the OER movement conceals the ways in which the apparently self-directing learner is a product of its own discursive practices and permitted behaviours.

This presentation is not intended to dismiss the OER movement per se, but rather to seek its refinement through a more rigorous theoretical examination. The three critiques introduced here are suggested to provide a coherent framework for future work in this area."