Group items tagged

blog on connectiv--heutagogy, andragogy, pedagogy

Presentation by Stephen Downes to the London School of Economics, pretty ironic for Stephen to give a lecture on how learning is different now, August 2014. Amazing and funny! "People are looking for learning that isn't so much the repetition of their professors' ideas, but learning that they can apply, that is a part of their life, whether it's part of their life in work, part of their life in their hobbies or their avocations, or part of their life just in what interests them. They expect universities to be flexible." different learning going on The fact is that people learn differently, that they have different objectives, different priorities, different goals, different times that they want to learn, different pets sleeping on their keyboard, all of these impact how people want to learn. That's immediately obvious to anyone who actually looks at people learning. Even as I look around this room, he's on an iPad, she's typing, she's writing on a notepad, he's asleep. Everyone learns differently. Connectivism MOOC George and I launched our MOOC on connectivism, which some of you may have heard of. Most of you may not have heard of it. If you talk about a niche subject, this is as niche as it can get. It's an unknown theory in the field of educational technology.

Amazon reviews of The Extended Mind collection of essays edited by Richard Menary and how far an accessible, reliable, and fully trustworthy object can "produce effects/results that are sufficiently comparable to those of components of the natural (internal, biological, original, classic) mind; in essence, it's about multiple realizability/functionalism." The examination of the extended mind, to me, relates to connectivism learning theory in how we expand our minds by belonging to learning networks that exponentially increase our knowledge or access to it through objects or people sharing their understanding.

Wonderful blog by George Siemens from 2010 enriched with good comments and exchange on teaching in social and technological networks. He reviews the traditional role of a teacher in a classroom (role model, encourager, supporter, guide, synthesizer) and shows how this model falls apart in a distributed learning network with multiple educator inputs and peer-based learning. Instead he says the roles teachers play in networked learning environments are to amplify, curate, find the way to help students make sense of information fragments, aggregate, filter, model (to build apprenticeship learning), and provide a persistent presence (place to express herself and be discovered).

George Siemens on the role of the teacher

"attributes. When entities are connected to other entities, different attributes will be activated based on the structure of those connections and the nature of other entities that are being connected. This fluidity of attribute activation appears to be subjective, but in reality, is the contextual activation of the attributes of entities based on how they are related to other entities. Knowledge then is literally the connections that occur between entities. I don't see networks as a metaphor for learning and knowledge. I see learning and knowledge as networks. In global, digital, distributed, and complex settings, a networked model of learning and knowledge is critical."

A rubber ducky personal learning network--could this be a model for a personal reflection--knowledge building exercise for IL teachers?

interesting use of Scoop.it on connected learning and connectivism

Change MOOC blog "On Brain Rewiring and Speed of Access" by Multilitteratus Incognitus, January 31, 2012. An amusing view that I find myself responding to positively on the assertions being made about the advent of the internet and connectivism and connected learning.

A description of The Extended Mind by Richard Menary, editor. This excerpt below captures the debate: The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument excited a vigorous debate among philosophers, both supporters and detractors. This volume brings together for the first time the best responses to Clark and Chalmers's bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer a valuable overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis."" I found this mention of the Extended Mind from a PBS Next Avenue blog post on 8 ways to make yourself smarter. To me, it suggests that if we place ourselves in learning situations such as networks or MOOCs, we will increase our cognition AND through the mix of intellectual connections/people we know there, we extend our minds considerably.

Leveling Up research project makes me think about all the benefits of being associated with a purpose driven online adult group. It may start out as a research group, one may participate to help deliver an outcome/product, but the growth that one can experience through reflection, application, adaptation, and sharing with the 'team' is where the learning occurs on an individual basis. How can one do a better job of harvesting the learning collectively for the group and for exporting (for whatever reason) to other audiences? Excerpt: "Our gaming cases center on the learning resources and supports that surround specific game communities. The experience of games is bigger than the designed games themselves. Players think about and work on games before, during, and after play. They develop complex relationships to their play, write detailed theory about their play, invest in their gaming reputations, and bring all of this into other social contexts. All of this "other" activity is known as the metagame, and designing for it is a key consideration in the crafting of games. More explicitly, gaming activities that include a social media component, span physical and virtual space, leverage the social labor of players in ways that reinforce and extend the experience into the everyday lives of the players."

#change11, blog post by Bon Stewart, May 2, 2012 And here's the rub... "The original MOOCs - the connectivist MOOCs a la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others - have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They've been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator's expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants' knowledge and experiences and ideas. They've been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They've been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn't stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they've given learners not just access to information but to networks. They've been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual. The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions."

Article identified on Stephen Downes' home page, Juy 20, 2012. Excerpt "Although MOOCs share the common characteristics of being large courses open to anyone, there are two main types, one called an "x MOOC," and another called a "connectivist MOOC." The companies and partnerships that fall into the "x MOOC" include Coursera; an MIT and Harvard partnership called EdX, and a new venture founded by three roboticists called Udacity. Other universities follow a connectivist MOOC model developed by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in 2008. What's the difference between the two? Connectivist MOOCs are more social and focused on deriving meaning of the learning experience with others, Virginia Commonwealth's Becker said. And they allow students to participate through blogs, RSS feeds and other decentralized methods, said Downes, a senior researcher for Canada's National Research Council. By contrast, x MOOCs emphasize content mastery, centralizes courses on one website and uses automated grading tools to support hundreds of thousands of students. But regardless of the category, MOOCs as a whole will change how universities offer courses, Downes said. And they're not going away. "Universities can't just keep doing what they're doing and hope this whole online thing goes away," Downes said."

Lisa and Doris - a bit in the middle here about over-abundance of information for your next event... Otherwise, nice intro to GS and his work and his interest in SNA and analytics as ways to improve learning and how learning might operate outside the context of a siloed course

great background on George Siemens