The Complexity

So here is why the problem is complex. By definition, if the learning process is open and the technologies and content on the basis of which the learning experiences are based are also open, this poses several challenges to assessing the process. It is not a controlled institutional environment and in many cases it is only a partial learning environment, suited to content (as of now) that doesn’t have supporting physical dependencies like LABs or for traditional classroom type group collaborative activities – i.e. more suited for digital self-sufficient learning processes. The other problem is formalizing a process that is inherently complex and chaotic. Furthermore, it requires resources, a challenge that the open movement has succeeded in surmounting in the creation process, but critically, not in the support process. There is also the problem of the digital, an affordance that the bulk of the global learning population has limited (if at all) access to.

The OER-U Model

The OER-U project focuses on a subset of these challenges. Open Collaboration (for learning) is constituted by four things: open curriculum, open design and development, open pedagogy and open student support. Educational Institutions are then playing the role of a service provider – open assessment services, open credential services and open community support. This is backed by the OER support infrastructure that comprises open business models, open ICT infrastructure and open student administration (a new term for me). The use cases range from OER based free self-directed learning to consuming fee-based services. Cost is a major concern and therefore two important things need to be pursued vigorously – use of technology to make the assessment process more efficient (automatic marking?) and pushing down the cost of any type of assessment (teachers in India get 2$ or lower per exam script, which in itself provides a great business case). Obviously quality assurance, a weapon of the establishment, finds its way into the project as a critical component while accrediting institutions.

The model paradox

The acceptability of the model is being promoted in comparison to the existing models. For example, for open assessment services to be credible, they “must be strictly equivalent to that for mainstream students” and therefore must involve a fee. My argument is that the world over, traditional assessment mechanisms (as also learning) have been criticised for their inability to assess students accurately and for their inability to provide a job-ready candidate. Even different components of the same system don’t really trust each other’s credentials (witness entrance testing and qualification tests like GRE and TOEFL which also serve an important need of matching limited institutional resources to most deserving students). In this, and many other senses, the OER-U model promotes a hybrid inside-the-box model, not an out-of-the-box open model.

Fearing the establishment

Part of the reason for this approach is fear. This is a new realization for me. It is the fear, as Rory remarked, that if this model takes off, the establishment (traditional universities) will mount a heavy offense (backlash) with quality as their main argument. As I think about it more, this fear has many other dimensions as well that OER proponents must contend with – acceptability by employers, acceptability by students, lack of government support and so on. And our thinking is often shaped by these fears.

These fears are real. But I would also like to point out the opportunity to do something new. World over, demand is exponentially outstripping available educational infrastructure and resources. We have the opportunity to seriously consider the emergence of other systems which are scalable, cost effective and open. We have the opportunity to master our fears. These other systems need not to be thought of in conflicting terms (either these or the traditional system), but as options to help a fast growing, often disadvantaged population to navigate around the systemic problems that plague the traditional systems.

For example, the open software / open source movement succeeded because it empowered software users. The term OER University conflicts, if there is a parallel intended, with that vision. It is like saying Microsoft should have open source initiatives (which it has), rather than saying that Microsoft should be open source. We have to think of models that empower our learners, our teachers and our employers rather than help traditional universities extend their reach as consumers and ultimate approvers of a new system. Of course, it doesn’t help that I am an incurable optimist, even as I write this!

Services in the model

So, apart from Open Assessment services, there are also Open Credentials Services. Again, by making participating institutions, and there could be other entities or individuals who should be included in scope, have to comply with having credible local accreditation, the model perpetuates the hybrid in-the-box approach. It lays the claim, further, to be a nodal organization for assessments, with any student being able to join, with any student being able to use open content and open support (from perhaps participating institutions and academic volunteers worldwide). The skew is then on assessment rather than learning and by definition, then, it differs from a traditional university in these terms because it removes formal teaching from the mix.  And assessments in this way involves many other challenges – proctoring and security, for example.

So OER-U is like a melting pot which brings students (learners), teachers, academic volunteers, institutions all together, but takes ownership over assessments. It is not a new model in that sense either. There are assessment and accreditation bodies across the world.

Stephen pointed out an inherent conflict because resources for learning are intimately connected with assessment design and development. This would lead to other formalizations such as a process for certifying additional resources (not necessarily) open and even creating a cadre of certified open support resources. Rory’s response, in the context of the university, was that it was a way surely of generate an alternate revenue stream, but was open to a more distributed approach, with this being one way that students could choose from. Also, he talked about quality in the context of teaching to the test and also talked of evaluating competency based models for assessments.

So what are possible directions for change?

In my mind, and since this is Change11, the change could come from various sides. The most important factors influencing change will neither be OER or technology, nor will change come from private players. Rather they will come from either the government or from an entire distributed movement that is able to capture mindshare and shape future systems.

Why I say government is because any new initiative whose outcomes are not clearly visible (except in the vision) and which entails a single window (democratic) decision-making in the face of risk and uncertainty, quite clearly has to be backed the government (our combined resources). The government is critical because it is responsible for creating the traditional system and the onus of change rests with it. By definition of democratic systems, the onus of convincing government lies within us. Of course there are challenges to make governments think and feel this vision, but it is not an impossible task.

Why I say movement, is equally obvious. The more we can take control of our own futures, the more the chances of change  actually happening will improve. Obviously too, there are challenges with this approach, and inherent contradictions, but isn’t that we are all already trying to achieve through our individual and collective efforts? Perhaps it needs to be more organized and focused.

An important feature of this change will be innovation in assessments in the OER context. Dave pointed to the need for students to be able to pass the test which is especially important professionally, so it would be important to design tests differently for different needs (for example, early learning assessment vs. late learning assessment). Some suggestions in the chat room also pointed to an absence in thinking of assessment types that we have been talking about in the past – like those covered in LAK11 (Learning Analytics), peer assessments, competency models, data trails and critical literacies. Obviously, when we are talking of open design of curriculum and content and learning environments, we must also focus on open design of and new forms of assessment.

He makes an important point – that the institutional leaders must be aligned, planned and strategic in terms of how they go about really leveraging digital technology and new pedagogies for the future. Structurally, both roles for the institution and a clear decision-making process must be in place – in short, a system of governance must be established. The role of course design is also extremely important. What happens is that costs in effect go up when introducing an online component because the face to face instructor time is not going down.

Which is really what most people would say when faced with the challenge of change. The standard response is a structured one – usually top down and systematic, backed by consultants (internal or external experts). This approach presupposes many different things:

1. Firstly, it assumes that the approach is scalable in terms of numbers. It is not. The sheer amount of intellectual resource and skill, investment, management time and development effort required does not by definition scale. Therefore the strategy of structure imposes constraints on the poor and helps make the rich richer. We don’t have enough skills to manage large scales.
2. Secondly, it assumes that such deterministic structures can help organizations gear up for the future and achieve goals such as cost reduction, higher retention and improvement in academic outcomes. In effect, it perpetuates the myth of structure being an effective solution for an acknowledged complex and chaotic system.
3. Thirdly, it kind of assumes that usage of digital technology will primarily drive these outcomes (though Tony has far more elements in the how). This is just one part of the picture. When people realize that the basic capabilities to bring about change do not exist in a majority of our institutions (which is also one prime reason for the lack of or difficulties in implementation of these structures), that is when real change will occur, in my opinion. For long, our focus on technology as the critical agent of change has been misplaced especially for entire countries who cannot hope to reach the technological sophistication of a developed country. I have asked the same question of connectivism itself – what would happen to it if the technology aspect was simply removed or absent.
4. Fourthly, it also perpetuates the absence of an important voice – that of the student. For long I have bemoaned the fact that academic institutions advertise brand, history, alumni, amount of space, high paying placements and other such things to attract/influence students. Very rarely would one see a student being marketed the course design process, or even exposing the student to that choice. When students don’t make the choice of an institution based on the strength of its design of the learning experience, something is seriously amiss. It is an assumption that students make on the basis of other factors. Students are assumed to be transient entities with no entrenched interests in furthering the quality of the institution itself.
5. Fifthly, the approach runs the danger of being a model of choice for institutions nationally or globally, without a true understanding of local contexts and constraints. It is a case of structure without the content, in this case.
6. Very explicitly, this assumes that the machinations of corporate consulting can be directly applied to an academic institution. I do have specific issues with there being a university COO or CEO, the main being that we, by default, are then tuned to thinking of a university to be run in a corporate fashion.

Tony says an important thing about ways to control costs. He says one of the ways is to transfer work to the students. I am not sure what that really means. If it means students using mobile devices to collect data or conduct interviews, how is it a transfer of work? If it means that teachers can use technology to cut down time spent on monitoring these activities, it is still not transferring work. Institutions do not give up the power to grade students even if they allow students to self-organize or collaborate on activities.

The second way is to use OER. While there is much hype about the OER phenomenon, how many open courses can really be used effectively (and I have raised this question before) by a teacher for her class? A senior university leader once told me that the content being produced by the premier institutes in India (the IITs – Indian Institutes of Technology) were of a quality not suited (read: too complex) for students to really understand outside the IIT-context. While writing on Can eLearning really scale?, I asked similar questions. While selecting pedagogies and instructional design methods, what is the danger of resurrecting what obviously has not worked so far in online learning? I see many examples of institutions taking a course online, but is there a way to measure how good that really is? And Tony makes a point for scale, when talks about the Socratic myth.

By focusing on pre-service training, Tony has hit an extremely important nerve center. I have a basic objection to the notion of pre-service, but that notwithstanding, I have made two points in the past. One, that our teachers usually go in without a clear understanding of what teaching really is (particularly at the HE level) with the focus being on academic achievement. Two, that even where there is a formal education degree, the same system is responsible for teaching teachers to think differently – our teachers are a product of the same system that they need to overturn or substantially reform (a point that Tony himself made). Such are the travails of this kind of structure. Tony also make an important case for training of educational administrators, equipping them with the necessary skills to make necessary decisions.

So the ultimate questions are (for this MOOCWeek):

• Can universities or colleges change from within, or do we need new institutions for 21st century learning?
• What would reformed or new universities/colleges look like?

Stephen asked a telling question – how would it work for MOOCs - something outside the context of the institution. Tony responded with the user choice of wanting accreditation – an alternative could be ePortfolios and employers educated to understand the value of these ePortfolios. Which strikes really at the heart of the entire debate on assessment/accreditation/competency that started with CCK. Stephen pressed on by asking if formal degrees could be awarded by institutions on the basis of MOOC experience. But isn’t asking the same structure to validate a MOOC a little strange in the first place?

I think, these are wonderful questions to be thought about today. There may not be a single answer (in fact, there won’t be a one size fits all solution), but we should focus a lot of thinking here. My belief is that we are near an inflection point, not there yet. So, thanks to Tony, for a real interesting presentation and discussion!

Although the presentation is titled Connected Knowledge, Collective Learning, Allison talks more about collective knowledge (which she defines as the knowledge distributed across people, machines, networks and artefacts) and Collective learning (the term used to describe learning processes that make use of this collective knowledge).

Collective Knowledge is then, the output of charting - connecting, consuming, creating and contributing by people. In her opinion, the individual and the network are indivisible and collective learning itself is emergent. Also, the individual views the networks, groups and collectives through the lens of her own goals.

Allison defines groups as composed of the individual, team, manager and colleague with similar skills. Network is broadly defined to include this group and external contacts, peers with similar goals and anyone.

The quest is to understand the inter-relationships inherent in groups and networks, understand the forces that bind individuals in their learning, understand the learning process, how collective learning can help improve outcomes at the workplace and the literacies required to achieve collective learning and how to understand how different resource types might  support collective learning and knowledge building.

Collective knowledge is defined as formal learning, libraries, dynamic knowledge (wikis), collaborative spaces, knowledge networks, smart information, your knowledge, shared and recommended resources. The Collective is defined as a combination of groups, networks and collective knowledge. The individual is as the center and connects with groups and networks, creates/consumes/contributes to collective knowledge. Goals may change/evolve over time and so may paths, Allison feels, and this where she says charting really helps.

Content is king for publishers, authors and institutions in the educational context. This is because, as equated to a textbook or interactive digital learning object, it represents structured interpretations of the domain, vetted through a process of academic scrutiny, and backed by the repute of the author. Often, it degrades into corrupt practices at the institutional level itself, but broadly users and subscribers to the content ascribe value to these outputs, both economic and academic. With open content, there is also a moral (access, freedom) argument. Like other things - LABs, classrooms, teachers, software systems and libraries – an institution treats such content as an essential foundation of learning.

Over time, with the digital variants emerging on new devices, the representation of content in educational contexts has also evolved, but the essential structure remains the same. It is perhaps apt to question the importance we give to the medium at this point. The textbook, as a constrained medium - as an imposition of structure on a non-linear learning process, as an output of decisions regarding the finiteness,  as a representation of the periodicity of the “semester” or the “term”, tied inextricably to the concept of the educational system, predicative of the level of learning & intellectual advancement – in effect, removes the conversation from learning and constrains the learning process in many other ways. It is also fairly impervious to context – both learner and environment. It is an attempt at standardization with personalization left to the wiles of the unsuspecting and often ill-equipped teacher. Wiley himself acknowledges the reusability paradox – the more context laden (read “richer”) a piece of learning content, the less it can be reused.

Taking a medium like this and making it open is as anachronistic as the first generation of eLearning – converting the textbook into interactive digital variants. So long as we consider the textbook as the foundation, we are condemned to operate within its constraints.

Stephen proclaimed the “end of paper” as a threat to the open content model. However, both the claims – of open content models and of the end of paper – are severely located in the context of these developments. It is easy to get carried away and ignore the main problems – that most of the growth in population of learners in the world is not going to happen in these contexts, which are already tanking on GER (Gross Enrolment Ratios). “Online” is still the preserve of the developed nation. The low cost tablet does provide a feasible alternative to the delivery challenge in other nations. The problem is that these other nations are swept away in the hype and perpetuate open content promises to an unresponsive or simply “unable” audience.

Wiley himself provides a possible solution, that of OSOSS (online self-organizing social systems). The “noise” in such systems often puts real world academics off, as also the debate between “academic and everyday knowledge”. But such systems are, by definition, complex systems. The only discordant note to me is the use of the word “online”, as the most relevant prefix. We have to investigate models where online is the most efficient possibility, but other models of conversation exist and are promoted. It is like going back to CCK08, when I asked the stupid question – what would happen to connectivism if the technology did not exist?  Can we think of a paradigm where the poor get richer than a model where the rich get richer?

Content is not just textbooks or eLearning courseware. But somehow, there is a lack of imagination (or perhaps we are still not that state of art), in conceiving options beyond these delivery-oriented keywords. Sure, there have been a lot of initiatives (like the MOOCs) that attempt to break this paradigm, and I hope they succeed in bringing the complexity perspective into education.

To really leverage open content, we must break away from the constraints of the textbook or the eLearning course. We must encourage diversity. For example, my idea of open content would be to take a concept and open it up to the entire world to write their interpretation of it. By implication, the context richness would provide many opportunities for non-linear real life learning. So instead of looking at content vertically (hierarchies of domain trees and curricula), publishers would look at it in a networked manner with clusters of self-similar nodes. In that situation, learners and teachers would both find it instantly easier to locate in-context learning content. In one stroke, then, the reusability paradox would also be resolved, simply through scale.

No real-world system today looks at content that way. The same way for search. If I want to learn about the reusability paradox and I respect David Wiley and Stephen Downes for their seminal ideas around it (top two articles on Google?), I should be able to access the network of content in and around their contributions, plus curations. So I am not searching a digital repository for keywords that an IMS standard predicates, but I am able to put a filter through nodes that are not content items to get to the content I need. And what if there was really an offline way of doing this, so that more and more people could learn that way?

In summary, please let us think out of the box and in a global context.

These myths are often repeated claims that have been made about connectionist systems, which when closely scrutinized, fail to be adequately justified, or properly qualified. In some instances, such claims are simply false.

The myths that he seeks to refute are:

1. Connectionist systems are in some sense ‘neural’ or ‘brain-like’ - We have heard often a likening of connectivist systems to be brain-like or with brain like properties. He references Churchland (1989: p. 160) who introduces connectionist networks as follows:
   

   The networks to be explored attempt to simulate natural neurons with artificial units…Each unit receives input signals from other units via “synaptic” connections…the “axonal” end branches from other units all make connections directly to the “cell body” of the receiving unit.

   Talking about Rumelhart’s claim about the close similarity of a connectionist processing unit to an abstract neuron, Berkeley states there is nothing like an abstract neuron. There are many types of neurons in the brain, so it is valid to ask which type of neuron are we abstracting the type from since the features and functional properties of one kind of neuron may not apply to the entire class of neurons. Corresponding to this argument, there cannot be homogeneity in the processing units typical of the connectionist architecture. So also for the “bias” term or connection weights which are part of connectionist models – there seems to be no evidence that “threshold membrane potentials in biological systems can be modified in any analogous way”.

   Similarly, talking about connections, a visible difference in biological systems is that dendrites (the signal receivers) and axons (the signal transmitters) are part of the neuron, not distinct from it as in connectionist models. Not only that, connectionist structures are massively parallel (every node is connected to every other node in prior and subsequent layers of the network), but Churchland notes the fact that cortical neurons are rather sparsely connected; not everything is connected to everything else.

2.  Connectionist Systems Are Consistent With Real Time Constraints Upon Processing – Connectionists believe that their algorthms must have considerable parallelism because the brain has slow components, but many of them - ”neurons operate in the time scale of milliseconds, whereas computer components operate at the time scale of nano-seconds” (the 100-step argument). According to Berkeley, this argument ignores sub-neuronal activities (e.g. at the level of the synaptic cleft) and the “many chemical processes of the dendrites which take place over a wide range of time scales”. The argument also leads on the basis of an over-simplification - that neurons operate at the scale of milliseconds – which is untenable because of a ”variety of different intrinsic firing patterns and rates” of cortical neurons and “three distinct types of nerve fiber which have differential rates of signal conductance”.
3. Connectionist Systems Exhibit Graceful Degradation – We are able to make sense of imperfect inputs such as the distorted digit on a scoreboard. Connectionist systems claim to be able to recognize patterns that non-connectionist systems cannot. This overlooks research in non-connectionist systems that is able to deal with degradation.
4. Connectionist Systems Are Good Generalizers - “As a rough first approximation, a system can be said to generalize when it can produce outputs which are appropriate for a particular input or class of inputs, which it has not been previously given information about”. Generalization may not be considered a fixed property of connectionist systems due to the fact that “even with identical network architectures, training regimes and similar starting parameters, different versions of the same network will exhibit different degrees of generalization”.

I am not the expert here, but reading this article has made me think a bit about the proximity of connective knowledge and connectivism to neuroscience.

Let us assume a content/domain of collaboration, say, sales training. Let us take the simple example of a topic that focuses on (say) requirements capture or needs analysis from a customer and the offer of the correct product to the customer.

The context in this scenario could be the need to shorten the ramp up time for training new hires on the company’s basic process for sales so that they can become productive quicker than usual. From the new hire perspective, the state of world is that they have to use their prior experience, skills learnt and practice in the classroom to make sure that they not only understand the products, but also the customers and the sales process.

Let us assume that the company has invested in building  a simulation that models the products, best practices and customer profiles in their business and provides a real-life immersive activity for the learner to learn and practice on skills.

Now, in the class, the basic process is explained with a couple of examples. The instructor then starts the collaborative activity. This activity is really the simulation they have developed but with one major difference. The difference is that instead of the learners playing them outside the context of the collaboration platform (like a LAB situation), the simulation provides the instructor a way to see how each individual learner (or groups that she may have created in the class) are performing. That means. the instructor can literally view the sales process executing in the hands of the learners and can intervene at any point if a select indicator for a specific step in the process shows an alert for a user.

It could also be that the learners co-execute a simulation. This could be made possible if the instructor creates teams and configures them to use various channels (closed user groups) for collaboration so that they could combine efforts to execute the sales process on the simulator.

In this situation, the simulation and the virtual platform operate seamlessly together to bring the right results from the collaborative activity. Not only are the basic elements of the classroom (instructor, learners’ roster, help materials etc) available to the simulator, but also the simulator provides its own integration points (interrupt a process, view collaboration activities in a group, trace key decision points etc) to the virtual platform.

In this sense, this is an example where the best collaboration practices and expertise in the domain can be brought together to augment the learning experience. This is something that could be standardized and built into frameworks much like the way SCORM has evolved, as well as take current collaboration platforms to the next level.

It goes back to us, as individuals, and how we collaborate as subjects, alone or in teams or in networks. If the capability to collaborate in structured ways is learnt and becomes “native” so will adoption on a more widespread basis.

How can collaboration or the capability thereof, go native? By imparting a purpose to collaboration, I am focusing on collaboration that needs to be explicit, rather than implicit (or as a function of collectives). How can it become an essential part of our daily workflows?

One obvious component is technology of some sort – phone, Internet-based etc. and the knowledge & skills on the technology that you need to collaborate.

The other obvious component is your network and the level of access that you have to people with whom you can collaborate.

The third component is the collaboration skill itself, which is composed of not only soft skills (including social etiquette and cultural sensitivity), but also language skills (how effectively can you communicate) and knowledge of various structured and unstructured collaboration techniques (for example, collaboration could also include negotiation or mediation apart from the regular terms in which we view collaboration).

The fourth component is the content/domain of collaboration. Techniques like the Johari window  are pretty useful here to analyze the domain with respect to the collaboration participants and their level of knowledge.

An important fifth dimension, apart from technology, networks and collaboration skill, also emerges – context. It is really important to understand state of the world before, during and after the collaboration process ends. If we are able to capture that, then we are able to do two things – one, document the process for others to learn from and two, measure the outcomes and build performance indicators.

At this time (or at any time in the past), these have always existed in some form or the other. Online/digital technology scores because of its capability to bring diverse geographically distributed people together on a collaborative platform, but leaves much to be desired in terms of facilitating the use of formal techniques for collaboration.

In our experience, we have more or less learnt to collaborate by experience (I would say this would be a fairly acceptable generalization) and by making mistakes. But also a lot by how we see our peers and seniors collaborate. We take these complex skills involving social interaction, emotional control,  tact, courtesy and so many other dimensions to produce the results we so desire. There are also a large number of successful models that people have developed over the years. In fact Stephen Covey’s Sixth Habit is Principles of Creative Cooperation.

It is so difficult for formal models to be built in a highly subjective and individualized area. I quote Yes Minister where Hacker reveals the three varieties of Civil Service silence – Discreet, Stubborn and Courageous silence.

… He also warned me of the ‘Three Varieties of Civil Service Silence’, which would be Humphrey’s last resort if completely cornered: 1 The silence when they do not want to tell you the facts: Discreet Silence. 2 The silence when they do not intend to take any action: Stubborn Silence. 3 The silence when you catch them out and they haven’t a leg to stand on. They imply that they could vindicate themselves completely if only they were free to tell all, but they are too honourable to do so: Courageous Silence. (The Complete Yes Minister, pp. 93-4)

How does one depict or infer Courageous Silence online on a Chat or Social network discussion?

However, there is value that exists if we do use/adapt somebody’s well thought out or experimented mechanism or recipe for collaboration. After all that is where a lot of people make money in training because they can interpret and adapt to the individual’s context when suggesting a recipe or building capability on a specific technique.

To really be useful and pervasive, we must find ways to enable these dimensions on an Internet scale, in our applications. We must make these tools & techniques and the  knowledge thereof easy to grasp and implement. And this process will continue to evolve and benefit from multiple related developments in technology and technique.

Essentially, structured technology aided collaboration techniques are a medium through which learning efficiencies can be increased. These techniques:

• are contextual to domain
• are contextual to collaboration type (say, brainstorming vs voting)
• are open or close ended (in terms of time, scope, boundaries etc)
• could be ad-hoc or planned
• are quantifiable (both quantitatively and qualitatively speaking)
• are historically referenceable (audit trails for recorded collaborations)
• have rules of engagement
• can be structured to the desired level (sequence of activities, organization of inputs, permissions and access roles)
• are sensitive to scale of audience, available knowledge and other physical parameters
• result in trackable outputs/analytics

The logical next step, from a design perspective, is to attempt to model them.  Aldo de Moor’s paper on Community Memory Activation with Collaboration patterns yields some insights on what patterns could be modelled. The abstract for the paper is:

We present a model of collaboration patterns as reusable conceptual structures capturing essential collaboration requirements. These patterns include goal patterns (what is the collaboration about?), communication patterns (how does communication to accomplish goals take place?), information patterns (what content knowledge is essential to satisfy collaborative and communicative goals?), task patterns (what particular information patterns are needed for particular action or interaction goals?), and meta-patterns (what patterns are necessary to interpret, link and assess the quality of the other collaboration patterns?). We show how these patterns can be used to activate communities of practice by improving their collective, distributed memory of communicative interactions and information. We outline an approach that structures how collaboration patterns in communities of practice can be elicited, represented, analyzed, and applied. By presenting a realistic scenario, we illustrate how community memory could be activated in practice.

The other key component is to understand what is the need to collaborate and the forces impeding the required collaboration. This is key to understanding whether collaboration techniques shall be used, substituted by informal methods or not used at all. It is important to understand if they are “over sold and under used” or are “methods seeking an application” or are really cost-effective or intuitive. We have seen that in software engineering too and this may require change management to implement in enterprises.

In other words, the challenge is not quite really all about the technology or process, but is perhaps more about the individual mindset and the overall objectives with which structured collaboration techniques are to be implemented (basically saying that a great process or tool does not automatically ensure collaboration that follows the process or uses the tool or format).

It goes back to us, as individuals, and how we collaborate as subjects, alone or in teams or in networks. If the capability to collaborate in structured ways is learnt and becomes “native” so will adoption on a more widespread basis. On the other hand, organizations or learning delivery modalities can include, as mandatory components, such patterns, tools or processes as part of the workflow.

I am really intrigued. How can we create metrics (and data collection parameters) so that we can derive RoI from the activities in a learning network?

Almost directly related is the question of how LMS providers, as reviewed in Janet’s series LMSs that kick ass, can contribute to this activity. Outstart believes the LMS and the Social Network are separate platforms, the former controls, tracks and reports on formal training initiatives while the latter enable rather than control informal learning. As Janet reports, Jeff Whitney from Outstart comments:

We developed our social media platform separate from our LMS as many informal learning initiatives do not require the formal reporting and tracking features of an LMS. But we also integrated the solution with our LMS to support activities like the invaluable, ad hoc student-to-student and student-to-instructor knowledge sharing that surround formal learning initiatives.

Charles Coy from Cornerstone makes an interesting comment:

Incorporating multiple modalities of learning is not the challenging part. We can build communities of practice into business workflows and develop social media environments. The challenges, in Cornerstone’s view, revolve around engagement and tracking. Getting people to contribute and then assessing the value of this 80% social learning element for the organization.

John Stearns from Generation21 has this to say:

Gen21’s product focus is on its core product functionality. To that end, core collaborative features in the LMS cover the key aspects of social media – collaborative authoring, wiki’s, messaging, message boards, interactive web environments, content rating, library, etc. Imaginative use of these functions achieves a reasonable level of “social” interaction

…….For Gen21, social media is simply another analogous function that clients may choose to use in their learning toolkit. The elements of social media in our LMS are those that related most directly to our mission to enable learning.

Will Hipwell from Geolearning makes a strong assertion that I would love to see in action:

GeoLearning’s GeoEngage module facilitates Communities of Practice (CoPs), enables social networking, and provides access to Web 2.0 technologies like Chat, instant messaging, email, file sharing and uploading, resource library, blogging, wikis, discussion groups and RSS feeds. These are all integrated with our LMS platform so that informal learning can still be tracked, managed and measured as easily as more formal training programs. (emphasis added)

And this one from Dave Wilkins at Mzinga got me really intrigued:

Alternately, for companies ready to move beyond a course- and LMS-centric view of social learning, Mzinga can provide a Community strategy where social networking and social media are more prominently featured and formal learning elements take on supporting roles. In this model, Mzinga “hides” the LMS, but still exposes certifications, compliance, curriculum, virtual classroom, and courses through deep, direct links. (emphasis added)

There are others that Janet talked with such as ElementK and Meridian that are interesting reads. It seems to be clear that LMS providers have integrated social media functions to a large degree, in one way or the other. And that some seem to have some tracking and reporting linkages as well, though I don’t know to what level of detail or with what specific approach in mind.

Would love to hear from the community what they feel!

If Siemens is correct in asserting that the skills of ‘know where’ and ‘know who’ are now more important than the ‘what’ and ‘how’, we must ask: what then are the implications of this position for the role the teacher, and the place of content/curriculum in education today?

To put it another way: what is the nature of the relationship between learning about things – the bodies of knowledge – and learning how to learn about those things? Perhaps the relationship between content and the learning process has always been a problematic one, but it does seem that the impact of the digital technologies in education is bringing this issue into the foreground like never before.

On the one hand, I agree with his observations about the changing nature of the world, the significance of networks, and so on, but I also feel rather uneasy about his point that the ‘know where’ and the ‘know who’ are more important today than the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.

For example, might we find lurking in the Siemens’ position a tendency to over emphasise the technical wherewithal required to work with and manipulate digital technologies and data, at the expense of a learner acquiring a deep knowing about the world and his/her place in it?

Obviously, becoming digitally savvy is a vital skill for all to learn, but I also believe we need an informed citizenry that can also understand the world at a deep critical – interpretive level.
(emphasis added)

This really is my understanding too. The emphasis of technology is important, but so is the imperative for citizenry to be informed and understand the world at a deep critical – interpretive level. Stephen has made that point many times too.

Landy also evokes similarities with Manuel Castells, a social science thinker and sociologist, and I quote from Landy’s review, a quote from Castells’ 2001 book, The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford University Press, New York: 

A network is a series of interconnected nodes. Networks are very old forms of human practice, but they have taken on a new life in our time by becoming information networks, powered by the internet. Networks have extraordinary advantages as organising tools as because of their inherent flexibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive in a fast-changing environment. This is why networks are proliferating in all domains of the economy and society, out competing and outperforming vertically organised corporations and centralised bureaucracies…

Networks were primarily the preserve of private life; centralised hierarchies were the fiefdoms of power and production. Now, however, the introduction of computer-based information and communication technologies, and particularly the Internet, enables networks to employ their flexibility and adaptability.

Landy also looks at Section 2 of Knowing Knowledge where George talks about an implementation model. I have a great interest here in evolving an implementation model and applying it to different situations relevant today as I believe, has George.

Siemens gets straight to the point in this section by posing the following question:

 How can an organisation adopt ecologies when their goal is to drive out chaos and messiness, not embrace it? (2006:90)

 It’s a good question, especially pertinent for those of us that work in bureaucracies and education systems, and he responds with a rather conventional solution – and onethat’s hard to disagree with: change the organisational mindset and re-frame the organisational structures around networks. His call for organisational flexibility and adaptability and the creation of a work environment that is conducive to learning, is a refrain that will be familiar to anyone who has kept pace with the literature on Knowledge Management and/or organisational change, for example, Peter Senge is one amongst many who have written about this.

…An implementation schema provides the holistic overview, and then the five domains are unpacked and explained in sequence. The schema is useful, but I’m not sure how comprehensively the discussion in this section resolves the tension between entrenched organisational rigidity and the need to create adaptive and flexible work environments.

An interesting and provocative read. Thanks, Landy!

Found also Wenger’s interview and lecture at a KnowledgeLabs e-portfolio Konference where he talks about learning as meaning/sense making.

Lisa Lane wrote a list of recommendations on the CCK08 experience. Bradley Shoebottom has devised his own structure. I proposed the concept of Network Based Training. There are many others.

George Siemens writes:

I like the idea of thinning our classroom walls and allowing connections to be formed between concepts from other subject areas. But that responsibility shouldn’t rest on the educator. “Getting on the same page” (author’s words) seems a bit at odds with opening up class rooms. We need to all get on our own page, form our own connections, our own understanding of different fields. It seems that the desire still runs high for educators to apply increased organization when problems become intractable. What is really needed is a complete letting go of our organization schemes and open concepts up to the self/participatory/chaotic sensemaking processes that flourish in online environments.

Monty Paul ties in connectivism into social constructivism.

The idea of connectivism (Drexler, 2008 ) ties in well with social constructivism, demonstrating how new generation learners use the power of our networked world to tap into remote sources of knowledge, including experts in various fields. These learners work in a world without boundaries from a technological point of view. They are adept at finding, storing, managing and sharing information using new web-based applications. More importantly, they are involved in knowledge creation, using blogs, wikis and other on-line applications to mash and developing new ways of looking at and using information. These students bring fresh challenges for learning institutions across the educational spectrum, given their need for a fast moving, game oriented learning (Pensky, 2001) which traditional learning environments are hard pressed to provide.

But I want to discuss the difference between the creation of an ecological blueprint (if there could be one) that “allows” connective learning and what would constitute an ecological blueprint that “is” inherently a connective learning design/blueprint. For example, the difference between saying “the hotel lounge is Wifi-enabled” is different than saying that “I can check my email in the hotel lounge”. After all, it’s the conversation rather than the blogging tool that’s more important, right?

George Siemens contrasts behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism and connectivism in the light of Ertmer’s and Newby’s five definitive questions to distinguish different learning theories. For connectivism, he states:

1. How does learning occur? – Distributed within a network, social, technologically enhanced, recognizing and interpreting patterns
2. What factors influence learning? – Diversity of network, strength of ties
3. What is the role of memory? – Adaptive patterns, representative of current state, existing in networks
4. How does transfer occur? – Connecting to (adding) nodes
5. What types of learning are best explained by this theory? – Complex learning, rapid changing core, diverse knowledge sources.

(George’s responses in italics)

George and Stephen also talk of the impact of chaos theory, self organization and complexity on the learning process. They also refer to the impact of this way of learning on traditional notions of power, control, validity and authority (among others). So what would constitute the learning ecology that is connective? It should be one that inherently:

1. Enables us to recognize and interpret patterns that exist (way finding, sense making) ; indeed, generate our own new patterns
2. Helps us build adaptively on and capture existing patterns given a rapid changing core and diverse knowledge sources
3. Provides a distributed environment (both for knowledge and people)
4. Provides avenues for social collaboration
5. Is technologically enhanced to deal with diverse processes/circumstances such as negotiating information overload, self organization, determining order within chaos etc.
6. Enables us to leverage and expand on a network that is diverse
7. Helps us build ties at varying strengths that in turn may determine the efficacy/effectiveness of our learning
8. Enables us to negotiate complex learning needs

Replace “what would constitute a connective learning ecology?” with “what kind of educator would suit or engender a connective learning ecology?” and it becomes easier to think about the problem instantly.

That is, the answer that the educator should “model” and “demonstrate” his connective learning process/ability/efficiency while the learner should “practice” and “reflect” (I think “observation” and “experimentation” are equally critical skills), makes sense because the ability to do all of the above needs to be learnt by the learner. The objective is perhaps that the learner be empowered with the learning skills and ecologies of the educator (as George Siemens says “…A curator is an expert learner”).

What if there was no educator or formal role for one? What happens in that truly open, autonomous, distributed, uncontrolled network? Is there an ecology for the solitary learner; for the ones that are faced with unequal access; those who have technological/social barriers or limitations?

In a sense then, perhaps we should look at the design and metrics of a connectivist ecology from a different lens altogether – where the ecology contains components that inherently propel the learner to become a curator.

Instead of providing a chat tool and a structured interaction and participation schedule, it should provide (for lack of a better technologically unchallenged term) a “default” mechanism for learning that propels the learner to make connections, practice and reflect, observe & build & recognize distributed knowledge patterns.

It is here that the discussion around types of networks becomes really important. At the neural level, it is really immersion into the environment (“increased awareness?”); at the conceptual level it is the ability for the ecology to provide some ways of exploring and building concept patterns and at the social level, the learning network of people (and devices) itself in a given context. It is here also that we should perhaps attack the concerns around motivation and participation.

Perhaps when the three (and there may be more) types of networks come together in some way, they become really powerful for learning. For example, experiencing rain-drops, recognizing the dark cloud visual and listening to the thunderclap, associating it with concepts of cloud formation and effects of rainfall, and, warning your friend not to venture out, may be an example of learning could manifest itself given this three way association (there could be self spiraling associations within a network type itself).

Where would the metrics then come in and how would they be designed? In another corporate context, I once read a powerful article by John R. Hauser and Gerald M. Katz titled “Metrics: You are what you measure!”. In my mind and as they state, successful metrics are good if the actions and decisions which improve the metrics also improve the firm’s (read “learner’s”) desired long term outcomes (read “learning ability” or “expertise”). They list seven pitfalls of metric design and how these can completely subvert the metric design exercise. They also list an equal number of steps to design good metrics such as “Listen to the customer” and “Understand the inter-relationships” all of which I think are useful ways to think about what to avoid and what to follow.

The main point is that we need to understand if score, time elapsed, distance between two nodes (a.k.a. social network analysis), e-portfolio submission & ratings et al are good metrics in this connectivist ecology. Instead, wouldn’t we ask questions relating to or perform investigation into how well the learner is able to learn using the “default” mechanism I referred to earlier? For example, speed of learning could be perhaps (or maybe I am being too simplistic) the rate of change of new patterns, network connections, conversations; or the measure of expertise would be the number, qualitative rating, network perception or rate of interaction between you and the resources in your network?

As always, would love to be corrected and to know your thoughts!

The basic Montessori concepts are pretty well known by now (Montessori in Perspective, 1966). 1 – The teacher must pay attention to the child, rather than the child paying attention to the teacher. 2 – The child proceeds at his own pace in an environment controlled to provide means of learning. 3 – Imaginative teaching materials are the heart of the process. 4 – Each of them is self-correcting, thus enabling the child to proceed at his own pace and see his own mistakes. If you were to look inside a Montessori classroom, you would get the impression of “controlled chaos” because each child would be quietly working at his private encounter with whatever learning task he or she chose (Montessori in Perspective, 1966).

(Quoted from http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/montessori2.html, retrieved January 10, 2009)

Dr. Montessori said “I studied my children, and they taught me how to teach them.” And also her general principle – “first education of the senses, then education of the intellect”.

‘The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality’ (Maria Montessori – The Absorbent Mind: 206).

This connected with a further element in the Montessori programme – decentring the teacher. The teacher was the ‘keeper’ of the environment. While children got on with their activities the task was to observe and to intervene from the periphery. (Here there are a number of parallels with Dewey).

(Quoted from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-mont.htm, retrieved January 10, 2009)

Cammy Bean, was at the same juncture as I am today. Sending my son to formal school. But my son also has had an year of so already under his belt at a Montessori pre-school. She asks:

So, the question is, can we make the Montessori Method a part of the coporate learning environment? Is that what all this informal/DIY/learning 2.0 stuff is all about?

Constance Steinkuehler in her post Digital Montessori for Big Kids, likens virtual worlds to digital environments natively conducive to the Montessori method.

The Microlearning conference 2005 proceedings“Learning and Working in New Media Environments” (June 23-24, 2005, University of Innsbruck, Austria) has an interesting paper by Gernot Tscherteu titled “The Blogosphere Map – Visualizing Microcontent Dissemination” (looks very similar to what Valdis Krebs does ). The principles of the Montessori method are referenced in the context of microlearning:

• the Montessori pedagogue is acting in the background, and,
• Learning by playing in mixed groups
• Free schedules, no collective teaching
• Prepared environment
• Learning materials are kind of small interactive games for real life learning experiences
• Sensomotoric

Very similar to what I have learnt about connectivism e.g. the second is a characteristic of networks if you think about it.

Microlearning itself seems to be an interesting concept. Theo Hug summaries different dimensions together in his paper “Microlearning: A New Pedagogical Challenge” in the same Austrian conference.

There is not one precise definition which covers all the different concepts. In my view there are versions which are brought forth by different interpretations of particular dimensions such as:

• Time: relatively short effort, operating expense, degree of time consumption, measurable time, subjective time, etc.
• Content: small or very small units, narrow topics, rather simplex issues, etc.
• Curriculum: part of curricular setting, parts of modules, elements of informal learning, etc.
• Form: fragments, facets, episodes, „knowledge nuggets“, skill elements, etc.
• Process: separate, concomitant or actual, situated or integrated activities, iterative method, attention management, awareness (getting into or being in a process), etc.
• Mediality: face-to-face, mono-media vs. multi-media, (inter-)mediated, information objects or learning objects, symbolic value, cultural capital, etc.
• Learning type: repetitive, activist, reflective, pragmatist, conceptionalist, constructivist, connectivist, behaviourist, learning by example, task or exercise, goal- or problem-oriented, „along the way“, action learning, classroom learning, corporate learning, conscious vs. unconscious, etc.

Interesting meanderings so far!

Why is this important to discuss? Everywhere around us there are “frictional” forces that impede or obscure – could be authority, access, lack of infrastructure or others – the learning process.

The ability to learn to cope with these forces becomes equally critical as the process of sense-making or wayfinding in a connectivist paradigm.

What is this ability?  The best way to place this ability in stark contrast is to assume a limiting factor. Let us say the individual has no access to (say) Web 2.0 technology. Specifically, the ability to form online networks / inter-personal relationships and instant online collaboration does not exist for this individual.

For her, sense-making would be based in a world of books & letters, local resources, chance encounters and possibly luck in tems of finding the right connections for her purpose. She would then possibly compensate for this frictional force in many other ways and an important factor here would be individual agency, apart from environmental facilitation and personal skill. She would actively seek and pursue opportunities that allow her to overcome this frictional force in a unique manner.

This ability to innovate & learn within physical world and personal constraints is equally important as the process of learning itself – maybe an inseparable aspect.

Connectivism makes the negotiation of information an important aspect of the learning ability, maybe it should include negotiation of real world constraints as well.

• Usability
• Visual “languages”
• HCI Design
• Programmable patterns depicted visually
• Shared visual patterns
• Ease of authoring new media and media mashups

I was referred to ManyEyes through a blog post (I think it was George’s post) and found it extremely interesting, not because of what it does (because that has been experimented earlier), but because of the way they have put it together – large number of visualization types and ease of authoring.

What is especially interesting is what they call topic hubs. What this means is that anyone can go in, start a discussion topic and add visualizations and data to it.

So these are really combinations of two different ideas – mashup between data and presentation style, and, collaboration around a shared object(s).

I think these are powerful ways of visual collaboration. Within connectivism, they offer an important way of making connections thereby impacting learning. 

What would be even more interesting is if someone took two or more different media mashups and started mashing them together.

For example, a world map showing pollution levels across major cities could be drilled down (or linked to other related visualizations) into a bar chart which could then be tagged to a Technorati tag list in addition to a Twitter conversation in addition to….

For the visual designer (as well as the educator), these represent important starting points to think about the multi-dimensionality provided by connectivism.

…appreciate the idea that values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Gladwell explores success (“Why do some people achieve so much more than others? Can they lie so far outside the ordinary? What is the secret of their success?”). These questions directly attack our notions of talent and expertise. And in many ways bring out the effect systemic decisions may have on development of this talent and expertise – somewhat chaotic, sensitive to initial conditions.

In his chapter on the “Matthew Effect” (Matthew 25:29; term coined by sociologist Robert Merton), Gladwell does an interesting analysis. He took the birth months of junior hockey league players in Canada and found that most of them were born between the first three months of the year. Having found this, he went on to study other such teams, the US non-school Baseball league, European soccer, the Czech National Junior soccer team and the studies by economists Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey on the relationships between TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies) scores and birth month. He found similar patterns in the data!

Why? Apparently because, each of these had a system defined cut-off date for eligibility. In the Canadian Junior Hockey leagues, the cut-off date is January 1. So a player reaching the age of 10 on Jan 2, could be playing alongside someone who would reach that age perhaps in December that year – a huge difference at the age of 10, would you say?

Similarly, in TIMSS, among the fourth graders, the children who were the oldest scored at least 4-12 percentile points better than the younger children!

So practically speaking, if you group by “ability” and put older (“more mature”) students in advanced streams where they are given better opportunities to learn, they then have an advantage that is iteratively increased as they move from grade to grade.

Huh! Dubner and Levitt (Freakonomics) would be pretty kicked to see this research .

The other aspect is that the kids who were born in the later months got lesser and lesser attention or opportunity (very few Czech soccer players born between July-December, for example), which meant that a large population of students did not make it because of when  they were born?

So what does it mean to have innate talent or intelligence then? What it does it mean to be an expert? Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin who states:

The emerging picture from these studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, Ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. but no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know and achieve true mastery.

(also referred at PBDB).

That’s interesting because, where do you get the opportunity (and where is it systematically denied?) to practice twenty hours a week over 10 years if the analysis is true at all.

Gladwell goes on to look at Bill Joy, the Beatles, Bill Gates and many more. The refrain is that opportunity to succeed is too important a factor to consider in your success. And that, intuitively, strikes more than a single chord in me personally and because of what I have experienced in CCK08.

Open, accessible networks may provide our children what they need to be successful. Their ability to form connections and uncover opportunities for individual learning and growth may result in covering some of the great disparities caused by existing world structures, be they economic, educational, legal or others.

Starting with mind maps as a central way of modeling thoughts, the tool is quite like CMap. Allows tagged links and resources from delicious and other tools to be used and attached to each concept or thought node. It also allows “souping” knowledge using a centralized repository on the web that you can host with permission. However, this tool goes beyond in terms of usability and features. First, it is Web 2.0 based. Second it allows fragments or entire concept maps to be “imported” from one user to another. They call these concept maps journeys that can be shared and embedded.

Interesting concept because our project group in CCK08 was trying to get our maps together but could not do so because of disconnected terminology – no way to map nodes and compare because of language or representation (two different terms meaning the same, even typos, inconsistent use of mapping rules etc) problems. IMINDI does not address those problems.

They also have something called a Mindex or mind index which is really putting together the different journeys starting from a single keyword. So they take a keyword/concept term and check their database for all first level associations and so on. The results are pretty powerful at first glance. When quizzed on the business model, the CEO of IMINDI remarked that unlike Google that has to write a search engine to collect thoughts (read “nodes”), they are getting their users to pubish and voluntarily make the connections with what they want to know, some kind of reverse search (if there is such a thing).

The reviewers thought this was, well, a little far fetched and could not relate it to how people would even want to invest time upfront to create a mental map in the first place. They  thought the company would do better to focus on the enterprise as a testing ground.

This is an example of a good thought, but no clear articulation of value for the effort.

The locus of value is seen to be shifting from products and services to experiences that are personalizable at a large scale, yet being affordable and high quality. N=1 involves a new approach to access and use of resources. The authors term this R=G. The necessity is that no one firm can even attempt to own/access all the different resources that it would need for creating new experiences for the customer in an N=1 world.

To this end, they build a framework for innovation that organizations can leverage. This seems to be a useful approach for looking at how educational systems can be transformed by structural change in the pursuit of innovation and excellence. It also seems consonant with Connectivism as the inspiration and rational basis for the change to occur.

As I have started feeling, maybe the change should percolate from top down rather than from K-12 to adult education. But a thorough analysis of and architecture for the structural changes that may be required seems to be crucial at this moment.

For this reason, PLEs, which are based on learners needs/goals and concerned with individual and personal autonomy and learning, cannot move into the center of the learning process until the underlying power relationships change.

Attwell suggests that the next steps in research and development of PLEs should include

• examining in depth how individuals are using computers for learning in different settings (especially non-educational technology) and outside the setting of formal educational programmes;
• exploring the relationship between informal learning and formal learning in developing competence;
• examining different forms of competence and how educational technology can support such competences;
• examining the use of different social software applications for learning;
• examining in depth the nature and form of computer mediated interactions between learners in different communities;
• examining the implications of persistence of data for Personal Learning Environments;
• examining the different ways in which learners might wish to represent learning (both formal and informal);
• examining what materials are used for informal learning and how they are used;
• exploring the implications of changing forms and patterns of learning for educational institutions;
• exploring ways of representing and patterning learning activities interactions;
• exploring ways of utilising different services – both within and between institutions and with broader communities – to support PLE-type activities;
• exploring issues in standards and interoperability to facilitate PLE-type development;
• exploring how PLE-type applications and services can be integrated or work alongside existing educational applications and services

These are important inclusions. For example, Attwell talks about standards, interoperability, nature and forms of computer mediated interaction and data persistence, which are all going to be important for toolmakers and designers of PLEs.

Pontydysgu talks about the inherent contradictions in capitalist societies (and the associated systematized superstructures of education systems) and the power of individual & collective agency (as a transformative agent).

It is also important to reference Lisa Lane’s strategy for change in this context:

The solution is subversive application of connectivist and other useful learning ideas within the current structure, an insurgence for the purpose of fostering emergence.

The discussion begs two questions:

1. Apart from shifts in underlying power relations, are there any other enabling factors for the adoption of PLEs (as tool/process/concept)?
2. Is the mode of change that is required “insurgent” or “revolutionary”?

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

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.

As John Q. Johnston writes:

While the mission statements and policy documents of schools generally, reflect a view of education as an open-ended, dynamic and life-long process and pledge commitment to an eclectic approach to teaching and learning which takes account of individual needs, the fact is that practice sometimes falls short of such ideals. Indeed,according to Gammage (1986, p 82) the reality is often shown to be one of modestly child-centred and individual approaches, mixed with a large core of class teaching and recognisably planned and sequenced teacher direction.

John’s study, that uses the Learning Combination Inventory, talks about different types of learners characterised by specific learning preference profiles (sequential, precise, technical and confluent processing). Similar work has been done elsewhere – for example, Learning Styles Inventory and the Learning Orientations model.

In fact, the former describes the “social (interpersonal) learning style” as:

If you have a strong social style, you communicate well with people, both verbally and non-verbally. People listen to you or come to you for advice, and you are sensitive to their motivations, feelings or moods. You listen well and understand other’s views. You may enjoy mentoring or counseling others.

You typically prefer learning in groups or classes, or you like to spend much one-on-one time with a teacher or an instructor. You heighten your learning by bouncing your thoughts off other people and listening to how they respond. You prefer to work through issues, ideas and problems with a group. You thoroughly enjoy working with a “clicking” or synergistic group of people.

You prefer to stay around after class and talk with others. You prefer social activities, rather than doing your own thing. You typically like games that involve other people, such as card games and board games. The same applies to team sports such as football or soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball, baseball and hockey.

Rupert Wegerif talks about research (I could only access the abstract) where it was found that:

…individual success or failure on the course depended upon the extent to which students were able to cross a threshold from feeling like outsiders to feeling like insiders. Factors affecting the construction of a sense of community are drawn out from interviews with students. The significance of these findings is discussed in relation to a situated model of learning as induction into a community of practice. Finally recommendations are made for the support of community building in the design of courses.

This last quote, is perhaps why I suggested that the existing metaphors of educators need to be extended. I believe that educators and instructional designers should also take on roles that help them incorporate strategies for enabling students to “cross thresholds” and recognize that barriers to socialization need to be overcome if connectivist learning is to occur at all.

As always, would love to hear from you all and voraciously read any references you may care to provide!

References

• Socialization in the Online Classroom, John Q. Johnston, Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Paper Presented at: American Educational Research Association’s Annual Meeting, New York, 8-12 April 1996. Retrieved November 24, 2008, from http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/vol9_no1/papers/full_papers/irwin_berge.htm.
• The Social Dimension of Asynchronous Learning Networks | The Sloan Consortium, Rupert Wegerif, Centre for Language and Communication, School of Education, The Open University, Volume:2, Issue:1, March, 1998. Abstract retrieved November 24, 2008, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/jaln/v2n1/v2n1_wegerif.asp.
• Learning Orientation Research – Menu Page. . Retrieved November 24, 2008, from http://www.trainingplace.com/source/research/learningorientations.htm.

This started out as an email, but transformed into a blog post (probably for the better), when I found I had very few email addresses

It’s been a great experience reading through all your posts and being part of the CCK08 experience. I have benefited greatly from the contributions made by the participants and for me, it has really brought home the immense diversity that the network brings.

As I was thinking about what I should try and do for the final project submission, I thought that a real way of assessing the nature, diversity and strength of my network was to reach out to my peers in the experience and request them to review one of my papers. I believe this will be useful from a variety of perspectives. Not only will I be able to receive honest and blunt critique of my contribution, but it will be a good way of evaluating how a peer review process would really work in a network of this kind.

I would really appreciate it if you could spare sometime providing a peer review for my Paper 2 : Changing Roles.

I know it is short notice and may be too much to ask given your own schedule and priorities or that you may not be interested. Do please feel free to not participate in this peer review. Let me know in any case.

If you do decide to participate in the peer review, here are some details:

• The project submission is due end November. I know this would be a very short timeframe for you to respond, but I will be glad if you can provide a review by November 27th.
• Review parameters: I am replicating a marking scheme that has been used by George Siemens which I think should be a good starting point. However, please feel free to suggest any other criteria that you would like the review to be based on.
• The link to the paper is at: http://learnoscck08.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/cck08-paper-2-changing-roles/ and it is titled CCK08: Paper 2 – Changing Roles.
• I will make available results from all reviewers on my blog (http://learnoscck08.wordpress.com) as part of the final project submission.
• My email is viplav.baxi@servitium.com

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos.

As the level of entropy decreases, that is, an increase in orderliness becomes apparent, the interval between salient events decreases. By implication, he provides a sublaw, the Law of Increasing Chaos, stated:

As chaos exponentially increases, time exponentially slows down (that is, the time interval between salient events grows longer as time passes).

He posits an inverse sublaw, the Law of Accelerating Returns, stated:

As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

And…

Order is information that fits a purpose…For example, a new theory that ties together apparently disparate ideas into one broader, more coherent theory reduces complexity, but nonetheless may increase the “order for a purpose”…

How does this relate to the challenges and opportunities that we face in any area, not just education, and not just with Connectivism but different approaches to teaching and learning?

I believe that it provides one effective way to think about how change can be brought about – by moving to more orderliness.

And how can we move to more orderliness? To understand this we must look at the elements that hinder the change and the main drivers that would facilitate it – the resistance and opportunities in adopting different approaches to teaching and learning.

For many, the real barrier to change is change itself. This is perhaps more common than we care to imagine. Patterson, Purkey, and Parker (1986, p. 98) state (quoted from SEDL – School Context: Bridge or Barrier to Change) that:

Lasting fundamental change (e.g. changes in teaching practices or the decision making structure) requires understanding and, often, altering the school’s culture; cultural change is a slow process.

That technology, innovation and new ways of learning and teaching will always be encouraged in any academic institution or process is not true. Attitudes and beliefs about the way the world works or personal preferences, knowledge and infrastructural limitations, affect how a change will be perceived and embraced. As an example, let us look at the questions around openness raised by Matthias in CCK08: Week 10, Openness.

The enormity of what Connectivism asks us to do can be realized in this very context – re-evaluate the role of educators, think of the network or connectedness as the base architecture for learning and re-assess notions of identity, power, law, authority, expertise, assessment and control in the light of the new theory.

At the level of implementation, much is still not clear – maybe not so much at the level of the individual course or two, but at the collective level where logistics, the forces of demand and supply, information asymmetry, politics and culture play important and influential roles. This is where I think there will be the most barriers to change.

I submit that Connectivism is not anything less than large scale, disruptive change, and attempts to incorporate it within an existing system would be to dilute the meaning and essence of the theory itself.

But what the ongoing debate in this course does not give us at this time, is time itself! To be able to propose something new at this scale, its utility or effects have to be demonstrated and documented. And that takes time. After all, the effects of technology or any new development often do not appear immediately, but take a while to appear. For example, research that proves that use of mobile phones is harmful for children may well throw mobile learning out completely for that segment.

I think the biggest opportunity at this time is to focus on the implementation specifics of theory and allowing its refinement and further amalgamation of other related areas e.g. HCI and personalization, through practice and reflection.

But this will require some concerted effort, some orderliness. To start with, the networks that have emerged here in CCK08, should continue to only expand in future editions of this initiative, with new people and ideas continuing to expand and diversify the network.

Secondly, I think from the perspective of need (cost, time, quality of learning), the adult education space may be more suited to start with. The time is ripe for the next generation of learning formations and technology to be introduced on a wider scale and there will perhaps be the least resistance here (I may be wrong!).

Adrian Hill references the Innovation Time Off motivation technique from Google. In an article from Chief Learning Officer Magazine, Summerfield talks about how IBM has successfully applied “intelligent mentoring” in global integration. Sheila Forte-Trammell, a learning consultant and co-author of Intelligent Mentoring: How IBM Creates Value through People, Knowledge, and Relationships, says:

“With regard to integration, we’re looking at connecting every person and every process, regardless of geography, time differences and cultural differences,” she said. “That integration starts with two people, and then we extend that practice across the business. We can’t operate in an individual space anymore.”

These efforts are a tiny sample of the changes that educators are trying to bring about and will continue to. Whether the ripples will change into a stream and a stream into a flood will depend on the ability of proponents to spread awareness of and enable educators to implement new models through, justly enough, the very network that they espouse.

There will, inevitably, be counteracting forces that will offer much to learn from. These are not just forces of resistance, but also wise counsel and diverse thought that shall only serve to enrich thinking about theory and implementation.

Can this world of weak ties really help us meet the challenges of now and the future? Well, it does now and it can in many ways in the future – provided we use these ties in consonance with an overall purpose, especially in a learning context.

In summary, my call to change, as Einstein said:

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

References

• CCK08: Assignment 3 « Memeospheric Pressure. . Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://memeosphericpressure.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/cck08-assignment-3/.
• “Google: Innovation time off” Wikipedia. Retrieved Nov. 16, 2008 at:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
• Summerfield, B. Intelligent Mentoring at IBM, Part II. . Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://www.clomedia.com/includes/printcontent.php?aid=2454.
• The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
  by Ray Kurzweil, Penguin paperback | 0-14-028202-5.
• SEDL – School Context: Bridge or Barrier to Change. . Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://www.sedl.org/change/school/culture.html.
• x28’s new Blog » Blog Archive » CCK08: Week 10, Openness. . Retrieved November 17, 2008, from http://x28newblog.blog.uni-heidelberg.de/2008/11/13/cck08-week-10-openness/.

(View the full sized image)

Note: Apologize for the length of this one!

For me, the educator and the instructional designer roles are intricately linked in many ways. In fact I think it is a mistake to think about them in isolation. In most universities that I know of, at least in India, the pre-requisite for getting a teaching job is a degree in the specific domain without considering if the candidate has any understanding of how to teach, which is so wrong. The only difference there could be is that some people could be playing one role more actively than the other. 

That there needs to be a change or that we need to adapt innovatively is obvious given the various factors of changing technology, new forms of media, new architectures of participation, increasing exposure to & diversification of knowledge & information and social collaboration that are representative of the new digital age.

A few key factors will influence this change dramatically. In my opinion, these are:

1. awareness of a changed context and the major aspects of that change
2. the ability to adapt learning experiences, cope with changing learner profiles, evolve institutional structures and create innovative learning designs based on the impact on each of the fundamental components that comprise a learning experience
3. a structured, well-researched and well-informed adoption of these changes
4. the capacity to evolve and adapt as new changes sweep the landscape upsetting some of the things we consider important today

It is important also to consider the context within which educators and instructional designers are expected to operate in a connective world. The five major aspects (Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies, Viplav Baxi,) common to any learning experience are:

• Global/specific outcomes desired / end-goals – participative, self driven, contextual; outcomes could also be unintentional/serendipitous but there is an overall end that the educator is trying to achieve both in terms of building connective capability and in terms of establishing that the student has been able to connectively negotiate the process of sense making to a desired degree
• Time – a set amount of time allocated by the learner in the context of the end-goal and the institutional/program objectives, explicitly or implicitly, to achieve a desired level of proficiency (or demonstrable ability)
• Measures – some personal/network way of establishing/confirming achievement that could include some form of social network based assessment (like soft peer reviews)
• Improvement – continuous innovation through diversity of views; lifelong learning – essentially a measure and demonstration of the ability of the learner to form connections and make sense
• Knowledge – diverse forms of media, contribution and interaction (cooperative and collaborative) generated learning based on the network need to be leveraged

There could be more, but I think these are core to any educational design opportunity. This is not an attempt to set constraints on the educator/instructional designer or the learner, but to provide an overall framework of constraints/opportunities within which she can establish a connective learning experience.

Structured, well-researched and well-informed adoption of these changes are key to successful implementations. While espousing constructivist principles, advocating the ideas of “telecollaboration” and “global classrooms”, educators and policy makers have assumed that certain activities will automatically occur once schools are connected to the network infrastructure. (Burniske and Monke, 2001, p.11).

Burniske (like Giambattista Vico who said “the true is precisely what is made” (verum esse ipsum factum) and Create the truth that you wish to know; and I, in knowing the truth that you have proposed to me, will make it in such a way that there will be no possibility of my doubting it, since I am the very one who has made it.) invokes Aesop’s Lion to state …Educators have experienced enough reform movements to know that today’s technological panacea may become tomorrow’s placebo. (quoted in Burniske and Monke, 2001, p. 9).

Connectivism Impacts

For an instructional designer, the challenges are multiple. She needs to:

1. understand the theory, identify frameworks for implementation
2. adjust to and enhance learner autonomy
3. understand the impact of complexity, self-organization, information overload and chaos on learning
4. utilize all available resources and learn to apply and adapt existing techniques that have been used and discard ones that do not fit the new genre
5. negotiate fast moving technology and new and evolving knowledge & interaction channels

Additionally, the instructional designer cannot be immune to the impact on related areas of visualization (usability, graphics design, HCI, programmable visual design, navigation frameworks, more pervasive use of graphics tools), of subject matter expertise, learning management and design of learning solutions.(CCK08-Connectivism Impacts, Viplav Baxi).

Educators or instructional designers must realize that their own learning is connective in nature. This has a major impact on the design process because no longer are we applying traditional methodologies in the same way. Take, for example, the process of developing content. In a connective world, that process becomes a part of the bigger picture viz. developing a learnscape (Jay Cross, Learnscapes).

Not only that, they have to realize that connective experiences will lead to emergent concepts and individual & network phenomena that they have to continuously cultivate into their designs. This is a major impact on the way educators shall learn to negotiate new designs and technologies and weave them into the learning experience.

Two initiatives that attempt to put together a collection of resources around possible new network pedagogies are worth mentioning here as well. The first is the Network Pedagogies Portal at Athabasca University, Canadaand the other is Cloudworks, a portal that facilitates social networking for learning design (Grainne Conole, Cloudworks, social networking for learning design). Resources such as these could become part of the connective evolution of learning design itself.

Learning Ecologies

Jay Cross’s learnscape architecture is an exciting formalized way of looking at how IDs/educators can look at engendering a connectivist experience of learning. Jay Cross writes “The learnscape architect strives to create a learning environment that increases the organization’s longevity and health and the individual learner’s happiness and well-being…..I am developing a pattern language of learning archetypes to make it easier for organizations to assemble optimal learnscapes.” (Learnscape Architecture, Jay Cross).

George Siemens also provides a list of similar approaches in his post, Networks, Ecologies, and Curatorial Teaching.

Power and Governance

The notions of autonomy, power, rights and governance need to be also placed into this context. Power and distributed power need to be defined in the discussion (Stephen Downes, Elluminate Discussion, Week 8 of CCK08). Also, is there good power and bad power? Sharon Peters makes some compelling remarks:

Once we have established that relationship of trust and accountability, control and power can slowly be given over to the learners.Let’s not forget the element of humanity and what it is to be human as we explore the issues of power, control, validity and authority.

And then there is the whole notion of identity and self in relation to power. How do we perceive the self in relation to others? Who is “powerful”? In contrast, who is “powerless”(Jenny MacKness)? How does negotiation and transfer of power occur between the self and the other/network? What happens when someone who is powerful loses power and vice versa. How do entrenched users in the network treat new opinions and socialize with newcomers?

Fritjof Capra writes “…The boundaries of living networks, then, are not boundaries of separation but boundaries of identity.”(Living Networks, Fritjof Capra)

Lisa Lane provides some insights into the discussion around rights, and personal power and around the importance of personality in control. Bradley Shoebottom makes an important point that what may work in one ecology may not work in another because there are different users and different tools being used. Catherine Fitzpatrick makes a forceful point “…as long as there are grades, there will be power, authority and control”. Wendy Drexler differentiates between individual, group and network power, both perceived and actual. It is important to note Wenger’s contribution (CoP: Best Practices, Etienne Wenger) in the context of the post by Wendy and her reference to Pau Skidmore. Dolores Capdet also references Bochenski’s epistemological and ethical categories of authority.

These are important concepts that educators and instructional designers have to experiment with in their connectivist design and implementation practices.

Other Major impacts

Related and important in their own right are the concepts around emotion, motivation and the socialization process itself that need to be considered. Suifai John Mak and others have also raised the role of legislation and how it would impact education and learning programs.

I would like to also mention two other references here. The first is the JISC Technology and Standards Watch, 2007 article by Paul Anderson in which he talks about collection and preservation of the web (Section 5.4 Libraries, repositories and archiving). I firmly believe that there must be concerted attempts and cognizance of this important task for educators and instructional designers.

The second reference I want to make is to Valdis Kreb’s product, inFlow, that is used as a tool for Social Network Analysis (Valdis Krebs, Emergent Networks – referenced & summarized at http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=136), something I believe will evolve into a necessary tool for learning solution designers.

Some Metaphors

Based on these, several metaphors (quoted from Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers, presentation to ITFORUM, George Siemens) for the educator can emerge. There are many that George Siemens has suggested – master artist or atelier model of learning [John Seely Brown, 2006], Network Administrator [Clarence Fisher], Concierge[Curtis Bonk], Curator [George Siemens]. I would like to propose some more.

Educator as a weaver – just like a weaver puts together many threads and creates a design, the same way an educator would need to weave together many networks so that her learners can appreciate and autonomously navigate a base from which a rich set of patterns can be recognized and negotiated. Unlike a weaver, though, the educator would need to leave the design unfinished, with plenty of raw ends and partial designs as well so that the learner is able to build and expand on patterns through diverse influences not even conceived at the time of creating the first design. Over time, the weaver must also enrich the design with her own and learners’ evolution in the network in a seamless way.

Educators as pattern builders – those who are able to build logical interconnections to make a field intelligible to the learner at each stage of learning. The educator must preserve the patterns in a way that can be accessed and re-harnessed for reference or for new learners. This is going to be a critical function. In the existing paradigm, lots of great learning experiences are simply lost because the people or the machines that enable these experiences exit the system. There must be a framework that can allow related patterns (Paris is the capital of France vs Paris is where Disney is), to accumulate. This accumulation also needs to have temporal and other annotations that the educator can describe.

Learning Personalization

One of the thoughts here was that there could be close pattern relationships in how two very diverse and different people learn that could prove an important asset in personalization techniques. My belief is that, by default, you teach or articulate just as the way you would learn, the way it makes sense to you.

If we could find a contributor who learns the way we do, my learning would perhaps be more effective. If we are, in the future, able to collate, compare and associate learning patterns themselves, we may just be able to greatly impact the huge problem of personalization in learning.

Evolution to NBTs and NLTs

An approach that I propose is to start thinking of what forms of content and learning experiences can educators start quantifying. Let me define Network based training (NBT) as a framework for sense making for the autonomous learner that leverages the principles of network learning and Network led training (NLT) as concerted efforts by a learning formation (defined as a range in the continuum between groups and networks or connectives & collectives) to facilitate and drive learning initiatives across the formation. These could leverage best practices of traditional WBTs and ILTs and situate them in the current context (Viplav Baxi, CCK08: Network based and Network Led Training).

In Conclusion

The biggest impediment to this change is the change itself. There is simply no system that people believe can replace the logistical capability of the current system. I have heard of experiments that started off in a diametrically opposite manner to the traditional system, but had to merge with the traditional when it came to the accepted national examination schedule.

Contrary to what others would probably feel, I think that this change should be driven from the level of the adult to the level of the child – from adult and continuing education to K12.

This is primarily to be able to experiment while preparing to build the infrastructure, processes and techniques to support the new mindset and the new learning experience. This negotiation of change has itself to be connective in nature and requires its own connective infrastructure (if I may call it that).

References

1. Burniske R.W. and Monke, Lowell, Breaking down the digital walls, Learning to teach in a post-modem world, State University of New York Press, ISBN: 0-7914-4754-5, 2001
2. Bradley Shoebottom, CCK08: Week 8: Authority, http://bradleyshoebottom.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/cck08-week-8-authority, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
3. Catherine Fitzpatrick , (http://ll2ndlife.blogspot.com/2008/10/i-was-reading-around-in-this-weeks.html, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
4. Dolores Capdet , Two types of authority, http://ltc.umanitoba.ca:83/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1059, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
5. Etienne Wenger, CoP: Best Practices, “Systems Thinker”, June 1998, http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml
6. George Siemens, Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers, presentation to ITFORUM, January 27, 2008, also at http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/Paper105/Siemens.pdf , retrieved on 01-Nov-08
7. George Siemens, Networks, Ecologies, and Curatorial Teaching, http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/2007/08/networks_ecologies_and_curator.html, retrieved on 01-Nov-08.
8. Grainne Conole, Cloudworks: social networking for learning design, http://e4innovation.com/presentations/conole_ascilite_final.doc, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
9. Jay Cross, Learnscape Architecture, http://informl.com/2008/09/03/learnscape-architecture/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
10. Jay Cross, Learnscaping, http://internettime.pbwiki.com/learnscapes, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
11. Jenny MacKness, Thinking aloud about power, authority and control, http://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/thinking-aloud-about-power-authority-and-control/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
12. Lisa Lane, Control by Personality, http://lisahistory.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/control-by-personality/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
13. Lisa Lane, Response to Stephen: rights and power, http://lisahistory.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/response-to-stephen-rights-and-power/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
14. Living Networks, Fritjof Capra, Network Logic – Who governs in an interconnected world, Ed. Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller, Paul Skidmore , Demos, 2004
15. Net Pedagogy Portal , Evolution – Emerging Developments, http://www.thewebworks.bc.ca/netpedagogy/Evolution/evolution4.html, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
16. Paul Anderson, What is Web 2.0?, Ideas, technologies and implications for education, 2007, also at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
17. Sharon Peters, CCK08/Forums/Week 8: Power, Authority, Control, (http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=1048, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
18. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Giambattista Vico, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
19. Suifai John Mak, How I see George and Stephen’s views in the UStream session Week8, http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/how-i-see-george-and-stephens-views-in-the-ustream-session-week8/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
20. Valdis Krebs, Emergent Networks, http://orgnet.com/EmergentNetworks.pdf, referenced & summarized in http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=136, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
21. Viplav Baxi, CCK08: Network Based and Network Led Training, http://learnoscck08.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/cck08-network-based-and-network-led-training/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
22. Viplav Baxi, CCK08-Connectivism Impacts, http://learnoscck08.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/cck08-connectivism-impacts/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
23. Viplav Baxi, Learning 2.0 Formal Methodologies, http://learnos.wordpress.com/2008/04/17/learning-20-formal-methodologies/, retrieved on 01-Nov-08
24. Wendy Drexler, CCK08 Power to the People, http://teachweb2.blogspot.com/2008/10/cck08-power-to-people.html, retrieved on 01-Nov-08

Images courtesy various artists who have been kind enough to post on Flickr and elsewhere on the Web.

a. We should be, practically speaking, looking at a continuum between networks and groups, connectives and collectives etc. and situate our applications of connectivism in a range within that continuum. Each point or sub-range in that continuum (represent a learning formation), will contain mixed characteristics. I am not sure there can be a pure “anything” because there are many frictional forces that come in the way of that. George Siemens also exhorts us to design for various levels of connectedness.

b. Autonomy of the learner is a difficult thing perhaps for a lot of learners to handle and we must be cognizant of that. This is not only age dependent and is one many factors that actually end up influencing the learning process. (one such model is Learning Orientations). George’s presentation on connectives and collectives talks about how autonomy decreases from connectives to collectives.

c. As I was reading the part of the discussion around whether Connectivism is applicable to lower grades in the K12, the thought that struck me was that this is a learning theory and expected to explain learning itself (global principles, like those behind the steam engine). Are we saying children at those ages do not learn in a connective manner? Are there more exceptions such as these? Or are we saying that applying the theory presents greater difficulties in one segment versus the other. 

d. In my experience, the teacher (and the institution) is usually “responsible” for reporting on and “ensuring” the good performance of the student. I believe that exercise of some kind of power/control/structure is necessary in most situations for the teacher to be able to “shape”/influence the outcome. The degree may vary depending upon a variety of factors.

e. Critically, not all teachers may be able to cope with Connectivism the same way as they are not able to cope with existing strategies. I would love to research how much understanding teachers in India, for example, and compared across the world, have an understanding of any formal methods of teaching or theories and are actively using them in the classroom. 

f. Power and distributed power need to be defined in the discussion. Stephen raised the question in the Elluminate session as well. Also, is there good power and bad power? Sharon Peters makes some compelling remarks:

Once we have established that relationship of trust and accountability, control and power can slowly be given over to the learners.Let’s not forget the element of humanity and what it is to be human as we explore the issues of power, control, validity and authority.

f. And then there is the whole notion of identity and self in relation to power. How do we perceive the self in relation to others? Who is “powerful”? In contrast, who is “powerless”? How does negotiation and transfer of power occur between the self and the other/network? What happens when someone who is powerful loses power and vice versa. 

Let me define Network based training as a framework for sense making for the autonomous learner that leverages the principles of network learning and Network led training as concerted efforts by a learning formation (defined as a range in the continuum between groups and networks or connectives & collectives) to facilitate and drive learning initiatives across the formation.

1. Traditional training (read WBTs and ILTs) has long depended upon structure, control, unity,  instructor/teacher/instructional designer primacy and cohesion. Network based and Network led training emphasize open, non-linear, participative, emergent, diverse and autonomous learning.
2. Traditional training has focussed on specific formats, styles and design methodologies for the development of training. NBTs and NLTs focus on harvesting connective knowledge across a variety of very fluid formats and styles of contributors and enabling continuous extension & expansion of this knowledge.
3. Traditional training is focused on deterministic attempts to achieve predefined learning outcomes. NBTs and NLTs focus on ability and capacity of the learner to adapt to fast changing conditions recognizing sensitive dependence on initial conditions and on an overall end-goal rather than on predefined outcomes.

Traditional training, if designed and implemented effectively, has some key benefits.

1. Firstly, effective training content provides a format for content that is the result of a lot of effort around presentation of key concepts using visualization, language and instructional techniques. These are not skills that the average blogger has, for example. This is key because language and visualization can make the difference between obscurity and meaning.
2. Secondly, traditional training content makes some definite assumptions about the state of knowledge and characteristics of the learner that provides a plateau from which the learner can ascend. This helps in situating the difficulty and complexity of the learning itself for the learner.
3. Thirdly, traditional training is able to provide a pathway or guidance (even if in a very limited manner, cost of development is a big consideration here) to the learner and possible framework for sense making that is (however) distilled from an expert.
4. Fourthly, there are a large number of interactive lecture delivery techniques, gaming & simulation led techniques and visualization techniques that have been extremely effective. As of now, I am not able to situate these within connectivist-speak and relate them to network learning. But I am convinced that these are too important to be left out of the discourse.
5. Fifthly, there is a mechanism for evaluation that is critical to quantize for network learning. Without it, connectivist approaches could well become infructuous in a wide variety of training administration contexts, something that should never happen.

These benefits directly impact the learning experience in terms of available time, level of comprehension of materials, ability to navigate complex content etc. which are key experience factors in today’s fast moving information environment.

If we look at material covered in the first week of the course, it seems much more intelligible now than previously, not because it was not articulated well enough in this instance, but because a whole lot of us had to negotiate several plateaus in between through collaborative activities given that we were standing on different plateaus when we started. The instructors modelled and demonstrated while we learners reflected and practiced.

However, the sequence of week wise topics is just one single pathway that learning designers could have taken. The learning ecology that was created and extended was just one example. The content itself is not exactly conducive to meet the constraints of time, though (and availability of time is also a variant across participants) and this is a challenge, at least for me.

The design of NBTs and NLTs then have to be situated in principles of network learning but cannot ignore key benefits of effective traditional training materials and delivery techniques.

What would be key factors in the design of such NBTs, NLTs. A lot has been said on the learning ecology (e.g. learnscapes), learning technology (Web 2.0), connection forming & social network analytics among other ideas and all seems extremely useful. I think there are some more factors that deserve attention.

1. Firstly, we should look at the concept of distributed, associative knowledge and learning as the network metaphors to see what representations could, at a network level, be found suitable to identify (say) learning how to fly a plane or (say) what is Paris. An example could be a concept map.
2. Secondly, we should look at the individual “dot” in the pattern more closely. By this I mean to focus on how information or knowledge contained in the constituents of a pattern (which are by themselves patterns) can be represented.
3. Thirdly, we should try and see how these patterns could be published as well as accessed when we want to at an individual level. I see this as problems with technology (e.g. authoring tools that generate high quality animations are few and restricted) and communication strategy/design (e.g. awareness about how to write a blog post so that it communicates what you really want to communicate), both of which are critical if we are to learn or teach.
4. Fourthly, the similarities between patterns and the relationships between them together become important tools for the educators. Concepts could be taught/learnt using similar learning patterns (e.g. an astronomical phenomenon of a particular arrangement of stars that looks like a kite – one learning pattern that looks like another – I learn the same way he learns) or by using similar & related domain/knowledge patterns (e.g. I learn how to write a recursion based program in BASIC using a pattern of how it was done in C++).

The principles

Connectivism is a new theory of learning that embraces and extends the following principles:

• Learning is the process of making new connections
• Connections are a primary point of focus and could be to people or devices
• Connections expose patterns of information and knowledge that we use (recognize, adapt to) to further our learning
• Networked learning occurs at neural, conceptual and social levels
• Types of connections define certain types of learning
• Strength and nature of connections define how we learn
• Networks are differentiated from Groups (by factors such as openness, autonomy, diversity, leadership and nature of knowledge)
• Knowledge is the network, learning is to be in a certain state of connectedness
• All knowledge is associative in nature and resides across our connections
• Chaos, complexity theory, theories of self-organization and developments in neurosciences are all extremely important contributors for us to understand how we learn in a volatile, constantly evolving landscape

Connectivism is very different from existing theories of Behaviorism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and is more readily and effectively applied to today’s learners and their needs. Learning 2.0 as a style or connectivism as a theory is diametrically opposed to the traditional 1.0 styles of learning or the prior learning theories. Every aspect, whether it be setting goals for learning, providing content, organizing learning groups, measuring & tracking progress and managing schedule constraints, needs to be re-evaluated for it’s equivalent in the 2.0 connective world.

Impact on Instructional Design

ID has evolved under the influence of traditional theories, but needs reinterpretation in the context of the new theory of connectivism. Contextualization, sequence of content and interaction complexity are typical factors in design, however there are several new factors that need to be concerned.

• Ecology or learnscapes (Jay Cross) – engendering connections through creation of learning architectures or landscapes is a new key factor
• Being able to create capacity in learners to adapt as situations and circumstances change is a new key factor in a fast changing world
• Three key skills for a learner are:
  • Patterning – learning is pattern recognition and adaptation
  • Wayfinding – is a key skill in an overwhelming abundant information climate
  • Sensemaking- making sense or arriving at a framework to make sense of patterns and knowledge
• Currency of learning is another key factor because of the fast moving nature of knowledge. It is not sufficient to just take a course, we need to learn continuously
• Learning is not deterministic and linear. There is chaos and complexity in learning
  • Chaos theory tells us that learning is sensitive to initial conditions that can have a dramatic influence on the final outcome and that there is a degree of hidden order/structure within the chaos of learning
  • Complexity theory suggests that multiple complex interacting elements result in particular outcomes. Outcomes are not something we draw out on a piece of paper. There are too many variables in the learning experience itself.
• Challenge for educators and instructional designer is now to achieve particular outcomes through distributed approaches (as opposed to the challenge to achieve distribution within traditional modes)
• We need new metaphors for educators and instructional designers – curator, master artist, weaver, network administrator are possible metaphors
• All in all, learning ecologies in a connectivist world shall be based on facets such collaboration and networking tools, learning formations, social learning network analysis.

Impact on Visual Design

Not much has been said about the impact of Connective learning on visual design. How will visualization be applied, not only for appeal and engagement but also for exposition of ideas? There are new factors that need to be addressed in visual design.

• Usability – if one looks at usability from a content explosion point of view, tool designers are now confronted with the really difficult challenge for reducing the  time taken to read,  user attention to key ideas,  recall and structure (read pattern) among other factors. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.(Anon. Reading on the Web (Alertbox). http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html, Last accessed, October 25, 2008)
• Graphics design is also impacted. As the processing power of computers grows, the personal computers are no more regarded as devices to be programmed but rather as a bunch of applications to manipulate media. In this new setting, visual languages play a fundamental role, providing interactive or even proactive elements to manipulate not the computer but the applications….Its design is no more only a question of graphical representation of formalisms and inferences but it also requires the definition of direct manipulation and dynamic interaction processes.(Formative Interfaces for Scaffolding Self-Regulated Learning in PLEs, Mustafa Ali Türker and Stefan Zingel, 2008, http://www.elearningeuropa.info/files/media/media15975.pdf )
• Human Computer Interface (HCI) design and the impact of connectivism, chaos, complexity, self regulated learning, information overload, patterning, wayfinding and sensemaking on user interfaces, in particular personal learning environments. Earlier cognitive science- based theories could not adequately address issues that were cropping up related to better understanding of work context, levels of expertise, role of the artifact and focus on individual user in an increasingly workspace characterized by co-operative work among many people. These shortcomings made the HCI community look outside of cognitive science based HCI for a framework that could address these issues and also offer concrete conceptual tools that could be used in designing better work practices using computers. (Activity Theory : Sam Rajkumar. Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://mcs.open.ac.uk/yr258/act_theory/)
• Programmable patterns depicted visually or as networked data structures, in my opinion, are going to be very important. Consider the effort being made by Garito – Mind map as programming language – Visual Think Map (Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://visualthinkmap.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2168552%3ATopic%3A1053), where he is trying to develop a programming language based on mindmaps.
• How do we design graphical representations or navigation frameworks that are easy to share, extend, and adapt to by learners who, in essence, recognize patterns? Visualization is a great and necessary tool not just at the level of the individual learner, but also from the perspective of networks themselves. For example, networks may publish (or from networks, we may extract) visual/programmable knowledge maps given approaches such as strict faceted classification (Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://www.facetmap.com/pub/strict_faceted_classification.pdf)
• How can creation of these become as easy as writing a blog post at the level of the individual contributor? Graphical Media has been always difficult to create and represents a major cost point for learning developers (the stakes get higher in 3D immersive worlds). This goes beyond tool makers providing templates for drag and drop, for example – in fact those are too simplistic, even if they are available freely and inadequate for more creative visualization. We could look at approaches such as WordsEye – …for a short text such as: John said that the cat was on the table. The animal was next to a bowl of apples, WordsEye would construct a picture of a human character with a cartoon speech bubble coming out of its mouth. In that speech bubble would be a picture of a cat on a table with a bowl of apples next to it. (Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://www.semanticlight.com/docs/wordseye_siggraph.pdf)

Impact on the Subject Matter Experts

The subject matter expert (SME) has typically not been known to be the best instructional designer or educator (and vice versa). In a connective world, the role may perhaps require a host of different things.

• The expertise to be able to create patterns or guide to patterns (of knowledge) for differing states of learner networks. The thought is that experts are also learners. They would, I assume, natively teach in much the same way as they would learn (and thus, be connected). If they could publish successive pattern adaptations (viz. their incremental learning), these could be useful for a learner who learns (or is connected) in a similar manner.
• An interesting article around Twitter behavior by Jared Stein notes – They need to watch and observe the experts as they work….examples suggest that there is some real learning potential for the cognitive apprentice in following experts or even colleagues on Twitter. (Twitter as a Tool of Cognitive Apprenticeship? | Flexknowlogy – Jared Stein on Education and Technology. Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://flexknowlogy.learningfield.org/2007/12/21/twitter-as-a-tool-of-cognitive-apprenticeship/)
• Ability to negotiate collaboration tools and ecologies can be another major impact. Networks may provide potentially a source of great satisfaction for the SME and will definitely serve as a great way of not only staying current, but also of being able to measure/evaluate expertise in the community/learning formation/organization.
• I believe that one of the greatest impacts on exposing their own learning to a community will be due to the increased ability to self-organize using tools and to be able to share that in real-time. I think that some ordering mechanism, such as FacetMaps would be useful. …Facetmapping is also good when you want to organize your resources in different ways for different users. For example, you could map all the books in a bookstore to various facets, then build special-interest websites that access the dataset of books (FacetMap Wine Demo – Faceted Classification Demo. Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://www.facetmap.com/browse/?v=selection2tags.xsl&n=5&s=220700000013). Facets, however, are different. Abe says that facets tend to be more loosely defined and that they tend to represent human attempts to make sense out of the world. “Genre” would be a facet of literature, for example. (Learning, Doing, Selling: 2006 IA Summit Wrapup: Monday – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Retrieved October 25, 2008, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/learning_doing_selling_2006_ia_summit_wrapup_monday.)
• I also intuitively feel that at some point, knowledge, networked as it is, could be seen as a really large, AI based object oriented relational database management system. That’s a mouthful and speculative, but this is best left for an individual post.

Impact on Learning Solution designers/consultants

People who design learning solutions shall also be impacted in many ways. These could include:

• Belief that content, context and connections should form the fabric of the new learning experience
• Web 2.0 and evolving technologies provide the technical infrastructure for collaboration, information negotiation and connection making (for example, use of Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Podcasts)
• Organizations need to rethink the roles of learning managers, instructional designers, experts and learners as well as curricula and content
• New forms of collaboration and sense making need to be utilized. Some are:
  • Communities of Practice
  • Concept Maps
  • Journaling and collaborative content creation
• Structure solutions very differently as compared to traditional modes and technology such as LMS (LMS + Web 2.0 does not equal Learning 2.0)
• Analyze and design a set of formalized methodologies around Learning 2.0 in the organization
• Analyze if and how existing training goals, content, learning processes and learning infrastructure can be adapted to suit the new approaches
• Create learning networks for both learning and performance support that combines social networking, tools, community ratings, learning and structured teaching
• Perhaps organize around specific areas of focus or communities of practice such as a technical domain
• Place a special focus on defining the process of creating, initiating, managing, mentoring and monitoring the progress of each type of learning network
• Provide employees with Personal Learning Environments, or a set of tools that allow learners and teachers to collect information and knowledge and collaborate with others
  Integrate collaborative features or collaborative learning designs within traditionally available content (may require repurposing of existing content to suit the new 2.0 style)

Impact on Learning Managers

The key challenges that may be encountered by Learning Managers are:

• Ability to implement the required infrastructure (technology, process, policy and organization) for Learning 2.0
• Ability to accommodate both traditional and new styles depending upon preferences
• Buy in from learners, instructors, learning managers and other key stakeholders

Learning Managers, though, have perhaps the biggest challenge. They must orchestrate learning rather than just be responsible for the creation of the learning content itself. They must be able to bring out functional excellence and the culture of sharing and continuous learning. Their goals and measures must be community led and guided by the organization needs. This will directly result in performance improvements because the community can be made responsible for those improvements. Learning Managers will need to step up and leverage these new developments to foster that culture. They are the ones who are responsible for implementation of formal methodologies for Learning 2.0 at the workplace.

The human nervous system, comprising of the brain (control center of the nervous system), the spinal cord and a complex neuronal network, is divided into two sub systems – the central (brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous systems (complex neuronal network / nerve bundles). The Peripheral nervous system connects the central nervous system with the rest of the body. For example,  the cranial nerves take impulses to/from the brain and the spinal nerves, from to/from the spinal cord.

The brain consists of the cerebrum (largest part, seat of consciousness, controls movements, sensory perception and plays an important role in memory, language and thinking), the cerebullum (responsible for coordination and balance) and the brain stem.

The cerebrum is broken up into two hemispheres – the left and the right (see also left-right brain). These are covered by a thin layer of grey matter called the cerebral cortex. The cortex itself is divided into 4 parts or lobes – occipital (visual), temporal (auditory), parietal (touch, taste, pressure, pan, heat and cold) and frontal (motor activity and integration of muscle activity, speech, thought processes).

The brain stem is broken down into five sections – thalamus (which is the central relay point for all incoming messages), the hypothalamus (that regulates blood pressure, temperature, hunger, thirst etc), midbrain (that contains some areas of sight and hearing), the pons (controls the nerve centers of the muscles of the face) and the medulla oblangata (which is closest to the spinal cord and controls breathing, heartbeat etc).

The spinal cord serves as the pathway between the brain and the peripheral nervous system. The bones of the vertebral column are designed to protect the spinal cord.

Neurons also called nerve cells are the oldest cells in our bodies and send/receive information by the means of electro-chemical signals. Each neuron is connected to as many as 80,000 other neurons. There are approximately a 100 billion in  the brain. They measure 4-100 mm microns wide (1 micron = 1/1000 mm) and some neurons can be many feet long.

The neuron has a cell body and nerve processes (that are able to conduct and transmit signals at speeds of as much as 360 feet per second). The two types of nerve processes are Axons (carry signals away from the cell body, typically one per neuron) and Dendrites (that carry signals towards the cell body, many per neuron). A synapse is the space between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. The signal comes in through the dendrite, passes through the axon and is passed on to the dendrite of the other neuron through the use of neurotransmitters that are chemicals in the synapse.

Neurons can be classified in many ways. By structure, there are many types of neurons – unipolar, bipolar and multipolar. Some types of neurons have also been identified based on their location and distinct shape such as Betz cells and Pyramidal cells. Functionally, they can be separated into Afferent (peripheral nervous system, sensory nervous cells or sensory neurons carry information from internal organs and external stimuli to the Central nervous system, CNS); Efferent (peripheral nervous system, motor neurons, carry signals from CNS to organs, muscles and glands) and Interneurons (that conduct signals between sensory and motor neurons).

Neurons work by conducting electrical impulses using the action potential. Potential is defined by the diferent in electrical state outside and inside the neuron (which has ions such as Sodium, Potassium, Chloride etc). In the resting state, this difference is about 70 mV (inside of neuron is 70 mV less than outside) and this is called Resting Potential. In a state of excitation i.e. when a signal moves down the axon, depolarization occurs that lowers the potential. When the potential goes down to a critical threshold level, an action potential is created and the neuron “fires” or gets activated. A repolarization occurs to bring the neuron back to it’s resting potential subsequently. The polarization happens because of the movement of Sodium and Potassium positively charged ions through channels that are semi-permeable – i.e. only allow specific ions to pass through. 

When the action potential reaches the synapse, the neurotransmitters take it up and the signal is passed to the receptor neuron. The neurotransmitters are made in the cell body of the neuron and passed down the axon. Many things could happen when the neurotransmitter is released. 

The incoming messages are processed by the appropriate part of the brain and corresponding output signals are generated that represent human response.

I think it is helpful to acknowledge that, as defined, groups and networks provide two opposing and contrasting definitions of a learning “formation”. There could be “pure” groups and “pure” networks, but actual formations would lie somewhere in between these kinds of formations, sort of like a region in the continuum between these types.

Dr. Terry Anderson, for example, talked about three intersecting kinds (he included collectives) and George has talked about the continuum of strength between individuals and groups/collectives. The contrasts are completely necessary to acknowledge that these distinctions exist. And there may be more such types that we can identify (possibly ).

Secondly, it is very important to be able to base one of the distinctions between ”traditional” and “connected” in groups vs. networks,  in the context of the dominant educational systems today, otherwise you do not have a base reference to what you are trying to revolutionize (and revolution is what is required, IMHO). In that vein, calling this an experience vs. a course and similar examples, only reinforce the point that we must contrast in order to expose. We must expose in order to change.

Roberta, I think yours is a difficult comment to absorb:

1.  we are a group because we are discussing and learning the same thing…about connectivism. 

2. we are a group because there is order to the readings and weekly topics, including topics of discussion. 

3. we are a group because there are borders and memberships.  You have to be a member to post here on the forums, you have to be a member to post a blog etc.

4. we are a group because the knowledge gained here is increasing by additions, or working to prove the same point.

Why this is difficult is that I cannot remember a learning experience or a formation that has been so open, diverse, autonomous, participative, complex and emergent. And I don’t think that atleast for George and Stephen, that is unintentional. I think it would take me a lot, and I am still struggling with design methodologies for engendering connective learning, to even think of evolving this course in the way they have.

But learning formations can be guided (if not directed by a concrete end goal) using certain design methodologies. If they cannot be, then they cannot address the logistical challenges of learning. That is the focus of the next week’s discussions – how can educators adapt to this new understanding.

I am simply not learning about Connectivism. I am learning much more (even bought my first book on Philosophy in an inspired moment ) and that learning IS happening as a result of the design for this experience that George and Stephen have facilitated.

Order and memberships (just because we have a simple “create a profile, it will help organize and identify”, does it amount to borders?) are part of the design, but when have they been restrictive in this entire experience? I think we are also discussing a huge number of things that would never even physically (within the constraints of time and focus) be part of a traditional curriculum.

And knowledge has been nothing that is linearly additive in nature simply because I am connecting with so many diverse perspectives that it is hard to even collate on a mind map (in fact, for once that tool is proving to be useless to me at this point for me).

As Stephen writes:

Either way, for both of us, learning and knowing are not simply the ‘having’ of entities. A society might have a library or a database – it might ‘have’ knowledge, therefore – but neither of use would say that the society ‘knows’ or ‘has learned’ unless the members of that society are relevantly connected to that database.

Second, The ‘doing’, according to connectivism, is to conduct activities that would lead to being organized in a certain way. George would characterize this as ‘network formation’, while I (thinking more of personal learning than of social learning) would characterize it as ‘practice and reflection’.

and:

“to know is to be organized in a certain way, and to learn is to become organized in that way.”

and:

First, we need to be clear that collections of people have some group properties and some network properties. No collection of people is ever a ‘pure’ group or network. So, insofar as a collection of people learns, it is by virtue of its network properties.