CCK2011

Blog of Danah Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Is the PLE a connectivist construct or a constructivist construct? Or both? Or neither, just influenced by many theories? A statement by Wendy Drexler in her paper prompted this question.

a critical question: what is the unique idea in connectivism?

Our knowledge, our intelligence, must be based on something emergent from the connective activity of many individual neurons, can't be based on the content of a neuron, has to be based on the pattern of connectivity of these neurons. We replicate that in connectivist teaching.

Thought this series of talks by Nicholas Carr may be of some interest to CCk11 participants. How our thinking changed as technology progressed.

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We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

"Social lock-in - where we are reluctant to move to new social networks because all of our friends/colleagues are part of our current social network service. When Twitter was experiencing downtime issues a few years ago, some individuals moved to Plurk, Identi.ca, or other services. But, in the end, the social lock-in of Twitter was sufficient to pull many back. We're experiencing this to some degree in our work/research building a social learning network at Athabasca University - The Landing. If learners have a developed online identity and use proprietary services like Facebook and Twitter, what's the motivation to create a separate social network within a learning context? Connective lock-in - where we have lost control of our ability to define and shape connections because the proprietary connection tools ((Like, Facebook Connect, Twitter) are so ubiquitous and services (Delicious, EverNote, DropBox) are so easy to use."

As I begin a class on a learning theory referred to as Connectivism, I consider how greatly our collective abilities to access to information have transformed in recent years, while our teaching methods in the university environment have barely changed at all. I ponder how much more advanced our abilities are to locate and share information, while our educational methods in the university setting have barely progressed beyond the overhead projector.

Collins … theorizes about the rituals by which people interact with others, from large groups, to person-to-person relationships, to the imaginary conversations that a person engages in his or her mind. … When people interact their shared attention trains each other to be in a group with a shared purpose.

e-learning, distance learning, open learning, OER, online resources,