CARTOGRAPHY OF CONTROVERSIES

ABOUT MOOCS

MD. SAIFUDDIN KHALID AND ELSEBETH K. SORENSEN

KHAL ID@LEARNING.AAU.DK & ELSEBETH@LEARNING.AAU.DK

AALBORG UNIVERSITY, DENMARK

Global Learn Berlin 2015: Global Conference on Learning and Technology "The Local Global Conference"

16-17 April, 2015

Outline

• Introduction

• Motivation and Scope

• Objectives

• What Comprises a Controversy

• ANT and Cartography of Controversies Method

• Digital Techniques: Constraints and Facts

• From a Framework of Controversy-website to

Framework of Research Paper

• Mapping controversies about MOOCs

• Conclusion and Future works

Introduction

• MOOCs (e.g. Edx, Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, FutureLearn,

P2PU, Moodle, MIT’s OCW, etc.) are educational

technologies: highly debated issue, polarized among

proponents, boosters, skeptics, and opponents.

• “Cartography of controversies” is a method that guides the

application of actor network theory (ANT) and originated from

science and technology studies (STS) discipline.

• “Adopted and developed in several universities in Europe

and the US, the cartography of controversies is today a full

research method, though, unfortunately, not a much

documented one” (Venturini, 2010, p. 258).

• The method is documented for website production as the

medium of communication but not as a research paper (see,

fx, Venturini, 2010).

Objectives

• To adopt the cartography of controversies method in the

fields of education and educational technology.

• This paper documents and demonstrates how

controversial issues can be documented by using the

method cartography of controversies and proposes that

such investigations can be reported as a genre of the

scholarly article.

• It includes observations and explorations of the contents in

the online digital media and analyzes of the nature of

controversies about MOOCs.

• It demonstrates the application of some of the digital tools

for the data collection and analyzes.

What Comprises a Controversy

• MACOSPOL: Controversy is every aspect of a science

and technology concept or product that has not yet

stabilized.

• Simply put, “controversies are situations where actors

disagree (or better, agree on their disagreement)”

• “[I]n the widest sense: controversies begin when actors

discover that they cannot ignore each other and

controversies end when actors manage to work out a

solid compromise to live together.” (Venturini, 2010, p.

261).

What Comprises a Controversy (Cont.)

• Five features of social controversies (Venturini, 2010):

1. “Controversies involve all kind of actors, human groups/beings and non-human actors” (e.g. technical and scientific artefacts, biological and natural elements and etc.),

2. “Controversies display the social in its most dynamic form” (i.e. an actor can break into a network and a heterogeneous network can coalesce to function as an actor),

3. “Controversies are reduction-resistant” (i.e. context dependent and non-generalizable) and “the difficulty of controversy is not that actors disagree on answers, but that they cannot even agree on questions”,

4. “Controversies are debated” (i.e. taken-for-granted ideas are questioned and discussed),

5. “Controversies are conflicts”, not necessarily involving fights (i.e. actors with different levels of power struggle to reverse or conserve social values and opinions.

• A good controversy is not (1) cold, (2), past, (3) boundless, or (4) underground, that is, open to public debate.

ANT and Cartography of Controversies

Method

• Latour et al. “attempts to create a new research tool, to

follow the dynamics of science and technology. ‘Socio-

Technical Analysis’ develops new quantitative indicators

and graphic representations with which to map the

development of a scientific controversy or a technical

innovation.”(1992, p. 33)

• Venturini (2010), a student of Latour, elaborates

• how to explore controversies with actor-network

theory

• how to represent controversies with digital methods

ANT and Cartography of Controversies

Method (Cont.)

Venturini’s five layers of controversy and observation

lenses:

• From statements to literatures

• From literatures to actors

• From actors to networks

• From networks to cosmoses

• From cosmoses to cosmopolitics

Digital Techniques:

Constraints and Facts

• A search engine does not search the whole web;

• the content on the web does not include all the content

on the Internet;

• the content on the Internet only a subset of the content

in the digital media;

• the digital content is a subset of the data in the World.

From a Framework of Controversy-

website to Framework of Research Paper

Framework for controversy website comprising 9+1 layers

as a pedagogical tool to facilitate university students as a

deliverable alternative to project report (Venturini, 2012):

1. The glossary of terms and non-controversial elements.

2. The document repository.

3. The analysis of scientific literature or Scientometrics.

4. The review of media and public opinion

5. The tree of disagreement

6. The scale of controversies

7. The diagram of actor-networks.

8. The chronology of the dispute.

9. The table of cosmoses

10.Perform public debate

Mapping controversies about MOOCs

Layer 1. The glossary of terms and non-controversialelements.

• xMOOCs: e.g. Udacity, Coursera, edX

• cMOOCs: constructivist pedagogical model, learnerautonomy, includes – LMSs, wiki and web pages.

• quasi-MOOCs: e.g. Khan Academy and MIT’sOpenCourseWare (OCW)

Layer 2. The document repository.

• Public access: http://tinyurl.com/nh6qy58

Layer 3. Scientometrics

Analysis on 340 documents; Scopus search result from queryusing ”MOOC AND massive open online course”

Layer 3. Scientometrics

Figure 1. MOOC documents in

Scopus by subject area

Figure 2. MOOC documents in

Scopus by type

Layer 3. Scientometrics (Cont.)

Figure 3. MOOC papers by authors from

developed countries (affiliation inst.)

Figure 4. MOOC papers by authors from

developing countries (affiliation institution)

Figure 5. Main authors, keywords and sources (actor-networks) in relation to MOOC

documents in Scopus

Layer 3. Scientometrics (Cont.)

Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion

Figure 6 Interest over time on “MOOC” and “MOOCs”, including news headlines

linked to alphabets

Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion (Cont.)

Figure 7. Regional interest using the term

”MOOCs”

Figure 8. Regional interest using the

term ”MOOC”

Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion (Cont.)

Figure 9. Partial view of the actor-network mapping of Twitter hashtag #MOOC

Layer 5-9: Work-in-progress

Example of analysis approach, considering one of the news

articles from Google trends graph

Layer 5: The tree of disagreement

• 1. Can MOOCs fill gaps for high schools students in relation to

their needs? 2. Should high schools students gain credits for

participation in MOOCs?

Layer 7: The diagram of actor networks

• Actors: EdX, Coursera, secondary education students, and St.

Margaret’s Episcopal School.

Layer 9: Actor-ideology representation by the table of cosmoses:

• Education sectors, under which there can be higher education

and Secondary education.

Layer 8: The chronology of the dispute.

Layer 10: Perform public debate (excluded)

Conclusion and Future Work

• The paper takes the point of departure from the STS

discipline applying the theory of ANT by recently devised

cartography of controversies method to explore the

Internet-accessible media.

• We discuss a 10-layer framework published by Venturini,

one of the students of Latour, as a way to adapt the

framework suitable for academic publication genre,

instead of a making a website.

• We covered the first four layers of the mapping in

sufficient details but could not include some of the

network analysis, and summarized the approach being

applied to the rest of the work-in-progress layers (i.e.

layer 5-9).

Conclusion and Future Work (Cont.)

• The controversy of MOOC is considered as a case

• Data collected from Scopus, Google Trends, Twitter and

the Internet of website (using URL Harvester and

Crawler Tools),

• Presented the cartographies by using Scientometric

analysis tools (i.e. Scopus, ScienceScape and Excel)

and network data collection and various visualization

tools (NodeXL, Google Trends, Navicrawler, Gephi,

OpenHeatMap).

Questions and Comments

For access to the paper, references, and to raise questions/provide

feedback please visit:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275023999_Cartography_of_Contr

oversies_about_MOOCs

Citation: Khalid, Md. Saifuddin, and Elsebeth Korsgaard Sorensen. “Cartography of Controversies aboutMOOCs.” In Proceedings of Global Learn 2015,

2015:25–35. FernUniversität in Hagen, Regionalzentrum Berlin: April 16-17, 2015:

Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 2015.

http://www.editlib.org/pv/150845/.

Access to the Author Version

of the Paper, via Researchgate