This essay examines how remixes that combine human rights footage with popular songs complicate our understanding of the relationship between media production and civic participation. We argue that editing and compositing complicates establishing the authenticity of source material and that rapid dissemination of digital files through distributed networks may compromise the agency of victims. Furthermore, we raise questions about how so-called “conflict porn” that depicts graphic violence is received by Internet audiences. We offer a number of basic ethical principles for remixers of citizen journalism to consider in the post-Arab Spring milieu.

As has been apparent for the past several months, MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courseware) have emerged as a powerful contender for the next new education technology. Yet the landscape of education technology is littered with the remains of previous technological breakthroughs that have failed to live up to their initial promise, or at least their initial rhetoric. Is anything different this time?We strongly believe the answer is yes-this time really is different. Several MOOCs have been run during 2012 that have taught many thousands of students in a variety of topics. This panel will be a chance to review and discuss the short but engaging history of MOOCs, reviewing data from several MOOC instances, critically assessing what's happening and why things are different. Are MOOCs really a qualitative change in the way education can be delivered, or is it merely another new wrapper for old content. We believe the human experience of online education is about to change; we should understand the issues behind the phenomena.

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Most readers of this volume are likely familiar with the distinctive history of massive open online courses (MOOCs). Their rapid expansion contrasts with the more steady expansion of higher-education technologies in prior decades, punctuated by small bursts around the advent of computers, personal computers, multimedia computers, and the Internet. The pace of change quickened around the turn of the century with the open education movement that laid some groundwork for the modern MOOC. The acronym itself was coined in 2008 for an open course on "connectivist" learning offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. MOOCs exploded in 2011-12 with Udacity, Coursera, edX, and others, suddenly enrolling tens of thousands of students around the world in free courses designed around the instruction of prominent academics. This outpouring of attention, investment, and learners was unprecedented in higher education. Even as the New York Times dubbed 2012 "The Year of the MOOC" (Pappano 2012), the backlash against MOOCs was already underway. Many observed that the streaming videos and quizzes that dominated the newer MOOCs represented relatively shallow ways of interacting with content (e.g., Kays 2012; Marks 2012; Pope 2012). The acronym "xMOOC" (variously for eXtended or eXtension) was introduced to distinguish these newer offerings from the earlier networked and interactive courses advanced by Siemens and Downes, which quickly came to be called "cMOOCs" in response. Some observers had already commented on the difficulty of connecting with other learners in the cMOOCs (Mackness, Mack, and Williams 2010). It turned out that supporting social interaction in the xMOOCs was proving much harder. An effort to include more interaction and group projects in a Coursera course on online learning was widely cited for going "laughably awry" 1

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