In part 2 of this post found on the Los Angeles Book Review blog, the four academics who posted position essays on MOOCs respond to each other’s essays.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/moocs-and-the-future-of-the-humanities-a-roundtable-part-2
A few highlights of the responses…
Al Filreis writes, “I agree with everything Cathy Davidson has written in the first round, word for word, and so I won’t take up my space to comment further, other than to encourage everyone to read or reread her short essay.” “Ian Bogost’s commentary nicely complements the others. He leaves pedagogy aside and clearly lays out the non-educational issues, category by category.”
Cathy N. Davidson writes, “I got it wrong in my original essay. When I said that we have some good methods for teaching problem-based learning online but haven’t yet designed a MOOC format that serves dialogic thinking in the humanities and social sciences, I hadn’t read about Professor Schroeder, in Springfield, Illinois, interacting with “eduMOOC” … Nor had I read Professor Filreis’s account of parents and grandparents taking his modern poetry class online alongside his Penn students — way back in the mid-1990s.”
Ray Schroeder writes, “A revolution is taking place in the delivery of education. This revolution, I believe, is unstoppable and will remake higher education as completely as the internet remade newspapers, magazines, and book publishing.”…with the “promise to merge (education) into a much more personalized, far less institutionalized learning environment.”
Ian Bogost writes, “MOOCs can be virtuous and innocuous and deplorable all at once, because they operate on multiple registers.” “overall, MOOCs seem to function first and most powerfully as new instruments of fiscal and labor policy, rather than as educational technologies. It’s perhaps time we stopped talking about their value as instruments of learning, and started talking more about what choices they are making on our behalf while we are arguing on the internet about their educational potential.”