Julien S. Murphy

Unpacking MOOC scholarly discourse: a review of nascent MOOC scholarship

The rapid rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) signals a shift in the ways in which digital teaching and learning are engaged in and understood. Drawing upon a comprehensive search of nine leading academic databases, this paper examines the initial phase of MOOC scholarship (2009–2013), and offers an analysis of these empirical studies that conceptualizes themes in MOOC scholarship and locates them within a chronological framework. Two key phases of scholarship about MOOCs are identified, each with associated research imperatives and themes. Phase One: Connectivist MOOCs, Engagement and Creativity 2009–2011/2012. Themes of Phase One include: development of Connectivism as a learning theory, and technological experimentation and innovation in early cMOOCs. Phase Two: xMOOCs, Learning Analytics, Assessment, and Critical Discourses about MOOCs 2012–2013. Themes of Phase Two include: the rise of xMOOCs, further development of MOOC pedagogy and platforms, growth of learning analytics and assessment, and the emergence of a critical discourse about MOOCs.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) was an American philosopher of the late nineteenth century; she was also the first woman minister to be ordained in America and preach before the Civil War, a suffragist, poet, and novelist. Blackwell’s philosophy comprises six books. The most extensive, The Philosophy of Individuality, presented an elaborate cosmology of mind and matter as dual aspects of Nature. Also of interest are her works The Physical Basis of Immortality, which parallels the indestructibility of selfhood with the indestructibility of matter, and The Sexes Throughout Nature, her critique of sexism in theories of evolution. In her philosophy, Black-well brought together strands of evolution with a natural philosophy shaped by Newtonian physics and inspired by the Christian faith. Besides being deeply engaged in writing philosophy, her life was also that of a preacher, a public speaker active in the suffrage, temperance, and abolition movements. Three moments frame Blackwell’s public life. First, her fight for ordination, which began in childhood, peaked at Oberlin, and achieved success in a small New York Congregationalist parish.

The Body with AIDS: A Post-Structuralist Approach

The epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is one of the most significant threats to health in the United States in the latter part of the century. While medical researchers scurry to find ways to arrest AIDS-related infection in the body, scholars in the humanities have been at work analyzing a crisis of representation in academia, manifested by recent theories of interpretation (e.g., deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-modernism). In the epistemic epidemic, the vitality of our conceptual framework, the ways we know, and the means by which we interpret cultural experience are under siege. These two epidemics have much to do with each other, not only because of their synchronicity, but also because breakthroughs in ways of understanding cultural experience affect our interpretations of health and disease. One person whose life was caught up in both epidemics was Michel Foucault. Foucault was a leading French post-structuralist, perhaps the most notable French philosopher since Sartre. He was also involved in gay liberation struggles and the first intellectual of international importance to die of AIDS, a disease that is, not infrequently sexually transmitted, and in the U.S. was first diagnosed in and disproportionately affects gay men. Foucault’s death brought to an end his three-volume study of sexuality, a work which leaves no hint that it was written during an epidemic, and bears no mention of sexually transmitted disease. Yet, his writings on the whole lend themselves to analyses of the AIDS epidemic.