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Review of Knox J. (2016) Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education Abingdon, Routledge, 223 pages.

This is a book that makes you interested and passionate about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in ways you might have thought impossible.

It undermines the assumptions of every learning theory and digital education practice that you know by focusing on the harm done in the name of a defence of the 'human' from ‘contamination’ by the non-human (whether animal, machine or algorithm). Its key attack is on theory and practice that is ‘immunised’ (the medical metaphors are consistent) from the ‘monster’ of this very guarded and very ideological ‘subject’. Knox argues that 'humanity' is a concept tied to a highly specific form of ideological being in society – one that comforts itself from attack by what it perceives as the ‘monster’, threatening it from without and, sometimes, within. It is against this almost viral monster that it immunises itself in order to defend the notion of an individuated autonomous subject, who is the learner, and the comfortable notion of ‘community’ (‘social presence’ in the OU version) with which it defends itself against imagined attack. These notions are not only ideological, they are fictions that mask ugly realities – those that suppress dissent against the basic structures of the status quo by colonising anything that is other to itself – in global terms by ‘data colonisation’ (p. 53) by the institutions which uphold the MOOC as a means of global homogenisation and the uncritical spreading of the values of elite education.

Look, for instance at this brilliant analysis of how and why the phenomenon of ‘lurking’ becomes the focus of digital education theory and data analytics (in connectivism as well as preceding applied learning theories) and the sinister implications of its name:

“silence is recast as non-participation; a negative relation that presumes the need to overcome its undesirability and conform to the natural state of cohesive community participation. Thus, while seeming to accommodate lurking …, this stance tends to normalise difference and retain a core, authoritative mode of conduct.” (Knox 2016:109)

And more importantly, it shows how participation is experienced by participants as the pull (even organised within their own subjective state) for a safe and guarded space that saves them being ‘overwhelmed’ by the monstrous un(in)humanity of the digital algorithms that organise cyberspace and the relations of people who inhabit this uncomfortable underspecified place. Hence the need for fictive communities, safe groups and even a nameable ‘space’ with which to identify – such as Kelly House at the centre of ModPo, Pennsylvania’s transnational centre for Modern Poetry study. In an OU course I teach on, there is an attempt coming from above and below to name forum spaces by identifiable archetypes based on the hierarchical architecture of traditional universities – Junior Common Rooms (or coffee bars), Senior Common Rooms (or staffrooms) and clusters (classrooms).

Likewise Knox clarifies why there is in such circumstances fear of uncontrolled and unsupervised spaces (like Facebook student spaces) and why a Masters module I am currently studying makes ‘Netiquette’ a required knowledge and practice. Like dining etiquette, such formalisations of safer interactions maintain differences necessary to hierarchical systems. Lewis and Kahn (2010 cited Knox 206:109) the control of ‘excess’ – that characteristic of interactions that don’t ‘make sense’ from the parameters of the ‘requirement for stability and order’. Noise and interference can be being socially noisy (and insistent on a point) as well as reluctant to speak at all. Edinburgh’s Digital Education MOOC (EDCMOOC) is characterised as itself monstrous – and often appealed against by learners who run scared of it during the process, who are quoted throughout. The figure of the monster is like the ‘return of the repressed’ in Freud, Lacan and Althusser (for old people like me):

“a way of discussing aspects of the human condition that are rejected as undesirable and external to the purity of the community, yet which return as factors always and already within life itself” (Knox 2016:168).

In a review, what appears abstract and over-intellectualised is quite the reverse in Knox’s insistent but beautiful and careful academic prose. The monster contains that expelled from the abstract ‘human’ of the eighteenth century rationalists: the animal, the body, the machine, and the impersonal of a digital process.  In these we re-find humanity as something newly emergent if we are to find it at all and I find this appealing and very readable (more than I can make this review).

This book celebrates genuine hybridity that causes a reformulation of the meaning of what are sometimes thought of as innocent practices: like making ‘social presence’ primary to the MOOC or even assessment (the heroic St George aiming at the exclusion of the dragon-monster). Assessment has to be rethought after reading this book, and not only in the MOOC.

“an independent, private, and concealed exercise that is uniform and standardised. …practices associated with social interaction or collaboration are marginalised”. *Knox 2016:76)

You will not regard ‘data analytics’ either in quite the same way after reading this, especially in the context of McDonaldization (p. 75).

Innovation in Open and Distance Education is not an open field but a battlefield (at least ideologically).