tis a really interesting discussion 🙂
And its one of the criticisms ANT levies at Lave and Wengers Community of practice model, for not only are we communities of practice, and our communities overlap, the ontologies we bring and how we act and are enacted in the world differ. I have to try to see how Stephen for example conceives of a group because his understanding, his experience and what he projects when talking of this, is sooo different to my own.
No doubt when others talk to me and find that i talk to my mobile phone and that it in turn translates what and how i say something before it deigns to pass this correspondence on to someone else is similarly bewildering. Then again my conversations with endnote could also be seen as odd, she is such a finnicky bitc# in that she does not like meeting with me on a mac or in dropbox and so screws stuff up… active sabotage for non windows players? Or when i see a sign made that has to state it is a human-readable format and i need to think about how bot friendly signs get configured for bots to talk to bots…or at least for computers to talk to bots maybe…
We assume similarities when we may be aligned but not necessarily working off the same page. What i value and what someone else values when they say ‘that was a good course’ is internally judged, we may or may not share the same value base. Even when “i wish the teacher spoke more” i might like the lilt of a voice and you might like the knowledge shared.

A practical example i heard from a fellow phder in the United Arab Emirates, he works in a country where oral traditions, memory and rote learning are highly prized; to recite the koran is something to be esteemed. And there he is teaching critical thinking and condemning rote learning as expressed accurately in the essays he marks. In a non democratic setting teaching critique may be an invitation to set students up for failing in the ‘real world’. Most intriguing is students who learn to hop from one ontology to another, especially where there are profoundly different ways of thinking and learning, and learning how to contain what is learnt but still being fluid at choosing what to enact, where and with whom. Do we prize teaching people how to be fractured? Adaptive? Do we fail those who cannot enter the dominant world view? Or who reject this dominant worldview?

All i ever know is from where i am in relating to others. To quote Donna Haraway: there is no God like view from nowhere.
and therefore, be it ever so humble, ANT, for now at least, is my home.
For me a mooc is a 3d ever moving tangle of consitutive relationships, and where the learning is distributed between actors- human and otherwise.