The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2011 online course is starting on January 12. The course is delivered completely online, and it is open. This means you can join for FREE, and participate if and when and how you are able.

The course lasts 12 weeks, and explores how connectivism and connected knowledge are related to learning and teaching. I participated the first time this course was offered. I blogged much of my experience (check out the posts tagged CCK08).

If you are interested in the intersection of social media tools, learning, and work you should consider joining this course.

For CCK08 alumni — we need to have a reunion!! Mike Bogel? Vilpav Baxi? Ed Webb? Pat Parslow? Maru del Campo? Blanche? Ariel? I’d love to reconnect for no other reason than to use diigo again! What are all of you up to 2 years later?

If you follow me on Twitter or are friends with me on Facebook, you know that I graduated last weekend with a Master of Science degree from the Instructional Systems program at Florida State University.

Here’s a video to prove it!

FSU has an amazing program. I studied with legends in the field like John Keller and Rob Reiser (who was also my advisor). I was able to take the program as a 100% distance student, which was helpful to be because for the first 2/3rds of my program I had to travel for work.

But my real learning did not happen during my studies. I am lucky to have a very experienced set of people in my organization (Education Services) who did not mind me asking them questions about the things I was studying. It was great to see how we really do have a great system in place to execute formal learning. Thanks Lila, Gene, and Ernie!

Also, where would I be without #lrnchat? Because of this online Twitter chat, I connected with other IS grad students nationwide, as well as professionals and some of the superstars in our field. I got my internship at Pistachio Consulting because of #lrnchat. If I had any question about my studies, I could tweet to the #lrnchat community and I’d get links, questions, or just conversation.

I should also mention #cck08. This course set the stage for the way I would question and evaluate everything in my studies. It also connected me to many individuals whose path is similar to my own.

I feel like I am part of the online learning community. As sad as this is to say – I do not feel as if I am part of the FSU IS community. When I graduated last Sunday, at least one other Master’s student and 3 other PhD students walked. No one from the program arranged anything for us as graduates, not even a meet and greet. None of the faculty were even in town – they were at a conference. The student organization did nothing to recognize the accomplishment.

Now, two wonderful ladies I am connected to via Twitter and Facebook did come to see me. In fact, one fellow student, Lea Ann, even took me all around to get pictures on campus (I got my BS from FSU, and attended as a full-time student in Tallahassee), and came to dinner with my long-time friends who had also come to my graduation. My friend I’ve known since my undergrad days could not believe I had never met Lea Ann in real life before graduation day. I had to explain: we’ve talked on the phone, on Dim Dim, on Skype, via email, and lived together through all the tough times of graduate life. We connected through social tools, found a way to make our own small world, and I think it helped us learn.

I would not have learned much without some community to help me learn, to keep me grounded, to challenge the questions I had about different topics. Since I was a distance student, the University just didn’t know how to make and foster that community. Thank goodness there was #lrnchat.

This is the biggest lesson I learned from my graduate studies: Communities ignite learning.

Would I have still finished my degree if I had not been connected to any community? Yes, most likely. But I wouldn’t have gone as deep, I would not have done as much reflecting, and I would not have be able to integrate what I was learning through my formal studies into my work. To do that, you need a community of people – professional colleagues -  to help you put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint.

This has huge implications for corporate learning. Formal instruction will always be required. You need it when you are a total newbie to some category of information, or when things have changed dramatically. Since I am in an organization that does technical training, we’ll always have the situations that make formal learning important.

But what happens after formal training?  Once people learn the basics, and go back into their jobs or into the field? What happens when they need a way to put the formal learning into perspective from a practitioner’s standpoint? Harold Jarche has a great post about this where he discusses how social learning is really the way we get things done in knowledge intensive and creative enterprises. In the post, he shows a model of the 5 stages of organization learning as seen by Jane Hart and Jay Cross.

I like these new models, but I don’t think we can learn without being attached to a community. I think formal learning is meaningless if the student doesn’t have a way to connect to a community that will help him or her integrate what they have learned into their thought and work processes.

Maybe the question for the enterprise is: how do you foster communities to which each and every worker can attach?

I’m taking a class called Web 2.0 Learning and Performance. There are over 30 people in the class, and I’m having flashbacks to CCK08.

I may blog less here for the next few weeks as I have to keep a seperate journal for class. That journal is here.

We’ll see if I survive July — if you don’t hear from me send help!

This month’s Big Question from ASTD’s Learning Circuits blog is What did you learn about learning in 2008?

I started grad school in the Fall of 2007. So this year I took the following courses:

• Introduction to Instructional Systems
• Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology (I wrote a couple of papers for this class on social networking sites as a form of Instructional Technology)
• Designing for Online Collaborative Learning – My group produced this site as a final product. I also have a work project based on what I learned from this class
• Introduction to Instructional Design – Module, pre-test and post-test are here. The report will get published there soon.

One thing I have learned from my graduate studies is how much I already know about instructional design from work. We do a really good job of writing instruction based on learning objectives. It’s given me a better appreciation for my department, and my current skills.

I have been explaining the hows and whys of social media to my management for over a year now. I have learned how to communicate and work with a group of people who have to be concerned with things I never really thought of. It has forced me to slow down, think about why using these tools will solve problems, explain again, and just keep repeating that process. Being forced to tie things back to the business has been a huge learning experience for me.

I also participated for most of CCK08. I learned that you can learn alot from other people you don’t necessarily agree with.  I can’t even list all the ways I have used things we discussed as part of that class at work. I also made lots of new twitter friends.

I learned people love to open up and share. Once I got past the scariness, I learned that letting go and opening up is a great feeling.

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?

The last two days EMC held its 2nd annual Innovation Conference, right in the Education Services building. I was lucky enough to be given a last-minute invite to the conference. I attended last year’s conference (as a judge, not sure how that happened!), and both times the event has been very energizing and encouraging.

You may be thinking: wait! This blog is all about education! Why would Gina go to a geeky engineer science fair? Well, I am a geek. Our group writes technical training, so all of us are very technical and geeky. It is great to have a different connection to the engineering folks we work with to get our product training ready for consumption.

Plus I had two submissions of my own! They were both education based. One was very very innovative – in fact several of the finalists submitted a key piece to my idea. Next year I’ll try to geek it up more and hide my education side.

After the conference, we had a meet-up of some of the social media types at EMC. Besides myself and Brian Rosenthal, Dave Spencer, Polly Pearson, Mark Twomey, Steve Todd, Dave Graham, Stu Miniman, and Radha Sekhar were there.

As we talked, I started thinking about the connections we have. The connections started with our internal social media site, EMC ONE. Then we moved to external social media like Twitter and Facebook. These social connections allowed our unseen business connections to surface. Here’s a quick concept map:

I’ll try to break it down:

• 4 of us had Innovation Conferences entries (One of us won 2nd place!)
• 3 people are in Engineering (one Distinguished engineer)
• 2 people in Education Services
• 2 people in Sales
• 1 person in HR, and 1 person in the CTO office
• 4 of us do work supporting the Resource Management Software organization
• We represented 3 different countries
• 8 of us are on Twitter, and 7 of us blog (which is how we all met)

It’s clear to me social media breaks through organizational silos, and as an educator this is critical. If one of the biggest competitive advantages right now is how fast your workforce can learn, educators need to be able to find the information they need in a true cross-functional manner.

So CCK08 people, how can Connectivism be used as an instructional method that connects and tunnels through these organizational silos?

Here’s a picture of the group (minus “the Daves”)

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.