E-learning and Digital Cultures 2013

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