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Posts tagged connectivism
Concept Map for CCK09
02 years ago
by Asako
in My Partial Reflection
Here is a concept map drawn from my experiences of CCK09:
Concept Map – CCK09 – 100%.egg on Aviary.
For a better view, please click the image and browse using “View at Full Size” in the right-hand side panel.
Connectivism: Connecting & Sharing Meanings
12 years ago
by Asako
in Uncategorized
My final project is a powerpoint presentation entitled “Connectivism: Connecting & Sharing Meanings – Navigating Through Cultural & Social Layers.” My original idea was to sync with audio file and make it more like a real presentation. In the process of creating a podcast, I stumbled into many problems. So the final product is unfortunately without audio. Please refer to notes for each slide.
Abstracts: In the course, we had many readings and attended many presentations to understand Connectivism. The course focused on understanding Connectivism from a theoretical perspective. Two additional sources on Connectivism from social and cultural perspectives are shared: 1) Digital Youth Project, and 2) James Burke’s thinking about human history and change.
I included notes for each slide. Please follow my notes available at SlideShare site when you view the slides.
Assignment #2 – Future of Higher Education
02 years ago
by Asako
in My Partial Reflection
After exploring the concept of Connectivism and the role of emerging technologies in this course, media literacy, for me, would be the important keywords for the 21st century education. As Lipton states (2008), “[a]ny form of communication that carries and conveys meaning can be considered a medium of communication.”
Although the emerging technology always dominates the discourse of the day (Mosco, 2004), the skills to critically understand how each medium works and shapes the ways we communicate would be the most significant aspect of our education programs. Kelley & Jenkins (2005) put the function of reading in a historical perspective. They state that what “reading” signifies “has changed over time and in different cultures.” (p.7) The objective of their New Media Literacies Project is to “heighten awareness of the many styles and the meanings of literacy over time.” Similarly, Media Education Project led by Prof. Mark Lipton at the University of Guelph, advocates media literacy education and published a number of atticulating guides for teachers.
I see the possibility for exploring various collaborations in higher education to shape learning and exploratory spaces. These will be possible using both traditional, classroom, or physical face-to-face interactions as well as so called web 2.0, social media technologies. We will find a mixture of traditional course structure and more flexible cross-disciplinary networking space where students use it as a sounding board for their work. The basis of Connectivism is participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006), and by actively exploring the dynamics of learning in participatory spaces (classroom, online, or hybrid), higher education can be the provider of a dynamic space in which modeling of complexity and non-linear learning for students can take place.
The course or learning/exploratory space would be designed and facilitated by a team of “teachers” or “facilitators” including content expert, media specialist or technologist, or anybody else who can contribute to the space. The team can make the learning/exploratory space quite flexible by allowing some creative ways in which the students can negotiate to shape their own learning space. The purpose of the learning/exploratory space would be to encourage “1) self-assessment, 2) sharing the outcomes of learning with peers, 3) various forms of feedback, and 4) evaluation by the teacher.” (Lipton, 2008b) Connectivism is not about acquisition of knowledge, and it emphasizes how we all become responsible for our own learning by actively observing, reflecting, and expressing our ideas in order to share and sharpen up our understandings.
The key characteristic of the 21st century education will be ultimately about students themselves, who develop their own skills to reflect and guide their own thinking and problem-solving skills. The image of teachers standing and lecturing in front of a classroom will eventually disappear, but facilitators, guides, designers, mentors, counselors, peers, and motivators will be occupying the learning/exploratory space along with the students.
Major impediments for moving to this new orientation are the habits and the convention of how courses are constructed, structured and delivered, and how manpower in higher education is organized for teaching. The departmental and disciplinary structure is often the basis of how teaching manpower is being mobilized and the same is also the basis of job security.
Having pointed out the obvious impediments for any change to occur in higher education, there is no shortage of education research in general and e-learning research and discussions. Many higher education practitioners participate in education research collaborating with other teaching faculty members other than Education. For example, Summer 2004 issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning published various aspects of the decoding the disciplines model. This way of thinking only starts when teaching faculty acknowledge the lack of connection between the students and what the students are expected to learn. The first article lists a series of questions for teaching faculty: 1) What is a bottleneck to learning in this class?; 2) How does an expert do these things?; 3) How can these tasks be explicitly modeled?; 4) How will students practice these skills and get feedback?; 5)What will motivate the students?; 6) How well are students mastering these learning tasks?; 7) How can the resulting knowledge about learning be shared? (Middendorf & Pace, 2004). Many productive thinking and reflection/analysis and experimentation in teaching & learning can come from the bottom up. I end with some optimism and that this bottom-up movement would be the necessary ground work for the future change in higher education.
References:
Kelley, Wyn & Jenkins, Henry (2005). Reading in a Participatory culture – Defining Reading: A (Sort of) Historical Perspective. In Full Expert Voice Section. http://newmedialiteracies.org/educators/
Jenkins, Henry (2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture : Media Education of the 21st Century. National Writing Project.
Lipton, Mark (2008a). Media Education: Integration. Media Literacy Project: Research-based monograph series.
(2008b). Media Education: Metacognition. Media Literacy Project: Research-based monograph series.
Middendorf, Joan & Peace, John (2004). “Decoding the disciplines: A model for helping students learn disciplinary ways of thinking.” New Direction for Teaching & Learning. 98(Summer 2004): 1-12.
Mosco, Vincent (2005). The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. MIT Press. [Cited in Subject/Object Blog by Steven Chabot.]
PLE’s, PLN’s & Personal Web and Leanring
02 years ago
by Asako
in My Partial Reflection
Belatedly, I listened to the recorded session given by Steve Wheller at the PLE Conference. Wheller conceptualizes the ways in which the Internet environment with rich Web 2.0 resources facilitate self-organizing learning environments for the learners by themselves. His intention of the conceptualization is obviously to influence the established institutional learning and provide some alternative thinking towards the ways to support the learners. The ultimate objective of teachers or facilitators of students’ learning is to “create conducive environments in which the students will organize their own learning.” Wheller situates the concepts of PLE’s, PLN’s and personal web in the connectivism discussion. Like Stephen Downes and George Siemens, Wheller distinguishes between the institutionalized online learning (VLE) on the one hand, and the web of learning on the other. The former is designed for students to funnel the authoritative knowledge given by the experts, while the latter, to make their own meanings through the active interactions through their webs of connections. When taking into consideration of the wider learning webs, the boundary between the formal and informal learnings become blurry. The diagram of Web 2.0 tools Weller used in the presentation shows that these tools facilitate three functions of PLEs : 1) Managing information; 2) Generating content; and 3) Connecting with others. In general, his presentation helped me to establish how the concepts of PLE’s, PLN’s and Personal web fit into one easy representation of learning, even though how learning is taking place can be very complex and highly context dependent.
While his presentation helped me visualize a snap shot of how PLE’s, PLN’s and personal web are parts and parcel of one’s learning, when he mentioned his application of Hegel’s philosophy in understanding his idea of how self-organizing learning environment takes place, or how ideas are being exchanged, I posed for a moment to locate a loose connection I may have on the subject. It took me back to what I learned about the difference between Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s in my Sociology theory course that I took during the late 80′s. I remember from Hegel’s idealized notion of the State, Marx’s rejection of it. Also Marx’s dialectical philosophy to address the 19th century emerging social issues based on actual material productions. I apologize for getting a bit too theoretical here. However, as Stephen Downes was repeatedly asking for more specifics of the negotiations between the PLE’s and the rest of the connections, and what sort of processes are taking place in the negotiations, Wheller’s conceptualization remains somewhat abstract.
In summary, without hinting at a disruptive revolution in higher education, Weller’s conceptualization of learning in the Web 2.0 environment helps us broaden the notion of education and explore the ways to integrate Web 2.0 tools, in order for us to provide more conducive environments for learning.
My Position on Connectivism – Assignment #1
12 years ago
by Asako
in My Partial Reflection
My Statement on Connectivism:
Connectivism [1] challenges the contemporary education system and its orientation by contrasting it with emerging ways of knowing, interacting, collaborating producing, mixing or any other significant mode of expression afforded by emerging technologies of the new century. Downes and Siemens initiated new discourse on learning that is relevant and required for the new types of learners and engagement for the new Internet and Web 2.0 environment, in particular in the context of e-learning. What I find most relevant about Connectivism is its criticism of the existing education system and its inertia to bring about changes that are required to empower the new types of learners. Downes, in particular, repeatedly emphasizes in his numerous writings and presentations that learning is not about acquisition of the content and that there is no “experts” as such to transfer their knowledge to “novices.” The critical stance on the existing education system resonates the 20th century thinkers who were critical of the dehumanizing aspects of the modern institutions shaped by the industrial development. Illich’s deschooling and anti-professionalism[2], Freire’s “banking education,” [3]or Fromme’s the modern men’s obsession with “having” mode are known well.[4] For Illich, the solution was to develop convivial alternatives that ensure “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment”(Illich, 1973 cited by infed.org). In his convivial arrangements, the role of technologies is to serve individuals rather than managers (Illich, 1975 cited by infed.org). Freire also believed in connecting and networking people based on its local community through its informal and popular education leading to informed community action (infed.org, 2002). Fromme (2005) critically pointed out modern men’s erroneous focus on “having” rather than “being” in To Have or to Be? Similarly, Connectivism negates the creation of disengaged learners by simply transferring the same traditional pedagogies over to the online sphere with the implementation of the e-learning products such as Content Management System or Learning Management System. Downes and Siemens instead see potentials in a new emerging networked pedagogy, which is shaped and negotiated among the participants through their interactions in the environment of Web 2.0 and social media.
The concept of “network”[5] is central to both Downes and Siemens. For Downes (2006), the nature of a given network depends on how entities of the network are connected. He lists seven characteristics arise from it. This means that each entity plays some part in the network but no one entity can control its holistic effects or how all the connections in the network are working. Under the heading, “semantic condition,” he states that reliability of connective knowledge is achieved by “the promotion of diversity, through the empowering of individual entities, and the reduction in the influence of well-connected entities, is essentially a way of creating extra sets of eyes within the network.” Unfortunately, I am completely lost when Downs starts to talk about the nature of human perceptions or our inherent ability to recognize some patterns in everything at the level of neural connections, on the one hand, and the technical protocols of the Word Wide Web, on the other, and he continues to extend his discussion to sociological concepts such as “group vs. network.” His discussion then continues to refer to Social Network Analysis! I wonder if this is indeed a modeling of how Connectivism can be practiced?! They tend to relate to it in very abstract terms such as a set of properties at one moment , more concrete network phenomenon of the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 media, at another moment.
We were introduced to technical terms used in Social Network Analysis (SNA) in the 2nd week of the course. The common criticism of SNA is that it’s “just methodology.”[6] The success of SNA is when there is rich qualitative and contextual information about what are being analyzed. White & Johansen (2004)[7], for example, successfully utilized SNA in their longitudinal study of a Turkish nomadic clan based on detailed ethnographic data and contextual knowledge of the people. The nuances and contexts of the study were gathered by the fieldwork of Johansen that was carried out from 1956 to 2004. In a similar way, some of the nuances and contexts in which interactions, social relations, ideas or artifacts that constitute a network of given social configurations have to be qualified. In other words, “network” can be used as a shorthand for any number of configurations and contexts.
There are researchers who discuss more concrete findings regarding the nature of the network in social media. danah boyd (2009)[8], for example, delineates in her analysis of Facebook vs. Myspace that the race, class, education, and other societal divisions are being played out in the digital sphere. According to one of her subjects she interviewed, “Myspace became the “ghetto” of digital landscape.” Wesch (2008) [9] also effectively contextualizes the contemporary net generation youth at the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum and situates them in the context of American cultural dynamics of the past 25 years. His presentation narrates tensions of growing up and developing identity as represented by youth and popular culture. For the current net generation, engaging with the media like YouTube–which allows them to connect to many while in fact, talking to computer screen alone in their room late at night–would be added to their mix. Wesch, however, ends his presentation with certain optimism that the contemporary youth to change the world for better despite the inheritance of narcissism, individualism, consumerism and their own vulnerability. He might be a believer of human culture in which the youth can reframe the situations for better by responding to the inherently human value of connections and community in the social networking media.
I am looking for some extra perspectives or concepts to apply connectivism thinking in my practice. Edwards (2005)[10] refers to a useful concept of “boundary object” as something to facilitate and mediate the “in-between arena of boundary practices” when learning is taking place in unbounded environment in life-long learning where multiple learning domains and sites are involved. According to Edwards, the in-between arena is “hybrid, networked and mediated domains, which give raise to alternative framings and metaphors.” Star and Griesmers (1989) developed the notion of “boundary object” and they explain:
“Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. They may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.”
I am still premature to elaborate on some specific examples of boundary objects. They are something to help refram the known meaning in one situation and bridge us adopt to a new somewhat unknown space and situation. The concept can be useful in understanding the mechanisms of how Connectivism works in various situations and contexts.
References:
[1] I draw my understanding of Connectivism based on Elluminate presentations for the course and Downes, Stephen (2006). Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. Retrieved: October 22, 2009. http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html
[2] Smith, M. K. (1997, 2004, 2008) ‘Ivan Illich: deschooling, conviviality and the possibilities for informal education and lifelong learning’, the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
[3] Smith, M. K. (1997, 2002) ‘Paulo Freire and informal education’, the encyclopaedia of informal education. Last update: June 18, 2009] Retrieved October 22, 2009. http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-freir.htm
[4] Fromme, Eric. (2005). Have or to Be? New York: Continuum, 2005. 182pp.
[5] Downes, Stephen (2007). Groups vs. Networks: The Class Struggle Continues. Retrieved October 22. 2009. http://www.downes.ca/post/42521
Siemens, George (2008). Groups vs. Networks, Articulate slides presentation. Retrieved October 22.2009. http://elearnspace.org/media/CCK08_Wk5/player.html
Krebes, Valdis (2008). Social Network Analysis, A Brief Introduction. Retrieved October 22, 2009. http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html
Network Theory. (2009, October 9). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory
[6] Borgatti, S.P., Mehrs, A., Brass, D.J. & Labianca, G. (2009). Social Network Analysis in the Social Sciences. Nature, 323 (5916), 892-895
(I used the same article available from http://www.steveborgatti.com/papers/SNA_Review_for_Science.pdf, Retrieved October 22, 2009. The cited item is in p.17.)
[7]Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems. In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009, from http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html.
[8] boyd, danah. 2009. “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.” Personal Democracy Forum, New York, June 30. Retrieved October 22, 2009. http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html
[9] “The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube Culture and Politics of Authenticity” presented by Dr. Michael Wesch. Democary Forum, New York, June 29-30, 2008. Retrieved October 22, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09gR6VPVrpw&feature=player_embedded
[10] Edwards, Richard. (2005). Contexts, boundary objects and hybrid spaces: theorizing learning in lifelong learning. Education-Line: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/142037.htm Retrieved October 22, 2009.
[11] Star SL & Griesemer JR (1989). “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39″. Social Studies of Science 19 (4): 387–420.
Starting the Course on Connectivism
02 years ago
by Asako
in My Partial Reflection
I signed up on an online course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. This is the first week of the course, but people are already actively tackling with the definition of connectivism. For myself, I just don’t want to come across so critical, yet as a student of social sciences for many years, I want to be careful about any kind of “theories”: what they promise to be vs. what they are. Many theories can be useful in a limited manner, and as long as you apply them in that manner, they can be enlightening and useful. But if you elevate any theory to a value system or something more than it is, then I know that we are in trouble:
“Those who know will not say; those who say do not know.”
I stick to the Taoist widsdom to place all the things called theories into perspective and I try.
I just began reading Stephen Downes’ “What Connectivism Is.” According to him:
“… it is not more than the process of making connections. That’s why learning is at once so simple it seems it should be easily explained and so complex that it seems to defy explanation (cf. Hume on this). How can learning – something so basic that infants and animals can do it – defy explanation? As soon as you make learning an intentional process (that is, a process that involves the deliberate creation of a representation) you have made these simple cases difficult, if not impossible, to understand.”
This paragraph resonates with what I heard on the radio this week about the philosophical baby (toward the end of the page). It’s about a book called The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life .
So when we are babies, we have an amazing capacity to learn. It’s good to confirm that. But what about all the environmental, social and cultural factors that shape how we filter our learning as we grow older? For example, different cultural orientations influence how we view our world and our own value orientations.
I will continue reading more about connectivism and want to clarify what it is trying to achieve and why connectivism.
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