CCK08 – Networks and Groups

The question of distinguishing groups and networks has actually been coming up in the SL Cohort for a couple of weeks now.  I think we had already meandered our way to the autonomy idea that both Stephen and George mentioned.  The passion v. reason dichotomy that Stephen wrote about was something I hadn’t thought of, although I though George made a good point about different levels of control being appropriate to different goals.

Stephen seems to criticise most current educational models as being too “group”.  My initial reaction was to think that many students don’t have the comfort level with working autonomously that a more “networked” model requires.  Then I thought about Montessori.  If you can do it with four and five year olds, why not with less well prepared adults? Is there anyone out there in CCK08 who’s familiar w/ Montessori and ready to tackle how that model might be applied to novice older learners?

CCK08 – When your network shifts

I had toyed with the idea of writing the paper, but I’m going to write this instead.

Just about the longest standing member of my network moved to a different part of it today.  This got me thinking about many things. A couple of them even had to do with learning networks.  The Wealth of Nations is fixed.  It’s not going to change. People may interpret it differently, but it’s there.  A Connectivist approach focuses to a great extent on learning through connections to other people, with whom you fall out of touch, or with whom you have a falling out, or….

How does the transience of human networks affect them as learning mechanisms?  How do you cite your network, how do you provide persistence to that citation so those who come after you can check it?

Sorry… more questions than supposed answers today.

CCK08 – The Third Dimension of Networks

I have been quite impressed by the breadth and depth of the conversations in CCK08, and have already started thinking about what I can take back to my more ordinary teaching and training. Here I run into a challenge, and it’s got me thinking about our network diagrams.

All the ones I’ve seen are two dimensional, but I think there’s a third dimension, prior learning, which plays an important role. While few of us know anywhere near what George and Stephen do about the topics of the course, neither are most of us novices. Many of us are familiar with social networks, concept maps, and learning theory, for example. Therefore we have some prior understanding in which to ground our thinking, leading to some intelligent comments and questions.

I am considering two possibilities.

a. The level of discourse correlates directly to the mean level of prior learning. If you put knowledgeable people together, the conversation will be good.

b. Discourse level correlates inversely to the standard deviation of the level of prior learning. I think of this in terms of knowledge/learning gaps. My imagined typical case is the standard freshman survey of X where the instructor knows quite a bit and the students often know very little.

When we think about networks for learning, we have to ask , “From where in the network is the knowledge/information/etc. going to propagate?” I know this goes against the idea that the knowledge is in the network links, but, for example, I just saw a classmate Tweet a request for information on how to perform a technology task. In that instance there was a specific piece of information (instructions on how to do Y). The questioner was trying to find a node (person) on the network that had that information.

This isn’t to say there is no gestalt. In interacting with your network, you can come up with an idea that you and others on your network hadn’t thought of before. Perhaps those two processes work side by side.

I now notice that I’m rambling, so I’ll quiet down and see what everyone else thinks.

CCK08 – A tale lost in the telling

I only managed to skim George’s History of Networked Learning (note: RTF) but had more time to read A History of the Social Web. I was deeply disappointed in the latter, a bit like Lisa, though perhaps for different reasons.  I, not being a historian, was less troubled by the fuzzy thesis than by the uncanny ability of the author to take what ought to be a fasinating story and make it as dry as the package of silica which protects electronic equipment during shipping.

Most of the people mentioned in the essay are alive.  Several of them blog. Why not let them speak in their own words? Why not let them tell the fascinating tidbits about how all this ferment happened?  I suppose there is some need to be concise, but I felt as if the narrative sucked the life out of it, at least for me. Others seemed to like it, though.

As to the broader question of these networks in a learning context, what I’ve seen unfolding in the course suggests to me that decentralized may in fact be better.  Someone connected this with Ivan Illich.  Although I haven’t had time to read him yet,  an Illich fan with whom I chat on occasion explains it as creating tools and letting people use them. If you go beyond that, it seems very easy to create a creepy treehouse.  Trying to specify in great detail how people use the tools reminds me also of Clay Burrell’s “schooliness”.  (BTW, he has been doing a fascinating series on Gilgamesh - especially appropriate since it’s Banned Books Week).

But….

If you make things student driven and open, how do you then meet the demands for copious assessment? When you aren’t among the self motivated multitudes of CCK08, but among those for whom it’s about the grade….about the credits….about the diploma, I suspect that an open participatory model might create a whole lot of virtual silence, unless you declare, “Thou shalt post X times per week” in which case it becomes about grading and earning points rather than about teaching and learning.

CCK08 – On being graded

Pat Parslow writes about Catherine Fitzpatrick’s blog rating system.  I admit that I haven’t been following the forums much, so I didn’t know about this.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my blog was among those rated.  That means someone’s reading it.  A few things come to mind.

Catherine said of this blog early in the morning of September 26:  “thoughtful SL person but only a few posts and links to others”  At the time I had just begun posting, and there wasn’t so much content.  Also the posts were to some degree the falling tree that no one had yet heard. When Catherine posted my rating, the entire blog had 32 hits over its entire existence . I got mentioned in The Daily the morning of the 26th, and the CCK universe found me, I got more than twice that many hits on the 26th alone thanks mostly, I imagine, to the Daily mention.

This might be an argument in favor of the forums, as there certainly is a lag time before people find the blog posts and reply to them. It’s not that I have an innate dislike of forums.  Another group to which I belong has forums on which I have more than 500 posts.  There were a couple of reasons I decided to blog instead of forum post this time around with CCK08.

– Familiarity

As I said, I’m used to forums.  On the other hand, I’ve never blogged to any appreciable extent before.  I wanted to commit to using the tool so I’d learn how it really worked.  I have also been on forums long enough to have been through my share of flame wars.  One can, of course, be as nasty in a trackback as in a forum reply, but I was curious as to whether the decentralized discussion of blog discussions affected the tone.

–Permanence

I also tend to think of this blog as less of an explicit discussion and more of a place where I can make manifest what’s bouncing around my own mind.  If someone else reads that and it starts something bouncing around in their own mind, that’s great.  Lisa’s post on networks of the dead (previously referenced) did that for a number of people.

Also, I see my blog posts for this class as a beginning rather than a totality.  While the moodle discussion will continue to be available after the course ends, I would feel odd posting a new thread there six months from now.  In some important way they are linked to the one semester structure of CCK08.  I hope, however, to maintain the blog as a place to think out loud about other things to do with education and technology.

I suppose it’s a chacun à son gout sort of thing, when it comes right down to it. In a course this massive isn’t there room for both?

CCK08 – The Three Networks (with apologies to C.P. Snow)

Having just finished listening to the Friday wrap up session, I had an upsight.  I think that we are actually talking about three kinds of networks.

1. Neural Networks - Thanks to the neuroscientists with PET scanners, we know that different stimuli cause different parts of the brain to “fire”. Since I don’t have a PET scanner in my office, I can’t observe these networks directly, so I’ll say no more lest I embarrass myself.

2. Guidance Networks – Most people might call these social networks but I think the concept is bigger than that. These are the networks that connect us to ideas.  They’re how we find out about things.  I’m going to divide them into social networks and artifact networks based on whether communication is two way.

This stems in part from Lisa Lane’s discussion of networks of the dead.  I think it’s important to note that many of the things we learn from (blog posts, email messages, etc.) are just as much artifacts as an Ivan Illich book is. Something we read can prompt us to make a connection of ideas that we didn’t make before or can spur additional reading or research.

Where I see the difference is that , if I read Lisa’s blog post and reply to it, I’ve created a feedback loop and am now influencing her thought.  Not all interactions with the artifacts of the living create social networks, If I read and don’t reply, that blog post is just another artifact. When one can’t communicate with the person(s) responsible for the artifact, a truly social network can’t happen. Social networks are all the rage because modern technology makes them (especially if they are facilitated via Internet tools) relatively easy to map.

3. Conceptual Networks - This is the network of associations and ideas of which one can be meta-cognitively aware and use something like CMap to model. For example, I mentioned earlier this morning that the Multiverse Places trailer reminded me of the trailer for Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem.  On the surface they have the same sort of image of giant neon billboards.  As I thought about it more, I realized that they both also referenced my concept of being overwhelmed.  Stephenson’s character feels that way when he sees the billboards, I and felt that way when I saw the Multiverse Places trailer.

(The title reference, BTW, is to The Two Cultures – Listen to BBC Radio4 programs on this topic)

CCK08 – Virtual Social Networks and the relatedness of Neal Stephenson to all things

Joost Robben writes about virtual worlds.  The one which was new to me was Multiverse Places, so, intrigued by Joost’s comparison to facebook profiles, I wandered over and looked at the video trailer.  It made me want to run away, to be honest.  The trailer made everything look so energetically hip that I felt as if I were in sensory overload after a couple of minutes.  Who knows how I’d feel if I actually visited the world.  The shots of the virtual Times Square reminded me of the moment in the Anathem trailer (Apparently William Morrow has released a number of book trailers on MySpace) where the avout narrator stares up at the glowing billboards extramuros in utter bewilderment (a little less than a minute and a half in) Maybe Multiverse Places will have an “over 30″ zone for those who like their virtual lives to be more sedate.

Disclaimer : I’m more of a Second Life Person

CCK08 – Very asynchronous networks

Lisa writes about networking with the dead.  This seems to me something in between the social networks discussed in Wednesday’s session and the internal conceptual networks that aren’t really being talked about much, but can probably be seen in the concept maps many are creating. Since, however , one is only interacting with the dead person via his or her artifacts, is it the artifact more than the creator that’s part of the network?

I wonder how soon someone will write a biography based solely on a person’s collected blog posts, tweets, vblogs, comments, etc.

CCK08 – More thoughts – pragmatism v. idealism

An hour or so ago I made the assertion that educators were pragmatists.  Now I’m not so sure.

Most who end up teaching don’t grow up wanting to become learning theory experts. Instead, they want to teach something.  The US system of credentialing postsecondary faculty based on content knowledge tends to accentuate this, and one ends up with college and university departments full of SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) with not much awareness of learning theory.

Bear with me. This is going somewhere.

As an instructional technology person , I see all these things (twitter, wikis, blogs, Second Life) as tools that have value, not intrinsically, but because they help you create better educational experiences.  However, before I was an IT person, I taught (and actually still do teach) music and French.  I don’t, maybe even can’t, see the value of Tallis’s Spem in Alium (Listen to a BBC radio program about this piece or download scores)  or Clement Marot’s “A une demoyselle malade“  (This short poem was the point de départ for Douglas Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language)as being utilitarian. There’s something simply beautiful about them that I struggle to convey to my students, who tend to be pragmatists like my educator self. It reminds me a of a line from Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which I just finished reading.

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

So I don’t know what to make of my own duality here.  Bringing this back to the topic, I wonder what a concept map of this post would look like and what sort of network it is.  Never mind all the other associations firing in my mind (Snow Crash, the art installation ‘Fourty Voice Motet’ , Ivory tower vs. monastic cloister v. mathic concent, etc.)

CCK08 – Random Musings on Educational Pragmatism and Networks

Stephen made a comment somewhere about educators being ‘process people’ . That is, “The network maps are very pretty, but how do I teach differently because of what they tell me?” Stephen mentioned this in terms of extroversion v. introversion, but I think of it more in the sense that educators are pragmatists.  Many of us, though we may find the theory interesting, see it as first and foremost a means by which we improve our support of others’ learning.

I got a chance to hear most of Valdis Kreb’s session yesterday.  When I tried to think of this is an educational vein, I kept coming back to the self directed learner.  If you decide that you want to learn something, it’s common to locate your “local expert”on whatever it is, even if only for a recommendation on what book to read first.

Krebs showed at least one slide where the hierarchical network created by the org chart was superimposed on the network of actual member interactions.  Traditional education sort of walls those two networks off from one another.  Teachers who try to join the informal network are seen as usurping student space, while learners who try to insert themselves in the formal network are seen as usurping teacher authority (if it’s done without the “teachers” consent) or brown nosing (if done with said consent)

If connectivism is truly going to change anything, you have to tackle this question of what it means for educational locus of control.  I just stumbled across Illich’s Deschooling Society and am starting to wonder how it might tie in to all of this.