This is the final project submission for CCK08. Thanks to George and Stephen for providing an extremely effective ecology for Connectivism and connective knowledge! Thanks also to all the participants who made this an enjoyable and thought provoking experience. Hoping that we will continue this dialogue onwards into the future.

YouTube video accompanying this project submission.

A special note for the musketeers – Carlos and Maru – thank you for your support!

 The questions that were asked of us and my responses are given below.

1. What is the quality of my learning networks: diversity, depth, how connected am I?

Extremely connected. Although I was unable to contribute as comments as frequently as I would like in the Moodle forum or CCK08 blogs, I think I managed to read/skim through a very large number of the forum and blog posts with the help of the subscriptions and the Daily. Maybe I need to be more involved in ideas that others propose to be able to interest others in mine!

However as far as learning goes, I think the blog posts themselves, rather than the sparse conversations through comments around most of them, served more as thought triggers. The Moodle discussions were real conversations though that provided a far greater diversity and depth. Diversity was immense though I did feel the lack of interaction with profiles similar to my own.

I think there was a lot of depth across all the weeks of discussion that the participants exhibited. This depth is really what made me understand the gaps in my own education. The biggest decisions I had to make was to balance the travails of running a company with the ambitions I had to transcend these gaps.

2. How has this course influenced my view of the process of learning (assuming, of course, that it has)?

This course, for me, actually started a few months before it did physically. I had been following up with George and Stephen’s writings and debates all over the web (started with Learning 2.0) and was very impressed and in-line with what I read and heard.

But for me, the real impact was not learning how connectivism was defined, was distinct and was impacted by a confluence of many theories/concepts, but the basic understanding that knowledge could really be connective and that learning could be the process of making connections.

I struggled with the technology bias because I usually resist that in whatever I do, despite being a technologist, but I think I am at peace now with the way George and Stephen approach it (especially from the last Friday session of the course).

This course has also exposed a number of factors to me that can influence (both engender and impede) connective learning, but has not yet gone more beyond the use of technology per se in the implementational aspect.

3. What types of questions are still outstanding?

The types of questions that are still outstanding are around:

  • Neuroscience – can the new developments really describe intelligence?
  • How would connectivism work in the strict absence of technology or language or even people?
  • What other theories are there that could impact connectivism as strongly as self organization, chaos and complexity?
  • What are *acceptable* practical ways of implementing the theory?
  • What kind of a perspective do toolmakers need to adopt when crafting PLEs or the next generation of tools?
  • What kind of open, autonomous ecologies can replace the structures of traditional classrooms – are these ecologies going to be sustainable and extensible?

Many more questions are more domain specific. I think each node in my concept map has covered an entire very large domain of research and thought that I need to explore in a structured manner.

4. How can you incorporate connectivist principles in your design and delivery of learning?

At this point, I am dealing mostly with corporate training. I can see how these could be applied, but the predominant question (and it comes from within the dominant paradigm) is how progress can be assessed and measured using designs based on connectivist principles.

With the work we (Servitium) are doing in simulations, we have taken a step away from the semantic web / RDBMS representation of knowledge to associative knowledge. We are using loosely connected “fragments” to create “patterns” of knowledge, but still need to research how the latest techniques in neurosciences (and AI) can help make these more explicit and sophisticated.

Another initiative we have taken is to make the design process itself connective through sharing and collaboration using blogs of training design in a way that is accessible by a variety of stakeholders. The results of that one are still to be obtained.