This is the course site for Education and Digital Culture, part of the fully online MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. Since it was taught for the first time more than a decade ago, Education and Digital Culture (EDC) has existed as a collective experiment in being part of the wider social web. The course is delivered almost entirely within networked settings beyond the ‘closed’ spaces of the institutional learning management system, as we look to understand contemporary education by exploring and examining digitally-mediated cultural artefacts, environments and activities. There is a strong emphasis on collaboration as we critically examine ideas around cyberculture, community culture, and algorithmic culture, and consider what they have to tell us about teaching, learning and other educational practices. The course includes two assessment exercises: an online exhibition and a digital essay.
Create! Critique! Collaborate!
Whether for the purposes of consistency or completeness, when it comes to introducing academic courses, emphasis is often placed upon timings and readings, outcomes and assessment. What can sometimes be missed is the ethos that underpins all of this work: we might say that ‘course personality’ becomes lost among practical detail. This site contains all the important information around deadlines and assignments, but we have also attempted to establish the character of the Education and Digital Culture course, and the kind of experience you can expect. In the coming weeks and months you will be challenged to work creatively, for instance as you represent your ideas through original digital artefacts. At the same time there is a strong emphasis on criticality as you seek to make connections between cultural and educational content and practices. In order to do this successfully, you will need to collaborate with those around you, throwing yourself into discussion and the exchange of ideas.
Learning outcomes
On completion of Education and Digital Culture you will:
- have a critical awareness of the key concepts emerging from the study of digital culture
- be able to assess the implications of this thought for the history, development and deployment of online education
- be able to synthesise these ideas in order to develop critically aware, media-specific pedagogies for online learning
- have developed the ability to use social media and digital spaces in the presentation of academic discourse online
Community and co-producing knowledge
Past instances of Education and Digital Culture have benefited from an active and vibrant community. As we will come on to discuss in Block 2, ‘community’ can support a range of interpretations, however in this case we are talking about our willingness to engage in discussion, offer encouragement and to share ideas with those around us. In practical terms this can involve, but is not limited to, visiting each other’s gallery spaces and commenting on the work on display, actively participating in the synchronous sessions, and sharing tips for producing and presenting digital content. Going further, you might choose to collaborate with other members of the group around particular activities or artefacts. Across the 12 weeks of Education and Digital Culture we are going to confront some challenging ideas, while at the same time working in unfamiliar environments: a crowd-sourcing approach to knowledge-production and learning will help us to successfully navigate a path through the course.
Readings
Unlike other courses on the Digital Education programme, we do not provide you with a single resource list or set of hyperlinks to recommended readings. Instead, we want to nurture the information gathering skills that will help you across and beyond this course. Furthermore, it is not really feasible to provide a resource list when EDC mostly takes place outside the institutional space of the learning management system. All of the readings are available via the University Library – and we have provided the necessary bibliographic detail to locate them – however we want you to go and find them, with the benefit that you will encounter other relevant resources and voices as you do so. The only exception here is for the secondary readings in our Cyberculture block where we have suggested some seminal but older book chapters which are available as e-reserve pdf documents via our Moodle site. If you have problems accessing the readings please email the Course Organiser.
Methods
During each thematic block of EDC you will become familiar with a research method that is relevant to your work on this course and programme. This will give methodological context to some of the activities you will be completing, while at the same time broadening and deepening your understanding of digital education research. Going further, getting a feel for visual methods (within the Cyberculture thematic block), digital ethnography (Community culture), and then speculative method (Algorithmic culture) will also be helpful if you plan to progress to the dissertation stage of the Digital Education programme. There is a limit to what we can achieve in a short time, however in common with our desire to help nurture your information gathering skills, even a brief flavour of these methods will enhance your learning strategies and provide you with a broader and deeper understanding of the field.