virtual flânerie chez MOOC

…late in the day or game of my life ~ figuratively speaking, but this flâneuse persona is off on another city jaunt...virtual flânerie in the form of MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses about cities.

The first, nearly over, is Technicity, and the other, in development and yet to start, is City MOOC.


Technicity is a Coursera xMOOC that I may or may not "complete" for a certificate I neither need nor care about.  Why break my dilettante student record? The course, tech oriented (surveillance, tracking, data, etc) oriented and designed for city planned has been interesting, informative and not a little disconcerting. The course is well structured with forum discussions avoiding the usual maddening chaos (virtual traffic jams?).  More about mapping and managing than any sense of place. As cityspace, would it be the Office of Circumlocution?

Networked Cities: World City Network


City MOOC is Fred Bartel's, announced as connectivist, #cityMOOC project that is still in its (chaotic) formative stages. Where Technicity asked participant to look at and select a project for their individual cities, City MOOC considers multiple cities, cities as like MOOCs ~ distributed networks, and presumably networked cities, nodes in a world city network as described by Castell and others.

There is a single webpage ~ an attractive facade with no real content yet, a #citymooc hashtag, a Google+ community (more interactive but not as open as a page). He is talking about guests, syllabus, weekly topics. We need networks, rounding up the ones we have, and curation.

My contribution to the distributed networks:

• this blog, the contrary flâneuse
• flânerie (Scoop.it)
• places along the way (Blogger)
• citylit & cityspaces (Pinterest)
• cityscapes & places (Tumblr)
• bookmarked city links (Delicious)
• city folder on feed reader