Yenn Lee

A Hashtag Worth a Thousand Words: Discursive Strategies Around #JeNeSuisPasCharlie After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Following a shooting attack by two self-proclaimed Islamist gunmen at the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, there emerged the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie on Twitter as an expression of solidarity and support for the magazine’s right to free speech. Almost simultaneously, however, there was also #JeNeSuisPasCharlie explicitly countering the former, affirmative hashtag. Based on a multimethod analysis of 74,047 tweets containing #JeNeSuisPasCharlie posted between 7 and 11 January, this article reveals that users of the hashtag under study employed various discursive strategies and tactics to challenge the mainstream framing of the shooting as the universal value of freedom of expression being threatened by religious extremism, while protecting themselves from the risk of being viewed as disrespecting victims or endorsing the violence committed. The significance of this study is twofold. First, it extends the literature on strategic speech acts by examining how such acts take place in a social media context. Second, it highlights the need for a multidimensional and reflective methodology when dealing with data mined from social media.

Paragogy and flipped assessment: experience of designing and running a MOOC on research methods

Abstract This study draws on the authors’ first-hand experience of designing, developing and delivering (3Ds) a massive open online course (MOOC) entitled ‘Understanding Research Methods’ since 2014, largely but not exclusively for learners in the humanities and social sciences. The greatest challenge facing us was to design an assessment mechanism that was (i) rigorous yet practicable at scale, vis-à-vis over 60,000 students from highly diverse backgrounds; (ii) compatible with the pedagogical orientation of the MOOC provider; and (iii) meaningful to the nature of the course subject. Based on a network analysis of forum interactions and a qualitative analysis of a random sample of 116 research questions proposed by students, we explore how participants’ understanding of research methods developed through a series of carefully sequenced ‘e-tivities’ and ‘open peer assessments’ over the duration of the course. The aim of this study was to consider a model of ‘flipped’ assessment, drawn from elements of ‘paragogy’ and the IR Model that acknowledges and exploits peer learning opportunities that are not routinely captured by completion statistics.