I have a personal question : while in a Connectivist view it is clear for me how a student with Knowledge deficiency mays improve his/her learning, but how is an excellent student able to improve his/her excellence without a personalized didactic ?
A teacher could also try and support this student in making connections to scholars, experts outside the institution where he or she is currently learning. So that he/she may be able to have access to more advanced concepts, more complicated applications, etc and dicuss this with these experts... Perhaps he/she will connect to the leaders in their field via Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, delicious, blogs, etc.
Thank you all. your anwers explain two different meanings of "excellent student": Jaap talks about a student with excellent studying skills, Stephan about a student with an excellence attitude or knowing in some studying filed. Both are interesting interpertations and I agree totally. I would add the question, how to recognize the excellence in a connectivist course: through the level of partecipation? the given help to other students? the search of deeping studies or other?
Reputation, everybody knows who is the best student in a class or a group, students and teachers do know that. So recognizing is not a problem I think.
You asked how to recognise the excellence in a connectivist course. While I am still reading through the week 2 material, I wonder whether its more about the network and the learner's position within it, or more specifically how the learner has positioned themselves within the network.
For example, if you look at the social network analysis introduction (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html), and considering a learner is a node, then perhaps how the network looks from each node is a measure of a student's excellence.
So a measure of the learner's . degree centrality (how many direct & indirect connections they have with others) . betweenness centrality (are they interconnecting larger branches of the network together) . closeness centrality (how many hops required to reach farther nodes - how close is the information) . and so on
Could a learner's centrality in their network be a measurement of excellence or perhaps successful learning environment?
@jaap - in my experience you are right in a "traditional" teaching, but in a connectivist learning context I think it is a bit more complex. Thank you for your opinion.
@ Damien - I totally agree with you. Your explaination clearifies and completes the analysis. In my opinion an e-learning environment mays help very much the success of the learning for everybody, In the case of the being of an excellence it might be fully exploited. But it should be experienced..
your anwers explain two different meanings of "excellent student": Jaap talks about a student with excellent studying skills, Stephan about a student with an excellence attitude or knowing in some studying filed. Both are interesting interpertations and I agree totally. I would add the question, how to recognize the excellence in a connectivist course: through the level of partecipation? the given help to other students? the search of deeping studies or other?
You asked how to recognise the excellence in a connectivist course. While I am still reading through the week 2 material, I wonder whether its more about the network and the learner's position within it, or more specifically how the learner has positioned themselves within the network.
For example, if you look at the social network analysis introduction (http://www.orgnet.com/sna.html), and considering a learner is a node, then perhaps how the network looks from each node is a measure of a student's excellence.
So a measure of the learner's
. degree centrality (how many direct & indirect connections they have with others)
. betweenness centrality (are they interconnecting larger branches of the network together)
. closeness centrality (how many hops required to reach farther nodes - how close is the information)
. and so on
Could a learner's centrality in their network be a measurement of excellence or perhaps successful learning environment?
@ Damien - I totally agree with you. Your explaination clearifies and completes the analysis. In my opinion an e-learning environment mays help very much the success of the learning for everybody, In the case of the being of an excellence it might be fully exploited. But it should be experienced..