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?

Stephen Downes posted the transcript from a lecture he gave on Connectivism. The post is packed with great stuff that relates to my previous post, as well as social learning – both I’ll need to read and reflect on some more. I wanted to share one quote now, he talks about knowledge in the network being dynamic, tacit, and grown. His thoughts on dynamic are very interesting:

What we mean by that is, it’s always changing. What was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow, what was true tomorrow may not be true the next day. Even if there are underlying facts of the matter, even if two plus two is always equal to four, it’s not always relevant. It might not always matter. There are always facts out there in the world, the world may not be a totality of facts, but it has a lot of them, but these facts come in and out of relevance, come in and out of prominence. So even if there are unchanging parts of the world, our relationship to these things changes.

Sounds like where I work!

NOTE: this post is copied and pasted directly from a Blackboard post I made. We were asked to tie what we know about how people learn with how podcasts might be designed.

I think any podcasting pedagogy has to be linked to the principles of connectivism. Here are the connectivist principles I think relate most to podcasting:

• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. A learner can exponentially improve their own learning by plugging into an existing network.
  Applying this to podcasts: podcasts by the way we have defined them should be a series of snack-sized instructional goodness that are available via some sort of syndicated feed. In other words, podcasts containing educational nuggets are available via a network. If we can get a learner to plug into that network, they can improve their understanding about the topics the podcast covers
• Learning may reside in non-human appliances. Learning (in the sense that something is known, but not necessarily actuated) can rest in a community, a network, or a database.
  Applying this to podcasts: A syndicated podcast can be shared with more than the individuals with whom we share the feed link. Google can index it, and based on Google’s algorithms it will show up in searches based on the code we have provided on the page where the feed resides. People can find the syndication feed in ways that make sense to them, and they can use the learning nuggets for things we may not have even considered when we designed the podcast.

Maybe the biggest thing to realize is we can’t control how our learners use the podcasts. George Seimens puts it this way:

Maybe for podcast pedogogy we have to start thinking of how the little bits of information we create in a podcast will influence our learners.

I have to start by saying this: It’s hard for me to be in an eLearning course because of my technical skills. I realize that most people in my major have not created websites, administered servers and networks, etc. So I’m glad that my major has courses to get people who will be designing eLearning up to speed technically. But reading about “the wonder of TCP/IP” is so boring for me. There is no good way for me to skip those classes, since the Instructional Design part for eLearning is built into the class.

OK, enough whining, onto my review of this week’s materials.

This class so far has had lots of reading: two textbooks and links about Instructional Design. There are also podcasts of the Instructor explaining the readings. The one thing I am missing is the ability to interact with my classmates on a discussion board, via blogs, twitter SOMETHING. (darn you CCK08!!)

This week we started reading Advanced Web-Based Training Strategies: Unlocking Instructionally Sound Online Learning by Margaret Driscoll and Saul Carliner.

My instructor doesn’t think that a constructivist learning environment can be implemented; she is a behaviorist. This is probably why I am a little frustrated with the way the course has been designed: I am definitely a constructivist. I need to interact with others to pour over ideas I have read (or heard on a podcast) to try and make sense of them. I wonder what she would think about trying a connectivist approach!

This book is very interesting, it seems to me that the pragmatic approach the authors discuss is really a way of saying business needs are the most important part of instructional design. The first chapter is dismissive of the ideas of learning theory, instructional design, and educational research.

One thing I disagree with from a corporate perspective is the idea that a person’s philosophy on education will affect the way they design education. Really, the organization’s philosophy on education will dictate how an individual designs education. It is possible for your philosophy to differ from that of your organization.

Also I don’t think adult learners, especially the highly technical learners that we teach, expect to have instruction spoon-fed to them. In a technical training environment, you may have a learner who knows more about a subject than everyone else in the class. That person may just need a tech refresh (feature/functionality info), hands on training, or positioning information. They may need to know how a new product fits into an existing information management system. I can’t even imaging trying to spoon-feed information to some of our folks in the field, or even our customers for that matter.

I’ll spend time thinking about this, but what does a constructivist learning environment look like? What would a constructivist eLearning environment look like? How about learning and eLearning environments for the other types of learning theories?

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?

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.

This quote (“The half of knowledge, is knowing where to find knowledge”) is inscribed over the doors of Dodd Hall at FSU. Apparently no one knows who actually said this, but it seems very applicable to the conversation about the importance of the network in connectivism.