Abstract:The Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) is an online professional development experience designed as an openly networked, production-centered, participatory learning collaboration for educators. Addressing the paucity of research that investigates learning processes in MOOC experiences, this paper examines the situated literacy practices that emerged as educators in CLMOOC composed, collaborated, and distributed multimediated artifacts. Using a collaborative, interactive visual mapping tool as participant-researchers, we analyzed relationships between publically available artifacts and posts generated in one week through a transliteracies framework. Culled data included posts on Twitter (n = 678), a Google+ Community (n = 105), a Facebook Group (n = 19), a blog feed (n = 5), and a "make" repository (n = 21). Remix was found to be a primary form of interaction and mediator of learning. Participants not only iterated on each others' artifacts, but on social processes and shared practices as well. Our analysis illuminated four distinct remix mobilities and relational tendencies-bursting, drifting, leveraging, and turning. Bursting and drifting characterize the paces and proximities of remixing while leveraging and turning are activities more obviously disruptive of social processes and power hierarchies. These mobilities and tendencies revealed remix as an emergent, iterative, collaborative, critical practice with transformative possibilities for openly networked web-mediated professional learning.
In participatory cultures, the lines between producers and consumers of text are blurred, and communities emerge that are based on shared interest and peer support. Although literacy scholarship has mostly focused on youth engagement and literacy practices within online participatory cultures, scholars in the learning sciences investigate these ideas through connected learning. This article explores bringing connected learning principles into English classrooms and examines how one high school, partnering with the National Writing Project, redesigned their senior English course and senior capstone project around connected learning. The authors highlight its design and share students’ experiences with the project to illustrate the possibilities and tensions around designing for such a project in school settings.
The WAC Clearinghouse supports teachers of writing across the disciplines. Hosted by Colorado State University, it brings together scholarly journals and book series as well as resources for teachers who use writing in their courses. This book is available in digital formats for free download at wac.colostate.edu.
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