George Siemens gave a great end-of-first-day keynote session at 2008’s Distance Teaching and Learning conference, in which he addressed connectivism. It was forward-thinking, heady, and deep, which I love in a keynote; unfortunately, I think a number of attendees were expecting it to be “keynote lite”.
George put his slides for this keynote online on SlideShare. Here are my fast-and-furious, almost-at-George’s-pace notes (which I hope to come back in and edit);
Task of education is to “combat” for lucidity
Knowledge is in the connections
more college students in china than in any other country
we are not in control of where education is going
we are not in control of these tbs of information
Complexity
putting together a puzzle
metaphor of a weather pattern – that’s why we can’t predict (Photo)
education is meant to be more like a puzzle
too much information
we end up with extra nuts and bolts
fragmentation
(I remember reading EVERYTHING in a book, in a newspaper, in a magazine, in a comic—hungry for knowledge. Now there’s too much)
“Fragmentation requires re-creation”
Fragmentation challegene coherance”
freedom of creation = abundance
(how do we filter)
There’s something else I need to read.
Need to filter out the noice, but that’s beyond the capability of our tools
fast-paced deep stuff. I feel like I’m a smooth stone George has skipped across a deep water
Brings up Kerr’s challenge
“Something is happening.
“But is it sufficient to warrant a reconsideration of learning theory?”
Web 2.0 is hype. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that blogs are hype.”
oh shiny object slide (George should use more of these—great response, great illustration)
Long timeline ofslwo change: Information (great slide showing transition upwards)
what do the tools allow us to do that they didn’t before
reminds me of the idea that technology returns us from individual thought (intraspersonal/intraspective) to collective though, or thought heavily influenced by the sometimes rash opinion of others (interpersonal/extraspective). Can we have a balance of these when everything is published open, for everyone.
Gutenberg press was one of those technologies that spilled blood
Let’s look at this; don’t look at the tools. It’s about those bigger factors of openness, access, creation, control.
Connectivism.
Tagged his critics on his del.icio.us account—great modeling of the true scholarly approach toward getting at truth.
How is this unique?
(pause. Man, he’s a bullet train barreling down the track)
a unity of learning and knowledge
not a significant difference between learning and knowledge
learning != process; knowledge != product
Abundance
I say overabundance. Scarcity of quality may remain proportional? Of course not exactly, but there will be a quantity of crap that may equal the proportional quantity of silence we had before the Internet. Now instead of not having enough I have too much information. Instead of being hungry and savoring the crumbs of information, I am overfed and nauseous at the sight of more platters of information.
Levelsof networked learning
Neural-biological
Conceptual
External-social
neural
connectionism and ai
what fires together wires together
biologically learning is creating a network
conceptual
when we make a concept map it makes explicit what we know
the occurrence of words reveals connectedness of concepts to create meaning
do network properties exist at a conceptual level?
We do have network attributes to knowledge seems intuitively right
PERSONAL BRAIN
novak on concept maps (see his delicious)
our concepts are understood by filtering through networks
simulations dont teach us steps, they teach us sequences of patterns
enable individuals to form patterns
external and social
we are connected to each other
