This may be redundant because I’m trying to start a similar conversation at ThatCamp MLA. But I’d be keen to meet up with anyone who’s interested in the problem of scale: How do we move from individual innovation with particular tools & practices to larger adoptions, at the level of a program, project, or even a campus? This might well be part of a conversation on MOOCs: Is there such a thing as a studio model for MOOCs, a MOOC that makes makers? If even the social or connectivist MOOCs aren’t the answer, and they likely aren’t, what kind of investment should departments, colleges, and universities be making instead? What would make the innovations of individual faculty more spreadable?
Along these lines, Emory is sponsoring a symposium in late January on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing. Key thinkers for the event will be folks like Jim Groom & Tim Owen at UMW, who plan to bring their Domain of One’s Own pilot campus-wide next year (h/t Croxall). Or Pete Rorabaugh and Robin Wharton of Hybrid Pedagogy. And Rebecca Burnett of Georgia Tech, whose Brittain fellowships have helped re-start the careers of many a humanist (she has won one of the Gates grants for a first-year writing MOOC–very curious to see what that will look like!).
My work with scale has been mainly with how it is construred by critical geographers, i.e. the seminal work of Sallie Marston on the social construction of scale, but this sounds like a topic that would be of great interest for a number of reasons.
This proposal is making me wonder if we need to have a discussion about MOOCs and how we as individual pedagogues can interact with them.
The idea of scaling from the individual or individual course to the larger, even campus-wide adoption seems like a separate issue than a discussion of MOOCs. I’m interested in the former–in what happens when the digital practices in one space become networked with other instances and practices. Shall I propose this separately, if this will move in the direction of the MOOC instead?