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The new literacies ethos "celebrates inclusion (everyone in), mass participation, distributed expertise, valid and rewardable roles for all who pitch in" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 18).

premise is that it may be productive to consider their potential as large, immersive – and largely unintentional – environments for acculturating people to new digital literacies

This paper argues that networked learning opportunities at the scale MOOCs are beginning to reach have the potential to expose large numbers of people to participatory literacies and learning perspectives, even if and where facilitation and testing are highly instrumental in approach.

Trojan horse for the sociocultural development of participatory perspectives and literacies.

there is potential for peers to connect with peers and develop autonomous channels of information flow that bypass the traditional top-down model of teacher-centered learning

My premise is that this possibility of open, networked participation may become more powerful at a massive scale than in a conventionally sized online course, due to a version of the network effect, whereby "the more people use a service then the more useful those users find it, thus recommending it and adding more users"

emphasizing networked practices, knowledge generation, and distributed, many-to-many channels of communication rather than the conventional teacher-centric focus of traditional courses.

To be digitally literate is to be able to engage the connections and communications possibilities of digital technologies, in their capacity to generate, remix, repurpose, and share new knowledge as well as simply deliver existing information

The conclusions of the project were that MOOCs, as we understood them at the time, embody the participatory ethos of digital practices in their reputational, relational, and networked operations.

The decentralized, distributed nature of this type of communication of one's learning builds on the particular capacities of digital technologies: replicability enables remix and repurposing, searchability enables navigation of decentralized environments, and scalable sharing may lead to unintended audiences. cMOOCs enable and encourage open, participatory work among learners, where the audience is not solely or even primarily the instructor, but rather peers:

The model, in effect, frames learners as scholars: as identities with their own ideas to contribute and disseminate, rather than as conventional students.

While open scholarship focuses on the networked practices of formal academics rather than the motley collection of teachers, faculty, laypeople, and conventional students who have tended to gravitate to cMOOCs' education-focused topics, the open knowledge generation that has emerged from cMOOCs has resulted in formal academic papers as well as a broad, ongoing body of blog posts and shared ideas that might be thought of as what Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012) frame as "networked participatory scholarship" (p. 766).

Ironically, most appear designed to pose little overt threat to the conventions and exclusivity of academic knowledge management, appearing instead to "exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model" (Burton, 2009, para. 4). But the very fact that they have been touted in media as a revolution may position them to reach a wide enough audience to begin to effect a sociocultural shift in participatory, networked literacies. It is the scale of MOOCs – both in the sense of their individual large classes and their status as a rapidly emerging cultural phenomenon – that makes them an inadvertent Trojan horse for the introduction of peer-to-peer concepts and literacies about learning.

And in this paper, I posit that institutions placing their proverbial eggs in the basket of this type of educational future may well be undermining their own positions as purveyors of closed, expert knowledge.

Many xMOOCs may be designed and intended to maintain the expertise model and the market share of elite universities over the specter of knowledge abundance and participatory culture. However, so long as the courses as platforms continue to enable participatory networking and engagement among students, they effectively begin to sow the very seeds of new literacies that challenge and undermine that instrumentalist perspective on education and expertise

vendor bias has now got a firm grip on much of the public discourse about information and communications technology

be sceptical about assertions of the value of technology coming either from those who want to sell it to you or from their surrogates in political life

the suppression of research reports or evaluative studies that undermine the thesis that technology improves everything.

bullshit

When we see a concept everywhere it is easy to suspend our critical faculties and assume it must be right

breadth

think broadly about technology in teaching and learning.

Technology always involves people and their social systems

Remember that there are many technologies: books, blackboard, film, radio, television, programmed learning and so on. The Internet has not made them obsolete

starts with teaching and attempts to use technology to expand the range and impact of the teacher

the remote classroom approach

the rest of the world had a different tradition

We must strive for balance on a number of dimensions.

When we use technology are we using it to enhance learning or to enhance teaching?

Dimension number two means seeking balance in answer to the question: teaching and learning for what?

they like using the web for informational and administrative transactions.

communication between students

Online technologies can, of course, be useful for learning

two key virtues.

notably by destroying old jobs and creating new ones.

The best way to reach learners is to use technology that the learner already has.

technology more for activities associated with their studies

rather than for the mainline work of studying course content. T

Why should we want to use technology? How should we use technology for learning and teaching? What are the basic principles? Who can benefit most from educational technology? Where should we apply it? Which technologies are best? More generally, how do you make judgements about the many claims that are made for technology?

illiteracy

In both cases technology is changing society, notably by destroying old jobs and creating new ones.

Social determination

technology could solve the three most pressing problems of education: access, quality and cost

in all parts of the world evolving technology is the main force that is changing society

the orientation here is clearly dystopic

‘administrators and commercial partners’ as being in favour of ‘teacherless’ digital education,

‘teachers and students’ as being against it

these divisions have never been clear, and they certainly aren’t now.

the consequences of digital education

metaphor of the native and the immigrant

Prensky warns ‘immigrant’ teachers that they face irrelevance unless they figure out how to adapt their methods and approaches to new generations of learners.

Dahlberg, L (2004). Internet Research Tracings: Towards Non-Reductionist Methodology. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 9/3

The most frequently cited pedagogical reason in our survey for preferring asynchronous communication was that it promoted better reflection