Hacking The Classroom Rethinking Learnin

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Hacking the Classroom

Rethinking Learning through Social Media Practices
Gtz Bachmann and Nishant Shah, ICAM, Leuphana University, Lneburg, Germany.
Social medias ubiquity is transforming contemporary education. Students inhabit

classrooms with connected devices, streaming data, chatting on personal messaging, and
sharing information with invisible audiences. The academic curriculum is challenged not
only by social media resources, but also by novel, complex practices of producing,
organising, evaluating and distributing knowledge. Some have taken the emergence of
these connected learning environments as questioning the very need of a physical
classroom. We seek to unpack the dynamics that social media generate in academic
teaching, thinking, and learning without severely compromising the pedagogic impulse and
intentions of learning. Consequently, this paper begins with a look at the rapid rise and
even faster decline of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with the aim of identifying
some of the pitfalls for attempts to re-think higher education in the light of social media.
The second part of this paper proposes that the classroom was historically constructed
with and in relationship to technologies of knowledge production, thus questioning the
dissociation between the pedagogical practices and technological conditions of learning.
This leads into an exploration of some of the modes of engagement in user generated
content platforms, which have potentially fruitful resonances in higher education
This is a pre-publication draft. There might be some differences in references, footnotes, page
knowledge infrastructures and pedagogy: We explore verification by examining Wikipedia,

look at conditions of speech and assessment through the lens of Bulletin Board Systems,
examine registers of sharing and labour through Facebook, and reflect on content curation
through Twitter. The third and last part of the paper argues that analysing and
conceptualising social media can become a test field for experimental knowledge in
management education.
As a name for this endeavour we suggest the metaphor of hacking the classroom. While
MOOCs have significantly added to expanding the scope of traditional learning, most
MOOCs still anchor in metaphors of the physical classroom. This approach makes sense,
because it seeks to learn from centuries of innovation in teaching and learning methods
that have vitalized the classroom. However, it also produces a pitfall, indeed a paradox
effect: In constructing the classroom as something, which is on the one hand to be
protected, and on the other hand is now extended through technologies, it conceptualises
the classroom as a non-technological precursor to the MOOC, constructing a false history of
an a-technological past, which then, in turns, is prone to produce impoverished virtual
copies. Hacking the classroom, contrarily, suggest that practices and infrastructures,
which have evolved with contemporary technologies, have the ability to hack the classroom
in fundamental and productive ways exactly because the classroom has always been
grounded in technologies. Hacking, in physical computation, refers to the dismantling of a
system in order to identify the processes and components that make it work as a single
seamless unit. Hacking is a process of disarticulation, of locating the joints, of

understanding the logic and logistics that go into the making of a system. To hack a
classroom is not to break it, replace it or upgrade it, but to understand some of its key
functions and to reimagine, reconfigure, and recreate them. It is an ongoing process that
lays bare the power and privilege of those who can hack, but also imagines users as actors,
thus enabling multiple approaches and viewpoints, and offering the hackers new choices
between disabling, reassembling and modifying their classrooms.
1. After MOOCs: Learning from a bursting bubble

Like many Internet trends, the MOOC, or the Massively Online Open Courseware, has had a
long history in a very short time. The New York Times declared 2012 as the Year of the
MOOC celebrating the potential of Massive Open Online Courses to create unrestricted
participation in education for a wide range of people by building Open Educational
Resources and Learning Management Systems. Looking at the accelerated rate at which
prominent and well-funded online open courseware programmes were being launched by
some of the largest American universities as well as private companies like Coursera and
Udacity, there was a great excitement at imagining the MOOC as challenging the brick-andmortar University structure. MOOCs, as new spaces of learning, were quickly posited as
replacing the classroom, thus responding to a particular and longstanding narrative of the
University in Ruins (Reading, 1996) that describes the university as inadequate and in
need of change to become more open and accessible for new and non-traditional learners.
When Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander coined the term Massive Open Online
Courseware in 2008, they drew from various histories of attempts at opening up the gated
knowledge compounds that the traditional university had come to embody. Experiments in
distance learning,1 connected learning2, distributed learning3 and other broadcast based
1
Keith Harry, Magnus John and Desmond Keegan (1993) point out that despite the technological
advancements, the two problems that stay at the centre of Distance Learning models are: 1. The
Location of the Student and 2. The communication between student-student, student-teacher and
teacher-student. Lee Ayers Schlosser, and Michael R. Simonson (2009) locate four different axes at
the heart of Distance learning : 1. The academic institution within which the programme is housed,
which distinguishes it from Self-learning 2. The separation of the teacher from the student
geographically and temporally 3. Asynchronous and distributed interaction between the different
participants and 4. Availability of resources and the problems of relevance. These are all questions
that the MOOC challenges and addresses in new and different ways.
2
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (2012), the founders of the largest MOOC Coursera, talk about
connected learning as a shift from teacher-centric focus of education discourse to a learningcentred approach in their vision of the MOOC. However, Elizabeth Losh argues that their vision is
compromised by both, the hierarchical construction of their learning systems as well as the
episodic nature of MOOCs that does not support Life Long Learning which has been at the heart of
the interest-based, passion-driven idea of connected learning.
structures that imagined the university at the centre of a hub-and-spoke model all
coalesced and leapfrogged into the imagination of how the MOOCs would change and
reform the existing university system. As such, MOOCs stand in a long tradition of promises
implied in the wedding of the technological and the pedagogical. As Carolyn Mervyn (1988)
points out, almost all technological innovations tend to evoke the imagination of a dramatic
pedagogical and educational impact. This is particularly true of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs) that have premised the opening up of learning
possibilities across different information delivery systems ranging from correspondence
courses facilitated by postal services and radio enabled broadcast teaching, and direct
content delivery mechanisms ranging from Televised classrooms to Open Educational
Coursware (OECs)4 like Khan Academy and MIT Courseware.
3
Mary R. Lea and Kathy Nicoll (2005) propose that the notions of Distributed Learning are multiple
and varied, and inform the construction of the MOOC in different ways: the breaking down of
traditional boundaries of face-2-face and open and distance education; the development of
distributed learning environments; the changes in our own understanding of learning and teaching
as distributed practices; learning as a shared enterprise housed in multiple individuals and
locations; divorcing of learning from formal institutional settings; and the tensions of the global and
the local within which learning has to be located.
4
According to the report titled Giving Knowledge for Free The Emergence of Open Educational
Resources by the OECD and CERI (2007), the definition of OER currently most often used is
digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and
MOOCs set out to harness the power of the web to build a new approach to learning and
education. Early MOOCs were Extended Education experiments. Stephen Downes course
on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge in 2008 included 25 tuition-paying students
at the University of Manitoba, along with 2300 registered online students from a general
public, who paid nothing for it (Parr 2013). The course content was available through RSS
feeds, and the online students were required to participate in the course through
collaborative and participative tools like blogs, discussion forums, and virtual meetings in
Second Life. From such beginnings, MOOCs have emerged at a fast rate to form a new
paradigm for technological and pedagogical mergers. Most contemporary MOOCs operate
with a logic, where didactics and pedagogic value reside in its interface and participatory
design, work on a model where basic services are for free and additional learning
opportunity, resources, and customisation require for the student to pay premium fees
(otherwise called the freemium model), and execute an aggregation of online interactive
learning resources through Information and Learning Management platforms.
reuse for teaching, learning and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop,
use and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences. The report
suggests that open educational resources refers to accumulated digital assets that can be adjusted
and which provide benefits without restricting the possibilities for others to enjoy them.
Despite their growing popularity, MOOCs soon ran into a growing wave of critique. Some
commentators worried that MOOCs flatten the complexity, granularity and specificity of
human learning enshrined in traditional classrooms (Ragman 2013). Others pointed out
that MOOCs increasingly favoured skills and content delivery over committed and engaged
learning, thus ending up using the least interesting instructional modes (Kamenetz 2013),
and adding to the tendency of conflating higher education with vocational training. For
Cathy Davidson (2013), for example, the main reason of the MOOCs popularity with
university administrators is that they find their roots in the industrial revolution, thus
reinforcing rather than questioning the status quo of the contemporary educational
structures. This relates not only to the forms of learning, but also to the politics and
economy of access. While it is general consensus that MOOCs can give students from the
developing world access to hitherto unaffordable educational resources, Sharmila Rege
[2010) argued that the very construction of the crisis narrative that MOOCs are supposed
to solve, is symptomatic of a new power dynamic that responds to an unprecedented
appearance of dalit, female and queer bodies in public learning institutions. For Rege, it is
important to understand whose crisis MOOCs are resolving as they rewrite a political
question into a technological one, to create, once again, an elite educational learning space
of physical co-presence that can exclude learners marked by racial, economic, gendered, or
sexual disadvantage.
A further strand of critique targeted the parasitic arrangements between star academics,
universities, and often private providers. MOOCs looked increasingly like a game only a
wealthy few can play: The department of Philosophy at San Jose State University (2013)
argued in an open letter that the ability of universities such as Harvard of MIT to build and
develop MOOC environments creates new inequities of elites who have their own
professors and the outliers, whose access to public school professors is demeaned and
sought to be replaced by the remote access that MOOCs provide. Just as importantly,
MOOCs appeared increasingly disenchanting even when measured against their own
indicators of success. Extremely high dropout rates questioned their effectiveness, and a
closer look at their participants showed that they were taken mostly by those, who already
had advanced degrees. In the light of such results, even MOOC service providers became
cautious about some of the grander visions: The Stanford University based Artificial
Intelligence Professor, Sebastian Thrun, whose for-profit MOOC company Udacity is
considered to be one of the largest MOOC service providers in the world, has often
emphasised that MOOCs as they function right now need to be evaluated not for what they
are, but for what they can be. In the face of the research from University of Pennsylvania,
which had declared that MOOCs have failed, Thrun accepted that MOOCs, the way they are
designed right now, are better equipped for vocational training rather than for higher
education. It came to no surprise that critical digital scholars and online courseware
advocates soon started to make calls to think of learning and education beyond MOOCs
(Yuan et Al 2014.)
To conflate outreach and opening up of resources with the political and pedagogic practices
of learning in one big technological solution might be a mistake. As Wendy Chun (2013)
mentions in the Dark Side of Digital Humanities, MOOCs are characterised by a desire to
rewrite political and pedagogical problems into technological ones, into problems that
technology can fix. MOOCs have been caught in the paradox where they first emerged as a
critique of traditional structures, and are now being subsumed by those very
administrative and organization logics that take MOOCs as easy technological fixes to far
too complex and historically constructed pedagogical, academic, and societal problems,
instead of taking them as an opportunity to reflect on the question at hand (Ayers 2013)).
Anne Balsamo (2013) succinctly summarises the problem, when she says that MOOCs are
failed opportunities, when they merely rebuild what is available. It is therefore time to
remind us of Ashish Rajadhyakshas (2011) call for making a distinction between
digitalization and virtualization of the classroom. He argues that virtualization is merely to
render an existing form in a digital format whereas digitization offers an opportunity to
reconceptualise the form and providing systemic and foundational restructuring of the
roles, the processes, and the values that our universities stand for. It is Rajadhyakshas idea
of digitisation of higher education, which we now want to push forward further.
2. Pedagogy of social media: What could we learn, if we wanted to?
In this second part of this essay, we propose, that we frame our thinking in a much larger
historical and technological context for understanding the classroom. If the classroom is a
nexus that brings together the various knowledge interactions within the University based
knowledge ecology, we have to realise that the classroom is an amalgamation of learning
and technology practices since the days of simple Anamnesis techniques, writing tools and
systems, and rudimentary calculating devices, which then were slowly turned into the
assemblage of books, furniture, libraries and, indeed, the brick and mortar structures of our
universities. In other words, the classroom comes into being not only as a producer of
learning practices, but is also informed and shaped from its very beginnings by
technological models of knowledge production, consumption and distribution. Following
this argument, we suggest, that it might be useful to look at the classroom in the age of
social media, not as something that is an extension of the older form, but as something that
can be re-created hacked, if you will by looking at some of the key learning principles
that describe and shape everyday practices, structures and models of digital social media.
Instead of figuring out how to use social media in the digital learning environment5, we
therefore propose that the way to conceive of the digital post-MOOC classroom is to begin
by looking at some of the learning and knowledge-production principles embedded in
5
As is the trend in looking at concepts like blended learning, connecting learning, extended
learning, etc. which seek to incorporate the social media in classrooms, as if the two were discrete
and extricable entities.
influential social media spaces in a way we propose to go back to the early days of the
MOOCs, when similar ideas were playing out. These principles offer us new solutions to
older problems, and in the process also hack these problems through new interfaces,
designs and flows of information and knowledge. The following list of principles is not
exhaustive, comprehensive or definitive, nor is it meant to be a critical analysis of these
principles. While busting the ideological claims that accompany social media rhetoric is a
necessary task, it is not in the scope of this essay. Hence, we bracket the rich critical
discourse on social media, acknowledging its presence and usefulness, but not engaging
with it right now. Instead, we offer a symptomatic and a consciously affirmative list of its
learning and knowledge production principles, with the aim to open up new ways of
reconceptualising the classroom in the time of social media. Identifying learning principles
and modes of engagement stemming from cyber cultures might help understand the
classroom as a multi-modal, multi-media, affective, and sharing atmosphere.
2.A. The Question of Verification

As a start, we want to look one of the toughest questions that the classroom has to solve:
Verification of sources of learning, evaluation of lessons learned and skills acquired,
authentication of the provenance of knowledge, standardising templates by which
indicators of learning can be established, have all been debates that have structurally
informed and shaped the ways in which classrooms operate. The ways in which these
concerns have been addressed in traditional academia is to create broadcast based models
where the teaching, curating and evaluating are all rolled into the central figure of the
teacher, who then transmits information and learning to those in the class. Similarly,
centralised authorities like curriculum approval committees and review boards, become
the meta-centres, that replicate this hub-and spoke model. So endemic is this imagination
of traditional learning that all the activities, even those that expect students to take up
different collaborative roles, eventually subscribe to the idea of one-to-many
communication. Verification and rigour are embedded in everybody looking over/after
everybody else, enfranchised to pass judgement of value, worth and relevance.
With the emergence of Wikipedia in 2005, this particular model was quickly questioned. As
Wikipedians started engaging with the task of building the Sum total of all human
knowledge, that included not only lofty disciplinary summaries but also the aggregation of
all the whimsical, strange and banal that makes us human, they introduced a different way
of thinking about verification. Through self-organisation, detailed discussion, open
hierarchies and a unique system of consensus generation supported by the principle of a
Neutral Point of View[24] footnote is missing?, Wikipedia came and offered new ways of
thinking about the verification question. Wikipedia relied on folksonomies of knowledge
rather than taxonomies, thus encouraging people to find value in what they already know
and love and encouraging them to learn more and contribute to the knowledge entry on
Wikipedia. Instead of scouting only for experts, its system of cross-verification and factchecking allowed for 12-15 year olds writing for what has become the de facto global
referencing system. So strong was this process of multiple layers of iterative verification,
that it subsumed the different roles of digital systems like identification, authentication,
validation and verification, all into one process. It culminated, thus, in the famous
experiment conducted by Nature magazine, which showed that the number of substantial
errors in blindly selected Wikipedia articles was almost the same as articles selected from
Encyclopaedia Britannica (Giles; 2005)[25].
Wikipedia demonstrates the evolution of a model, which does not depend upon single
narrative structures that lend a stamp of authority upon a particular thing. Instead, it
evolved a knowledge commons built on good faith, endorsing a principle of Novice-Expert,
where people with particular passions, interests and knowledge were asked to edit about
things that they are deeply interested in, and learn of things they had never heard before.
While Wikipedia has come under critique for not allowing non-textual and oral citations as
well as original research in its structure, there is consensus that Wikipedia has contributed
to the reworking of knowledge engagements and interaction. It has proposed a new
paradigm of learning while teaching, and introduced models of discussion, debate and
consensus building that remain unparalleled across any other User Generated Knowledge
website. Taking this paradigm as an inspiration can initiate some immediate changes into
the classroom setting up etherpads, which enable collaboratively produced and edited
minutes during class is one simple example, cooperative editing Wikipedia pages as part of
assignments is a second one , but it can also lead us into questioning the ways we build
our curricula and frame and practice knowledge. A digital classroom that actually takes
these principles seriously, would look very different, not only in its structure, but also in
the ways it would help conceptualise the form and function of the body of knowledge that
is opening up, and imagine new roles for the bodies that engage within the knowledge
ecologies, with each other and the system. The teacher will have to be dismantled to
become a co-learner. Students will have to be imagined as stakeholders who construct and
add to the curricula building processes. Wikipedias form of verification is a two way
process of establishing accountability and responsibility that at least in parts eschews the
structures of authority and authorship that continue to inform our academic practice.
2.b. Speech and Assessment

While Wikipedia has content consensus as its ultimate goal and thus places the finished text
at its foreground, other platforms thrive on infrastructures of discussion, critique and
dissent, which Wikipedia glosses behind the finished article page. The wildest of those
platforms oriented towards a multiplicity of positions are undoubtedly the oldest:
Discussion and Image Boards, often still named after the long-gone technical solution
Bulletin Board Systems. They tend to order posts in topical threads, in the order of
appearance, and sometimes in nested threads that react to an initial thread. In the West,
4chan received considerable attention due to the big impact of Anonymous as a new form of
activist collective, but discussion boards are not to be reduced to 4chan: Its prototype, for
example - the Japanese board 2chan - still has an immense influence on the Japanese online
discourses. Similarly, the biggest online sphere in the world - the Chinese sphere - is
partially ruled by myriad board providers with thousands of boards popping up every day.
Many of these boards, prescribe in their architecture, in the interface design, in processes
of conflict resolution and the foregrounding of information and conversation, slightly
different versions of how information is designed and arranged, censored and contained,
and how interaction is accelerated or slowed down. Some boards privilege dialogical,
others confrontational and even others mutual affirmative forms of relating posts to each
other. Assessment is reorganised in Peer-to-Peer-Structures, based on use as well as on
evaluation, and often the collective assessment is fed back to other users in rankings.
Providers such as Reddit or Slashdot gain further possibilities of using status (often named
Karma) of its contributors as a motivation tool, ordering mechanism, relevance criteria
and possibility to further fine-tune its inner workings.
All these forms of arranging sociality have potentially huge implications for pedagogy. They
can provide us with new ways of enabling dialogue, dissent, affirmation, assessment, status,
speed, relevance and ordering of conversations. An example might demonstrate the
potential of such an approach: Many discussion boards use cultural techniques of
anonymity, ranging from the absence of clear names to the lack of pseudonym identity, or
the choice of making IP addresses accessible or not. Anonymity, in turns, is also a
fundamental principle of academic judgement on levels of both scholarly and student work.
But regimes of anonymity have much bigger potentials. They provide us with specific
conditions for speech as well as for assessment, which can be made fruitful on much larger
scales. It is possible to think of knowledge as information without signatures. Allowing
students to be identified but still be anonymous, collective rather than an individual, is a
good beginning point. The possibility of knowledge transactions through avatars, the
incorporation of anonymised safe spaces for discussion and comment through online
spaces help augment classroom structures and conversations. Similarly, setting up new
evaluation patterns that recognise the invisible labour - affective, material, intellectual,
social - that learners often perform and rewarding these through badges6 and documentary
practices that move beyond the fetish object of the final academic performance, might be
ways in which we learn to hack the classroom as a bulletin board.
2.C. Sharing is caring?

6
Take the example of Mozillas Open Badging Initiative, for instance, which allows the learners in
an environment to adopt a multiplicity of badges that recognise their different practices of learning.
Open Badges like these, help the learners to recognise their own modes of learning and also reward
different roles of connectors, distributors, nodes, sharers, etc. as important.
A lot of energy, in contemporary social networking universes, is on values and principles

that one abides by, in the quest of creating a new commons. These values are often
reflected in the visionary evangelism of the early web pioneers. Tim Berners Lee, for
example, hoped in his romantic manifesto for the World Wide Web that the Internet would
become a space for sharing. By now we know a lot about the problematic implications of
current structures tailor-build for primitive accumulation, big data analysis and mass
surveillance produced by this wave of sharing, and yet, sharing seems to remain one of the
principles that upholds our ubiquitous social networks and the quotidian practices they
house. Within the contexts of the traditional classroom, the desire to share and to
collaborate have been looked at as positive outcomes of good pedagogy (though the same
takes on a sinister note when framed as plagiarism or copying), despite the often
competitive models of learning which gear students towards a cut-throat race for resources
both in and outside of the classroom. Entire cultures of secrecy around research work and
finding, the extraordinary value put upon individual authorship, and the fight against
sharing texts by creating exclusionary knowledge spaces have all been a part of knowledge
cultures and industries. With the emergence of a sharing networking platform like
Facebook, we see a mass return to this idea of the commons, as compromised as it may be,
and its processes of sharing with fierceness are remarkable.
Platforms like Facebook invite users to enumerate, describe, quantify and endorse their
daily lives, relationships, thoughts, ideas and politics. The user, in the social network is not
just a producer of data. The user finds meaning to its articulations through sharing the data
that they produce. While sharing is caring, sharing is also currency. Examining the
ubiquitous Like button and the Facebook Feed which curates information based on
algorithms that determine interest, proximity, and relevance, might help us look at sharing
as a principle that cuts across a wide range of practices within the classroom. Users share
what they produce content and articulation. What we author on Facebook, is at the basis
of building our communities. While sharing of this data, mimicking the principles of open
access and open education movements, is not new, Facebook puts equal value on metadata.
Metadata is not the content, but the content about the content. Digital content is often
understood as merely the information that we see on our screens. However, all digital data
is accompanied by other protocols, rules, guidelines, and information sets, which determine
how this data will be read, circulated, shared, distributed, stored, and archived. For big data
networks like Facebook, the importance is therefore not in the human content but in the
algorithms of correlation, curation, and customisation that scan this data and create new
connections. This provides as second level of sharing: Not only what we produce, but also
what we like on Facebook, is a lead into engaging with knowledge. An iterative cycle of
liking that allows students to share resources from their locations and experiences outside
of classrooms could indeed produce wide-ranging effects.
2.D. Curating data about data
In his optimistic book Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007) has proposed
that the power of the social web lies in the ability of netizens to take an object and ascribe it
meaning, value and circulation, fuelling economies of virality and folksonomies and setting
up the hierarchies of attention economies. In the over-produced world of the social web,
where multiple digital objects contend for attention and interaction, the micro-blogging
platform Twitter produced one of the most intuitive forms of curating information and
making it relevant. Twitter, today is one of the most powerful tools of distributed
conversations that tend to be non-archival and relevant. Its hashtags, unlike Facebooks
Likes, are not just metadata. A hashtag has meaning, it carries particular information, and it
is a tool for generating interest. It is subject to mutation and morphing, and often performs
bridging roles, bringing together communities and readers in a common tweet. This
potential of uniting multi-stakeholder interests in common tags that can further travel, be
shared, and help to filter information is new. The hashtags ability to filter not through
brute text search but through intelligent interest groups, offers a new way of looking at
information parsing and processing in our online and offline classrooms. To imagine the
community of learners as producing new filters of querying the knowledge sets available to
them, and to be able to share those filters with each other, learning from what the others
have designed, might lead us to radically rethink inter-learner relationships.
This gets more compounded by the re-tweet endorsement that Twitter users get rewarded
for. In our traditional classrooms, students are not always encouraged to actually promote
each others work. Despite the strong push for collaboration and participation, the cultures
of solo-authorship and individual relationship with work are very strong. To think of a
community that is not only pushing out collective work, but also promoting the work of
others outside of the standard practices of citation and referencing, produces a very
networked way of constructing the classroom. Twitters real-time trending patterns might
also help the educators to understand evaluation parameters and processes in a more
nuanced way. Getting the students to condense their knowledge into bite-sized responses
and making it accessible, is a concern that we have historically shared. Putting an artificial
restraint to their articulations might help in managing their outreach and access better.
With each learning community, based on certain interests and similarities, there are some
topics and areas that might start trending within a classroom? Twitters trending analysis
might help the educator to leverage what is of interest to the learning group, but also focus
on things that are left out, in the group articulations.
Twitter, as a paradigm of thinking about knowledge engagement and acquisition, offers

hacks into our classroom teaching and learning processes that can be executed and curated
by the students. It produces shared semantic and temporal presence, and allows single
short knowledge snippets to form its meaning and value against such a background. If the
role of the digital is to convert memory into storage, then we are all archivists and
collectors. Students can be made critically aware of their own learning practices by live
documenting their learning processes, where instead of focusing only on final assignments
they learn to think of themselves as resource builders, knowledge infrastructures creators ,

and collaborative research and knowledge producers. Learners often create parallel
systems of curricula and conversations that hack their academic practices. Making these
hacks visible and encouraging them to participate through live streams in and outside the
classroom, through curating content as a critical exercise, and through supporting via
sharing are all processes by which the post MOOC classroom comes into being.
3. Social media as organisation: Using social media as a means to think

In part 2 we made some broad suggestions on how existing social media platforms might
provide us with techniques and metaphors, which can be employed for re-imagining
learning and pedagogy. This approach was based on the assumption that such platforms
provide us with new forms, how to organise experiences, sociality, motivations, (free)
labour, resources and knowledge. In our final remarks we want to use these assumptions
and read them against the grain: If social media organise experiences, sociality, motivation,
resources, labour and knowledge, they can be seen, in fact, as forms of organisations. With
organisation we mean here an idea of extended organisation: It includes not only the
entities that run the platforms (such as the Wikimedia Foundation or Facebook Inc.), but
also, for example, programmer communities that contribute to its development, users
sharing content and, indeed, all users, who provide the most valuable forms of all resources
at stake: their attention, commitment and data. The key idea of these last remarks is this: If
we take this overall complex assemblage as a new form of organisation, looking at such an
organisation can open up new ways of understanding organisations in general.
Applying such an approach to management education might start simple: Analysing

existing social media platforms with such a framework of extended organisation theory
might provide students with questions, case studies and insights that extend their existing
ideas of leadership, motivation or control, to name just a few examples. A more ambitious
approach would equip students in ways that would allow them to conceptualise social
media platforms themselves (Lovink and Rossiter 2013.) Such a task is not only an easy
way of winning students attention (there are few students, who have not dreamed up an
app). Once it is taken seriously, it also demands from students to understand and lay out
explicitly the forms of sociality they want to pre-organise, the experiences they want to
prepare, and the incentives structures they want to pre-configure all of which necessary
to get user interaction going. If such conceptual thinking is pushed further to the level of
design mock-ups, they would be able to start to understand the complex and multiple
demands of social media, which have to juggle many of such ambitions at once. If they
would furthermore make first steps to building prototypes most likely this would have to
be done in project teamwork with students of computer science degrees they would also
start to understand how programming front- and back-ends of an application or a platform
asks them to reduce their conceptual ideas to basic abstract, thus programmable logic.
This, in combination with the more predictable business plan, would most likely lead to
insights, which are not only directly usable in the development of new social media
offerings, but, more importantly, into a better understanding of organisational change.
While conceptualising social media platforms, students will have to leave at some point the
height of conceptual development from scratch: An experience that will enable them to
understand the complex patchwork of different protocols, most of them far beyond control,
that is any organisation. Understanding social media in such a way will equip student for an
age of complex ICT systems, such as, for example, logistical software, in which arguably the
organisation itself is partially transformed into software (Rossiter 2014) At this point it is
important to caution once more against imagining pre-ICT organisations a free of media. As
scholars from Cornelia Vismann (2008) to Ben Kafka (2012) have shown, organisations,
just as classrooms, have always been partially constituted by media. In understanding
social media as organisations, and organisations as partially constituted by media, students
and with them we as academic scholars might extend the idea of social media, too, and
start to understand all organisations as forms of social media.
Conclusion
It might be the basic featureless character of the classroom as a blank canvas that can be
moulded by pedagogic practices, which has made it resilient, and survive the various shifts
in the composition of our academic and teaching processes. However, this blank canvas is
always spanned in the frame of specific media technological conditions. That is not to say
that it is a passive site upon which technologies become operative. But neither can the
classroom negate changes in such technologies. Instead of only trying to figure out how we
accommodate social media in our offline and online classrooms which can sometimes be
reluctant, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes serendipitously generative we suggest
to see the classroom as an amalgamation of various technological practices that inform and
shape it, give it form and structure, and as such, can be hacked. Here, we have proposed
three directions: Firstly the search for new forms of online learning, which go beyond the
limits of existing MOOCs; secondly employing in offline as well as online classrooms, and
with or without the enhancement of digital technologies, social medias methodologies for
knowledge-generation and teaching, many of whom are participatory, decentralised,
collaborative, iterative and constantly subject to morphing and mutation; and thirdly
including into the curriculum the analysis and experimental conceptualisation of social
media, which can lead us not only into understanding social media, but also new modes of
organising as embedded in technology and organisation alike.
We suggest that these principles can be operationalised in hybrid classrooms, by

conceiving of distributed teachers, learners, resources and processes of learning. Hacking
the classroom produces recursive relationships between technologies and pedagogy, and
as such an infinite set of versions of teaching and learning. The three directions we
proposed online learning beyond MOOCs, learning about learning from social media, and
understanding social media in novel ways can re-enforce each other. It is hard to predict
the outcomes of such positive feedback, but one way to imagine the post-MOOC digital
classroom is as a space for distribution. If the premise of the traditional classroom was
consolidation - where different learning resources, the interaction between learners, the
transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student, and the performance of academic
knowledge and thought were brought together, then the post-MOOC digital classroom can
perhaps be thought of as carrying the promise of distribution. While we have already
established that the current MOOCs are robust digital information delivery systems
harnessing the strengths of the connected web, thinking of the MOOC as the first entry
point into hacking the classroom enables thinking about distribution at a different level.
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Hacking the Classroom

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