1.
CARTOGRAPHY OF CONTROVERSIES
ABOUT MOOCS
MD. SAIFUDDIN KHALID AND ELSEBETH K. SORENSEN
KHALID@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

2.
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

3.
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).

4.
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.

5.
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).

6.
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.

7.
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

8.
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

9.
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.

10.
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

11.
Mapping controversies about MOOCs
Layer 1. The glossary of terms and non-controversial
elements.
• xMOOCs: e.g. Udacity, Coursera, edX
• cMOOCs: constructivist pedagogical model, learner
autonomy, includes – LMSs, wiki and web pages.
• quasi-MOOCs: e.g. Khan Academy and MIT’s
OpenCourseWare (OCW)
Layer 2. The document repository.
• Public access: http://tinyurl.com/nh6qy58
Layer 3. Scientometrics
Analysis on 340 documents; Scopus search result from query
using ”MOOC AND massive open online course”

12.
Layer 3. Scientometrics
Figure 1. MOOC documents in
Scopus by subject area
Figure 2. MOOC documents in
Scopus by type

13.
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)

14.
Figure 5. Main authors, keywords and sources (actor-networks) in relation to MOOC
documents in Scopus
Layer 3. Scientometrics (Cont.)

15.
Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion
Figure 6 Interest over time on “MOOC” and “MOOCs”, including news headlines
linked to alphabets

16.
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”

17.
Layer 4. The review of media and public opinion (Cont.)
Figure 9. Partial view of the actor-network mapping of Twitter hashtag #MOOC

18.
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)

19.
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).

20.
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).

21.
Questions and Comments
For access to the paper, references,
and to raise questions/provide
feedback please visit:
https://www.researchgate.net/publicati
on/275023999_Cartography_of_Contr
oversies_about_MOOCs
Citation:
Khalid, Md. Saifuddin, and Elsebeth Korsgaard
Sorensen. “Cartography of Controversies about
MOOCs.” 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