Day 6 - Digital Culture (MACRO, NOT micro!!) #edcmooc

Last night I found the area of the discussion boards which contains the "Made By You" section and there I found the 60+ area.  Since I am not yet 60, I hesitated to click on the link, but having 30+ years of teaching under my belt I thought I might have something in common with these people so I clicked and was immediately glad that I did.  The first thing I saw was a post which voiced something that I have felt every since I started teaching online. It said, "Just turned 63 - it's difficult to believe. Am training in learning to teach online and completely resisting video. My self-image is still 33.....but then I look in the mirror..."

Personally, I have taught since I was 23 when my students seemed old to me...now they are younger than most of my children, and my self image is still in my mid-twenties. (I'm sure this has a place in our course under the umbrella of "digital culture!") But also in this 60+ discussion board was a video made by a classmate on her iPhone and it was so simply beautiful and un-self-conscious that I was inspired to "go for it" and make a video on MY iPhone.  

I want to address the point that when I signed up for this MOOC, I really expected something quite different.  The term "digital cultures," to me, had a more “micro” definition.  I thought we would be studying digital culture or even "community," as it applied to an online course or MOOC. Now, the MOOC we are currently taking has MUCH online community.  There’s a lot of interaction between the students, there's a lot of different ways that networking is occurring. There is a feeling here of connectedness--that’s more what I felt we would be studying--how it applies to a MOOC environment, but I was wrong.  This is a much more “macro” interpretation.  We are talking about digital culture as it applies to humanity as a whole.  Yet this too, is very interesting to me.  I have never really studied this academically. It’s been around me my whole life, of course, but I’ve never really looked at it from an academic perspective so I’m very excited by the contents of this course and after studying this academically, how I can apply this on a more “micro” level to my own online courses.

So here is my video summary of the first week of EDMOOC, wrinkles, under-eye bags, and 30+ years of student concerns (oh, and I don't sound like this in my head, either!!):