Connectivism: Learning Theory or Pastime of the Self-Amused?
These are some notes I made from a paper by George Siemens which he posted here: http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism_self-amused.htm
The notes were intended to guide me in hosting a conversation with George on Jan 19, 2009, which was announced here: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbwiki.com/Events_Schedule. The talk was recorded and can be replayed here: http://tinyurl.com/090119siemens
The topic of the hosted talk series being on Multiliteracies for Social Networks and Collaborative Learning Environments, I had taken points from his paper that seemed to address this issue. In summary, George was writing about connectivism as a framework for describing how we learn or come to understand in an age of rapid change and information overload, where (to paraphrase George) the pipes are more important than the content within. The quotes I’ve taken from his paper (below) tend to support the slant we have taken in our course, which some participants are ‘getting’, and that is that learning to connect to and manage information inflow and from that develop knowledge is the 21st century learning skill that we are trying to model here.
At the end of the conversation I asked George about his recent CCK08 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course, and how he had managed to aggregate content being developed by 2400 participants. This course was one of the models for the Multiliteracies course I had mentioned here: http://goodbyegutenberg.pbwiki.com/Week1. He made a couple of interesting points in this regard. The people who had got the most out of that course were those who made the knowledge personally meaningful without relying on the course moderators for more than stimulus and initial guidance. People formed groups in various spaces, some in Second Life for example, or in the Moodle forum, but wherever they met, the knowledge development took place around those people in those groups. In other words, the moderators gave the course coherence (otherwise it would be fragmented and participants would be lost) but designed or conducted the course in such a way that despite massive amounts of information, participants could take those parts that were meaningful to them and run with those, best done in the company of a small group of others, and not worry about components of the course that might slip by or go unutilized.
So in talking to George I was seeking his insights from his recent experience in order to relate them to the structure of our present course (where I see that moderators must attend carefully to coherence). And also I wanted to relate his thoughts on connectivism to our topic of multiliteracies, for which purpose I extracted the notes that follow.
Quoting George:
ongoing changes obsolesce current knowledge (p.5)
‘To ‘know’ something is to be organized in a certain way, to exhibit patterns of connectivity. To ‘learn’ is to acquire certain patterns” (Downes, 2005, Section O, � 2).
Too many educators fail to understand how technology is changing society … We are exposed to an overwhelming amount of information�requiring continually greater levels of specialization in our organizations. It is here�where knowledge growth exceeds our ability to cope�that new theories of knowledge and learning are needed.
Instead of knowledge residing only in the mind of an individual, knowledge resides in a distributed manner across a network
The externalization of our knowledge is increasingly utilized as a means of coping with information overload
If media truly does shape humanity, the changed nature of dialogue and information exposure created by the internet will have greater implications to our future than the nature of the content currently being explored
The importance of the shift from internal to external knowing is evident in the rise of the internet as a connected structure permitting the development of knowledge and learning, not simply data and information. The learning is the network.
—————————
The paper I have (which George posted at part of his CCK08 course and dated Nov 12, 2006) is different from that at http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism_self-amused.htm
Downes (2006)
Learning … occurs in communities, where the practice of learning is the participation in the community. A learning activity is in essence a conversation [consisting] not only of words but of images, video, multimedia, and more.
Weinberger (2005) complexification [wherein] ware now able through an abundance of social tools, to produce and create content previously requiring a substantial investment. Broadcasting ideas — in text, audio, and video — is a fairly simple process.
GS - Making sense of this complex conversion requires a shift to alternative models of management
