Seth Godin’s Tribes and the Connectivist MOOC

About a month ago, I read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why as part of a course I’m enrolled in, and found myself frustrated for a number of reasons. After reflecting on what I wished he had addressed, I realised that my concerns stemmed from my personal preoccupations with the politics of belonging and social inclusion. I began to wonder if other popular thought leaders addressed this politics in their texts on tribe-making, and decided that Seth Godin’s book Tribes was an appropriate starting point.

Tribes is more leadership manifesto than book, with spare prose, lightly sketched examples, and no end-notes. In a sense, it feels strange to so seriously critique a text that is meant more as a provocation than a playbook, but I decided to do it anyway.

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HW1.1: Bibliography proposal

Prompt: Write a short proposal for your annotated bibliography.

Response: My bibliography might seem to skitter laterally instead of burrowing into the fact of MOOCs themselves, but I’m interested in the genealogy of ideas, and I’m drawn to the mechanics of connectivist MOOCs and Dewey’s ideas for education that feed into them. I’d like to know more about other places where Dewey’s ideas took hold, and since my academic research looks at 20th century South Asia, and my work with Building Bridges uses the arts as a vehicle for baking social inclusion into education, I think working on this bibliography will help me articulate more clearly why my academic research and arts-based education work, while seemingly disparate, are rooted in my longstanding fascination with belonging and social inclusion. Constructive comments are welcome.

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