My son, who is a sophomore at Bridgewater State College, texted me Friday. He was fuming about an incident in his Intro to Communications class. The teacher has a strict attendance policy: if you miss more than two classes you have 20% deducted from your final grade. My son attends class once a week for three hours (on a Friday, no less). He makes sure he is there.

On Friday, he had his laptop open to take notes. It should be noted at Bridgewater the students are required to purchase a laptop. The professor told Kenny he would be marked as absent for using the laptop to send an email during class.

I’m not sure how this will end. Kenny has an appointment to speak with the Dean of the Communications School. As a parent, I am annoyed that he can be in a Communications course that is being taught by someone who doesn’t know how to use the tools required of the students to teach about communication. As a mother, I am annoyed that Kenny couldn’t just wait till after class to send the email. As an educator, I am dumbstruck that a professor of communications believes this extreme use of control over 19 and 20 year-olds in a 3-hour Friday class is the best way to transfer knowledge. (Surely she understands filters, barriers, etc?)

Those of us who understand the connected nature of the Internet know that it’s possible to pay attention to a lecture and send an email or even IM at the same time. (For the record, Kenny swears he was not IMing, he just had to send an email for his duties as the Student Government Secretary). If this professor was smart, she’d foster the use of a backchannel during her lectures, especially during these marathon Friday sessions. Let the students discuss what you are talking about, be part of the discussion so you can see where you need to adjust your methods.

I can’t do much but encourage my son to use the channels available to him. It’s a real life lesson: sometimes you have bosses that are just like this controlling professor. At least it’s only for one semester. It hardly seems fair that he was actually in class, paying attention and taking notes for three hours, and all that is negated and he doesn’t get credit for it because his duties outside of class required him to send one email.

Here are some questions for all of you:

How would you counsel Kenny to deal with this situation? What should he say to the Dean? How should he act in that professor’s class?

How would react as a parent if you were required to purchase a laptop for your child to attend a state school, just to have teachers discourage them from using the laptops? How would you react if someone was teaching your child the basics of communication theory but they had no insight into the communication methods used by new media? (I have to say for me, this professor’s credibility is definitively suspect.

For my CCK08 friends, how does my son’s situation illustrate the topic of control?

For any of Kenny’s friends who may get here, have you experienced anything similar from this professor?

In one of Mike Bogle’s posts the topics of learning ecosystems and “walled gardens” comes up. The main idea I took away from his post is that now it’s so easy to make and access information. While that is a good thing, it brings up the issue of not being able to get to all of this information, and perhaps missing the most important information.

The one thing he doesn’t address is cost. For example, he said:

From the standpoint of the individual, the barriers to entry and participation in what are nebulously referred to as Web 2.0, social media, new media, or social software are extraordinarily low. Free hosting services enable the creation of blogs and wikis in mere moments and facilitate outreach and collaboration on a scale and scope that was once either previously prohibitively expensive, required high levels of technical expertise, or both. The notion of personal space has gone virtual, and it’s being wholeheartedly embraced.

All of that is very true. But in order to participate you must be online. Not everyone can afford to be online, and thus cannot participate. Which in the context of Mike’s argument is very scary: if we have this much information and not everyone is contributing to its creation, what would happen if everyone could get online!

Mike also pointed to the fact that many times new collaborative groups will create a new space in which to collaborate. They effectively reinvent the wheel since a portion of the group may have already started work someplace else. He gave his thoughts on the reasons for this attitude:

And yet with universities still more or less being walled gardens, in which prestige and reputation are the measured currency, the expectation is that projects need to be closely tied back to the institution of origin so as to set them apart from others.

No doubt some of this happens. However, is it possible some of this ties back to costs? I am pursuing my Master’s degree at a State University. Since the University is funded by the state, the institution has a responsibility to act in a responsible fiscal manner. Providing on on ramp to the Internet, creating the project spaces, and maintaining all of these things costs money. You have to pay for the servers, the cables, data storage arrays, software, and for the people to run and support all of this. Some of the “walling” must also come because there is a limit to what can be supported, and who can be allowed to access the tools.

Additionally, if someone is paying to go to that institution, they should be afforded priority access to University’s on ramp to the Superhighway. That doesn’t mean one person should get the biggest lane, which is way access to some tools such as Bit Torrent is restricted.

So I’ll up the ante in the discussion. Someone has to pay for the access to whatever collaborative spaces we build. How does that affect the way we design for these collaboration spaces? Is this one thing that tethers collaboration to one space? If so, how do we change that?  And how do we ensure that everyone gets to join this big collaboration pool – even if they do not have the financial means to get online?

I am going through one of the CCK08 readings for this week, “Cloudworks: social networking for learning design”. (I would reference the author but I can’t find one on the given materials – only clue is the document title conole_ascilite). The paper provided a quote from Engestrom that really struck me:

The term ‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone… The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

I love the idea that social networks require a shared object, in other words they need a theme . If you are building something electronic to facilitate a social network, what is it that binds the social network together?

I am working on a new project at work (I’ll be able to talk about it soon!), but there was some difficulty with the project precisely because of this issue. Why would people want to come? Why would they participate? During a brainstorming session yesterday, this “shared object” of the network was surfaced, and I think the “how” to get people to come and participate became much clearer.

The Cloudworks paper discusses this term social objects. It references the following authors when searching for a definition of social object:

• Weller who said a social object is “something (it can be real or virtual) that facilitate conversation, and thus social interaction”
• Demsey, who said “The linking theme is that people connect and share themselves through ‘social objects’, pictures, books, or other shared interests, and that successful social networks are those which form around such social objects.“
• McLeod, who said “The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them“.
• Fraser who defines profiles as social objects: Profiles ARE social objects. They’re not a real person – they’re a constructed representation around which interaction takes place – a specific kind of social object. They are artefacts which connect and make visible networks.

After  publicly declaring my angst over filters being put in place in the CCK08 class, Stephen Downes pretty much spelled out the rules for engagement in the Daily today when he said:

“It is not simply about saying you agree or disagree with the authors and leaving it at that. It is about relating your present experience with your past experience, looking at what you are seeing and reading now from the perspective of things you have learned in the past. Because this part learning is unique, you bring a perspective to the discussion no one else can, and hence, add to the learning of everyone else.”

I still can’t understand why asking for clarification of someone else’s ideas is not acceptable. We do not learn in a bubble. Our learning is influenced and guided by our own information seeking behavior. We are taught (or conditioned) how to seek information in school, from our families, in our churches or other community groups.

In an article entitled “Purls of Wisdom” in the Journal of documentation (Prigoda yr.2007 vol.63 iss.1 pg.90), Elena Prigoda speaks of how LIS researchers are beginning to look at information behavior of “hidden, unwaged, and often marginalised forms of work, particularly caring work, done in the course of what might be considered serious or casual leisure activities”. This particular study was of the information-seeking behaviors of a knitting group that met in a public library (ok this particular citation is a also a shout-out to my daughter).

The study explains how the library is not a value-free place as the knitters choose to participate in a group that meets in a library in an affluent neighborhood, and they behaved in the ways expected of a library patron in such a neighborhood. Prigoda explains that even the simple activity of joining a library knitting group creates an “information ground” (or a “social setting in which people share everyday information while attending to a focal activity” [Fisher, Landry, & Naumer].

So even in a simple setting like a knitting club, there is information-seeking behavior. And there are rules an individual must follow in order to participate in the information flow. These rules aren’t spelled out in black and white, but they are the social rules we learn to interpret in order to gain entry to groups. In fact, the lack of understanding of these hidden rules of engagement is one of the hallmarks of Asperger’s Syndrome.

So it’s only normal from an information-seeking perspective that there are rules of engagement for participating in the massive online experiment that is CCK08. Now that rules have been identified, maybe I can figure out a way to do a better job of engaging.

So I am wondering: are there filters being imposed in the CCK08 class? I know I am applying my own filters. I decided early on I would keep up with blog posts and posts from the CCK08 twitter network. I stay away from the Moodle boards because they are very busy, and for at least the first couple of weeks they were also very negative (from my filtered view at least).

However, I click and read all the links sent via the daily as well as links from blog posts that come via my google alert. Vilpav Baxi’s post about Passion v. Reason showed up in the google alert today. I especially appreciated this comment:

“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”

I think this is a very important point. We are taught how to learn in the “dominant educational systems” of our modern world. Even Dr. Terry Anderson acknowledged this in the Elluminate session I attended this week when he said (and I am paraphrasing from memory here) that we are taught to expect the instructor-led model, so that we expect to receive instruction (and thus have the tools to learn) from this one model. That rings true for me in Corporate Ed, because Instructor-Led training (ILT) is the method most preferred by our audiences. (A question for another post: if we are conditioned to prefer ILT, will they accept the more connected way of learning provided by Web 2.0 tools?).

Those of us who think differently, whether we are “gifted”, “dyslexic”, “autistic”, or whatever other learning label you they stick to us, may have an easier time with receiving instructions in different (more connected) ways. We had to figure ways around the normal teacher-led model to survive the dominant educational system. We are used to looking for other ways of learning.

I learned very early how to get around the library, and would check out every single book on a topic I didn’t understand, until I found some kernel of information that helped me make sense of it (my label was gifted).  I also learned my times tables from School House Rocks (I don’t do well at all with rote learning, I always want to know WHY). My oldest was taught ways to endure the onslaught of sensory information so she could have the clarity to withstand ILTs (she has Asperger’s Syndrome and Sensory Integration Disorder). My youngest was thrown anything that he would read, but the only thing that ever worked was comic books (he still hates reading). He’s in college now and still relates EVERYTHING to comics (he’s doing a project now on how political times have influence the way Batman has been portrayed in the comic).

So the questions I see are two-fold. Did I need to learn my times tables? Yes, that was important. Did I have to work at learning them? Yes because I hate rote memorization. To this day I have to sing the “Three is a Magic Number” to get some of the answers. But I would never have been able to grasp binary or hex or octal without the times tables, and I would have never finished college, and never been doing what I can do now.

Would everyone best learn the times tables the way I learned them? Probably not. My nieces both just knew their tables. I don’t understand it.  The question to me becomes: how do you ensure  that everyone in a school setting learns what we expect them to learn. And what do we expect them to learn?  Is there a list of  what kids need to learn to survive in today’s society? Won’t a teacher’s own filters influence the way she allows her students to connect to the information they need?

One thing I want to add about filters. Vilpav’s post referenced the Moodle Forum Passion v. Reason. I am still smarting from being smacked down by Stephen Downes for simply asking if his definitions were the same as or different than the sociological or ethnographic definitions for groups and networks. I never got an answer, and was made to feel like I shouldn’t have even asked for the clarification.

I think Vilpav’s comments about being able to contrast and compare these definitions are right on: we have to be able to explain these differences to have an opinion on them.

I think Stephen is (perhaps unknowingly) creating rules and language for inclusion in the CCK08 group. For example, from reading his posts on this week’s topics, he seems to very much believe the sociologist view of groups and networks. I am not sure though, and am quite unwilling to ask now. Especially after some of the remarks he makes to others to trying to engage him in the Moodle forum:

“would not expect or require you to believe this. You can believe what you want. But I would expect you to understand the distinct that is being made here. Your posts suggests that you did not understand the difference.
Certainly, you made no attempt to demonstrate that you understood – you simply took a cheap shot without thinking about it. That does not play well either in the domain of reason or passion.”

“I’m sorry to be snippy – but I’m getting very tired of students in this course saying “I disagree” or “You’re wrong” without giving me even the faintest clue about what it is that seems wrong much less concrete evidence that they’ve read the work they’re disagreeing with).”

“Finally – please don’t feel singled out here. The remarks in this post are meant not just for you but for the other members of the course. Where I am indicating a dissatisfaction, I am indicating a general dissatisfaction, not just a dissatisfaction with you. It’s not personal. I am trying in my response to point to the standards I think are appropriate in a course of this level.”

So I feel stuck a bit in this course to be honest. I do not agree with Stephen’s argument that learning is not work (see my times table argument, also the only class I ever got a C in was stupid Earth Science and the rock test. GAH. Hated it). Sometimes learning base level knowledge is work, but it’s a necessary building block to understand higher order things like algebra (and all the good logical math that makes sense and I can deal with!). I am also having a hard time figuring out what he is actually saying, how it is different from existing definitions and work in group and network theory. I even tried working it out in a wiki, without much success.

But I also now feel I can’t participate in the CCK08 discussion. For some reason my words and methods of asking aren’t what one of the leaders of the CCK08 group expects, so I am in fear of being singled out for not understanding the language and norms. Effectively a filter has been created for me and the group.

I was reading this excellent post about groups and networks and I started to think about if groups filter access to networks. I think that all of the readings this week (at least how I understand them) point to groups being a restricted entity. In other words, there are definite boundaries to a group, access is controlled, there is an accepted language and other norms, etc.

On the other hand, networks are an ad hoc, fluid connection of autonomous individuals.  But can a person’s membership in a group potentially prevent him or her from seeing a beneficial network?

In my last post I talked about group styles, or signatures. This signature includes expected behaviors, language used, clothing worn, beliefs, etc. New group members are included (or excluded) based on their knowledge and use of the group signature.

Maybe part of a group’s signature is to create barriers to the information seeking behavior that would allow individual group members to connect to different networks. I found a paper that I may rework and post about “information imposters”. Here’s the definition of an information imposter from Dr. Chatman’s class notes:

Information impostors are persons within a small group that give the illusion of having knowledge. They jam the information social system with their own psuedo-information, shutting down the information seeking process. In effect, they claim to have given all the information that is necessary, telling members of the small world that they do not need to seek for any more information.

Sounds familiar to anyone following the US elections I bet. Is it possible for a group to have information impostors that purposely obfuscate connections to an outside network?

So individuals are in groups, and groups expect certain behavior from their members. In some cases groups obscure pathways to certain types of information. Individuals can connect to networks, but only if their information-seeking behavior is not blocked by the behavior they are expected to show to remain a member of their group.

In other words, groups can filter access to networks.

I want to start by getting something off my chest. I attended tonight’s Elluminate session, where Terry Anderson was the guest presenter. He had a very interesting presentation which I enjoyed very much. One thing he spoke about is going to make its way into a presentation I have next week. Good stuff!

I am very interested in figuring out how the thoughts in this week’s CCK08 discussions (which is about networks and groups) are different than existing group theory produced by sociological, ethnographic, and information studies disciplines. I was roundly chastised by @downes for “complaining” and “harping” when I was asking honest questions. It is very confusing when there are terms being introduced that are similar to terms in other established disciplines. I thought these questions would be easily answered, but I was basically told to put up a definition or shut up.

I didn’t appreciate that at all. Actually, using that sort of tactic is a way to control membership in a group. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

I’ve started to map out what I am getting from the readings and presentations about groups, networks, and collectives in this wiki.

I don’t have any of my old books, and I don’t want to post any of my old papers. I was a pretty angry political woman when I finally made it to FSU. I will post some of the quotes from my favorite professors. Her name was Elfreda Chatman, she died very suddenly a couple of years ago. She specialized in studying the information seeking behavior of folks in small worlds, especially disenfranchised folks.

One paper I wrote was titled “Information and Cyberspace: Ethnography and Virtual Communities” (April 2000). I quoted a paper by Steven R. Thomsen (Ethnomethodology and the Study of Online Communities: Exploring the Cyber Streets”). He had a definition for community:

“the place of idle talk and banter with acquaintances and friends, is often where the sense of membership in a community is achieved and experienced…it should not e surprising that millions of people throughout the world turn to the Internet to recreate and reestablish the third sphere of conviviality “

From one of Dr. Chatman’s lectures I had this note:

A group’s “style” is their signature. This signature will define the way the group will handle certain events, including what topics are to be discussed (or excluded), the form of interaction, and the level of meaning. An important area where this style is utilized is when a group member encounters a stranger, or someone who is not part of that small world. In ideal situations, when a stranger enters a small world they provide raw materials that allow the member of a small world to look at a world larger than their own. As long as the stranger knows what the rules of information exchange are within the group, he will be allowed to share his world view. However if his information style collapses, he will not be allowed to communicate any longer with the members of the small world be cause they won’t show their true selves (only a false front).

I think I may have broken one of the CCK08 small world communication rules today in that Elluminate session. I’m not sure what – maybe just asking for clarification is a bad thing. We’ll see if I get treated any differently.

Ok, I give! CCK08 is officially killing me! I’m going to try and hang in there. I think the problem is that the topics are so meaty, and interesting, that I want to only do this class and nothing else.

For instance, this post has been sitting in my head for a while. I just haven’t been able to get the words together to do real justice to the idea in my head. So I put it off, and the idea gets bigger. Then I get frustrated. It’s such an evil cycle.

How are people on the Autism spectrum affected by a network? I’m just going to bullet point my main ideas, feel free to pull them apart. I do believe that if we are talking about a new theory of learning, we have the opportunity to investigate this theory for ALL learners. So I think we should take some care to think about how this new theory of connectivism works for folks with learning disabilities.

So here is the list of my thoughts on autism and networks. It is not referenced, I just don’t have time. These are merely the thoughts of a mom with a child on the spectrum:

• Some learners won’t give any (expected) feedback about being connected to the network, but will learn from the network.
  I say expected because they probably are giving some sort of feedback, but it’s just not at the frequency that the rest of the world is listening for.
  Obvious examples of this would be non-verbal people with savant qualities. These people have an expert level of knowledge or skill in one particular area. Did this quality come from the sky? Or are they plugged into the network somehow?
• The lack of social awareness may help attach to a classroom network, but being overwhelmed with sensory data may prevent that attachment.
  One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s Syndrome, which is on the autism spectrum, is that a person with this syndrome won’t understand social cues. They have a hard time making friends (connecting to the network?), are loners, etc. But they usually also have one or two special interests for which they are experts. People on this end of the spectrum are usually very intelligent as well.
  Maybe because their lack of understanding social norms is what helps them excel in school. They are not distracted by the social cliques at school because they just don’t see them. They don’t see the social circles, so they are left out them (excluded from those networks?). But this helps them have more attention for the lessons. So while socially they seem disconnected, they are very tuned into the classroom instruction.
  That is, if they are able to tune out sensory information. Many autistic people have very sensory integration problems. So while they are oblivious to social cues, every sensory cue that is in the room is handled as a major issue to be addressed cognitively. Florescent lights, someone sweeping the hall outside, kids whispering, all of that is hard to filter if you have sensory integration disorder. Since their sensory filters don’t work to filter sensory input properly, autistic kids may be too flooded with information to attach to the classroom network.

That’s all I have so far. Sorry there’s not more hard evidence attached to my idea. What have I left out?

This week has been about networks in the CCK08 course. I haven’t posted or responded much to posts. My excuses:

• End of the quarter at work
• Group at school is non-technical, I’m practicing positive inter-dependence and helping them

But I have been reading, and thinking, and talking about the information flowing through the CCK08 network about networks. Valdis Krebs on networks was amazing, and brought me back to my undergrad years. His presentation reminded me that you can represent networks inthe following ways:

1. Hierarchical (e.g. org charts)
2. Hub and spoke (obvious informal networks)
3. Just connecting the dots that show us how the work really gets done (sound familiar to anyone at EMC?).

What I thought of almost instantly was the big E2.0/L2.0/Web 2.0 buzzword: Community. Everyone is racing to set up a “community”. What do people mean when they say that? Do they mean some of the things that Valdis is able to uncover with his network maps, for example:

• Expert Location – put the experts out there with your customers
• Communities of Practice – form learning communities with your customers
• Key Opinion Leaders – Put the key influencers out there with your customers

Do people even think this far when they are making the community — why do you want one? Because you were told to make one? If that is the only motivation, the community will die because there is not a network feeding it, breathing life into it.

The question remaining for me is: is a community a network? Or is the network the energizing force that powers a community?

When we talk about networks in constructivism or group theory, my mind always compares them to computer networks. It’s the easiest reference I can pull up, since I deal with computer networking on a daily basis.

I’m going to try and post a series of posts including some mindmaps to help me make sense of my comparisons of a  computer network to the connectivist’s network.

This first map is of a compute node:

I am the world’s worst artist, so it doesn’t look like I want it to. But I am going for the concept here:

• Our Long-Term memory is like a hard drive, a place to store data
• Our Short-Term memory is like a computer’s RAM
• Our Mental Models are like filters applied to an individual compute node
• Network Connections are our access to information, just like that cable you plug into the wall to get on the internet.

To me, applying the constructivist theory of learning to how an individual learns makes sense. We are bound by what we filter with our mental models. I am comparing the mental models to filters because in a sense they are, they are social constructs so they may not allow us to search for or appreciate information we encounter from new networks.

Connectivism, to me right now at least, is everything from the Network connection out. Problem is, we have more than our own filters sifting through all the information we encounter. The network itself is filtered, and that may prevent us from ever knowing about certain networks.

I’m off to participate on a panel about Asperger’s and college (talk about filtering…), but when I get back I will try and draw out how the network filters work.