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Allan Quartly

Teaching in Social and Technological Networks « Connectivism - 6 views

  • How can we achieve clear outcomes through distributed means?
  • How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?
  • A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map.
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  • A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.
  • Learning is an eliminative process. By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.
  • Course content is similarly fragmented. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on.
  • Fragmentation of content and conversation is about to disrupt this well-ordered view of learning. Educators and universities are beginning to realize that they no longer have the control they once (thought they) did.
  • However, in order for education to work within the larger structure of integrated societal systems, clear outcomes are still needed.
  • How can we achieve clear outcomes through distributed means? How can we achieve learning targets when the educator is no longer able to control the actions of learners?
  • Thoughts, ideas, or messages that the teacher amplifies will generally have a greater probability of being seen by course participants.
  • Each RT amplifies the message much like an electronic amplifier increases the amplitude of audio or video transmitters.
  • A curatorial teacher acknowledges the autonomy of learners, yet understands the frustration of exploring unknown territories without a map. A curator is an expert learner. Instead of dispensing knowledge, he creates spaces in which knowledge can be created, explored, and connected.
  • In CCK08/09, Stephen and I produced a daily newsletter where we highlighted discussions, concepts, and resources that we felt were important. As the course progressed, many students stated they found this to be a valuable resource -a centering point of sorts.
  • Today’s social web is no different – we find our way through active exploration. Designers can aid the wayfinding process through consistency of design and functionality across various tools, but ultimately, it is the responsibility of the individual to click/fail/recoup and continue.
  • Fortunately, the experience of wayfinding is now augmented by social systems. Social structures are filters. As a learner grows (and prunes) her personal networks, she also develops an effective means to filter abundance. The network becomes a cognitive agent in this instance – helping the learner to make sense of complex subject areas by relying not only on her own reading and resource exploration, but by permitting her social network to filter resources and draw attention to important topics. In order for these networks to work effectively, learners must be conscious of the need for diversity and should include nodes that offer critical or antagonistic perspectives on all topic areas. Sensemaking in complex environments is a social process.
  • After all, why should we do the heavy cognitive work when technology is uniquely suited to analyzing and generating patterns?
  • I’d like a learning system that functions along the lines of RescueTime – actively monitoring what I’m doing – but then offers suggestions of what I should (or could) be doing additionally. Or a system that is aware of my email exchanges over the last several years and can provide relevant information based on the development of my thinking and work. With the rise of social media, and with it the attention organizations pay to how their brand is being represented, monitoring services such as Viral Heat are promising. Imagine a course where the fragmented conversations and content are analyzed (monitored) through a similar service. Instead of creating a structure of the course in advance of the students starting (the current model), course structure emerges through numerous fragmented interactions. “Intelligence” is applied after the content and interactions start, not before. This is basically what Google did for the web – instead of fully defined and meta-described resources in a database, organized according to subject areas (i.e. Yahoo at the time), intelligence was applied at the point of search. Aggregation should do the same – reveal the content and conversation structure of the course as it unfolds, rather than defining it in advance.
  • Filtering resources is an important educator role, but as noted already, effective filtering can be done through a combination of wayfinding, social sensemaking, and aggregation. But expertise still matters. Educators often have years or decades of experience in a field. As such, they are familiar with many of the concepts, pitfalls, confusions, and distractions that learners are likely to encounter. As should be evident by now, the educator is an important agent in networked learning. Instead of being the sole or dominant filter of information, he now shares this task with other methods and individuals.
  • By determining what doesn’t belong, a learner develops and focuses his understanding of a topic. The teacher assists in the process by providing one stream of filtered information. The student is then faced with making nuanced selections based on the multiple information streams he encounters. The singular filter of the teacher has morphed into numerous information streams, each filtered according to different perspectives and world views.
  • Given that coherence and lucidity are key to understanding our world, how do educators teach in networks? For educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher now influences or shapes a network.
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    Unpacking the role of the teacher in connectivism
markuos morley

Digital, Networked and Open : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Schol... - 4 views

    • markuos morley
       
      What is Martin's definition of a social network here?
    • markuos morley
       
      Surely scholars could use email distribution lists and Usenet Newsgroups for such activities commonly back in the early 1990's?
    • Rob Parsons
       
      They could but it wasn't that common.
  • Are they central or peripheral to practice?
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  • Blogs are also the epitome of the type of technology that can lead to rapid innovation. They can be free to set up, are easy to use and because they are at the user's control, they represent a liberated form for expression. There is no word limit or publication schedule for a blog
  • ‘Scholarship’ is itself a rather old-fashioned term.
  • How do we recognise quality?
  • Prior to the Internet, but particularly prior to social networks, this kind of network was limited to those with whom you interacted regularly.
  • the advent of social networks that is having an influence on scholarly practice.
  • Should bloggers use institutional systems or separate out their blogging and formal identities?
  • Dunbar's (1992) research on friends and group size suggests that it has a capacity of around 150. It necessitates keeping in touch with a lot of people, often reinforcing that contact with physical interaction.
  • for those who have taken the step to establishing an online identity, these networks are undoubtedly of significant value in their everyday practice.
  • openness
  • Tim O'Reilly (2004) calls ‘an architecture of participation’, an infrastructure and set of tools that allow anyone to contribute.
  • It is this democratisation and removal of previous filters that has characterised the tools which have formed the second wave of web popularity, such as YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Openness then refers not only to the technology but also to the practice of sharing content as a default.
    • markuos morley
       
      Significant point for me.
    • markuos morley
       
      The Philosophy is the important thing.
  • Fast – technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. The academic does not need to attend a training course to use it or submit a request to their central IT services to set it up. This means they can experiment quickly.
  • Cheap – tools that are usually free or at least have a freemium model so the individual can fund any extension themselves. This means that it is not necessary to gain authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means the user doesn't need to be concerned about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
  • Out of control – these technologies are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element and are more flexible. They are also democratised tools, so the control of them is as much in the hands of students as it is that of the educator.
  • Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services and the uses they put technology to in education.
  • ‘the good enough revolution’
  • This reflects a move away from expensive, sophisticated software and hardware to using tools which are easy to use, lightweight and which tie in with the digital, networked, open culture.
  • there seems to be such an anxiety about being labelled a ‘technological determinist’ that many people in education seek to deny the significance of technology in any discussion. ‘Technology isn't important’, ‘pedagogy comes first’, ‘we should be talking about learning, not the technology’ are all common refrains in conferences and workshops.
  • While there is undoubtedly some truth in these, the suggestion that technology isn't playing a significant role in how people are communicating, working, constructing knowledge and socialising is to ignore a major influencing factor in a complex equation.
  • entirely unpredicted, what is often termed ‘emergent use’, which arises from a community taking a system and using it for purposes the creators never envisaged.
  •  
    I've made some annotations and floating comments here. Possibly Martin would like to respond in situ?
Allan Quartly

A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on m... - 10 views

  • Teaching presence is much harder to facilitate as learners do not necessarily have contact with the educator, but it is the teaching presence that heightens cognitive presence (Annand, 2011).
  • This research showed the importance of making connections between learners and fellow-learners and between learners and facilitators. Meaningful learning occurs if social and teaching presence forms the basis of design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive processes for the realization of personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes.
  • The type of support structure that would engage learners in critical learning on an open network should be based on the creation of a place or community where people feel comfortable, trusted, and valued, and where people can access and interact with resources and each other.
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  • The new roles that the teacher as facilitator needs to adopt in networked learning environments include aggregating, curating, amplifying, modelling, and persistently being present in coaching or mentoring.
  • The facilitator also needs to be dynamic and change throughout the course.
  • Novices can best be supported through a series of activities that are structured on connectivist learning principles with a goal to enhance autonomy and the building of personal learning networks.
Lone Guldbrandt Tønnesen

Ideas from the thirteen weeks of MOOC « Not Worth Printing - 4 views

  • Search: Not Worth Printing open source, elearning trends, ethics in technology and education About
  • In terms of formal learning, Tony Bates believes that changes can occur within the existing education institutes
  • Martin Weller points to the importance of academic institutes recognizing digital scholarship, moving away from the inefficient and costly publishing model and moving towards online publications that better promotes interdisciplinary endeavours
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  • David Wiley and Rory McGreal urge universities to open their content; Wiley further envisions the future of education consisting of learner-generated materials;
  • Building rhizome-like learning networks can foster an environment more conducive to continuous knowledge acquisition and constructio
  • This does not match the way our brain process information, as we are better at learning incremental chunks of knowledge in a meaningful and authentic context.
  • Dave Cormie
  • Clark Quinn’s idea of slow learning
  • Here Jon Dron reminds us that tools themselves are not technology
  • Dron’s definitions of hard vs soft technologies relevant to both formal and informal learning, further help us to undertand that soft technologies are perhaps more useful in building learning and support communities and equipping learners with the ability to  navigate information in networks, thereby promoting lifelong learning.
  • The learners will end up leading the way, as they should.
Rob Parsons

Network Weather : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practic... - 0 views

  • the use of digital, networked open tools and approaches will have an impact on some areas of scholarly practice, which in turn will affect all scholars, regardless of whether they themselves use the technologies or not.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Network weather
anonymous

Interlocutor: The Word of 2012 - 5 views

  • If there is only partial participation, is it only the loud that will succeed?
  • The network is the medium. And if the network is stunted or ambivalent to actively participate, we run the risk not of a digital divide but of a competence divide.
  • Let 2012 be about the interlocutor. I post, therefore I am.
anonymous

Twitter Literacy - 9 views

  • You are responsible for whoever else’s babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
  • successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
  • If it isn’t fun, it won’t be useful. If you don’t put out, you don’t get back
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  • It’s about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what. Whatever you call this blend of craft and community, one of the most important challenges posed by the real-time, ubiquitous, wireless, always-on, often alienating interwebs are the skills required for the use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
Rob Parsons

Is the Revolution Justified? : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scho... - 9 views

  • And Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) claim as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that ‘they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, they like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity’. This rather begs the question, ‘was there evidence that previous generations had a stated preference for ambiguity and chaos in their learning?’
  • It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach. (Prensky 2001)
    • tatiluna
       
      I think this statement is anachronistic. In fact, the "new students" today who do not fit into the traditional educational system are in many cases people who were raised in the system, and then either rejected it or were rejected by it in some way.  Our educational system is designed to train conformist drones, who do not know how to learn without school.  There are many who are also able to live in both of these worlds, the traditional and the new, but I think they can bring new insights to the traditional school environment.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I think this is a red herring as far as technology is concerned. it's much more to do with a pervasive social issue about inclusion and exclusion, probably worldwide, but much more marked in the UK due to the enthusiastic implementation of Thatcherism by her and subsequent governments. Many students know or suspect that there is no point for them in school and schools exclude like everyone else does those pupils who are likely to be expensive. Cost has truly overtaken value as the main point of reference
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    • Rob Parsons
       
      That's interesting. I doubt that the older generation were inherently more moral. I suspect that they regarded plagiarism more seriously because it's easier to hold censorious views about a crime that's difficult to commit. When the crime becomes easy to commit fewer people stand out against it. There is also the issue that plagiarism falls into the category of wrong doing that doesn't obviously hurt anybody - like speeding or smoking cannabis.
  • Brown (2009) reports, Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: ‘We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users’. The report added: ‘Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level’.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      Summary: discussions about net gen are not significant. There is not evidence of significant difference between net gen and previous gens. Also there is evidence of significant variation within today's younger generation. Issue also lacks significance because we still need to cater for very large number of other gen learners.
  • A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT-rich one, and people are using the Internet for a variety of learning-related activities. People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.
  • Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex.
  • The first is that there is lag between society's acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (2009) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30 per cent of the population), ubiquity (30–70 per cent) and finally invisibility (more than 70 per cent). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority; now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2010. What is significant is the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.
    • Rob Parsons
       
      I'm not entirely sure what the argument is here; or what the evidence is. What sort of lag and how much is actually evident? And which bits of society is HE lagging behind - there are lots that haven't caught up with the interwebs at all, and others that are racing ahead.
  •  
    The Digital Scholar - Martin Weller
  •  
    I haven't read any of this book yet, but this quote is running along the lines of my own thinking for my own interaction with the web and all its tools and structures. I'm beginning to feel that many of the new tools used for organization, aggregation, and note taking are too regimented for what I want right now, too task-oriented. I'm figuring out how I learn best, and the most important part of that process that has been missing for me in the past is connection to creativity. Of course, the internet is a place where so much creation is going on and I can certainly find inspiration from it. But in terms of working out my projects using solely these new tools, I keep running against a wall. I'm not exactly sure if that's what Oblinger and Oblinger are talking about, but that's what I thought of.
Rob Parsons

The Medals of Our Defeats : The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholar... - 1 views

  • Nicholas Carr's (2008) article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ struck a chord with many people. Carr's (2010) argument, which he fleshes out in his book The Shallows, is that our continual use of the net induces a superficiality to our behaviour. He says this is felt particularly when trying to read a complex piece:
  • The issue of quality is perhaps more keenly felt when we consider teaching. I raised the idea of pedagogy of abundance in Chapter 8, and in such a pedagogy the content will vary greatly in terms of quality.
  • the question is not whether some people produce poor quality content, obviously they do and the majority in fact, but whether as a whole this system can produce high-quality content.
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  • As neuroscientist Joshua Greene puts it, ‘the Internet hasn't changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food. The Internet has provided us with unprecedented access to information, but it hasn't changed what we do with it once it's made it into our heads’ (Gerschenfeld 2010).
  • Whether there are social and behavioural impacts of operating online is a serious question, however. Just as the television had serious social impacts, we must accept that computers and Internet will also have consequences. These will undoubtedly be a mixture of positive and negative, but I would argue that using pseudo-scientific explanations to back up prejudices will not help us address these issues.
  • For educators there are two main issues; the first is the extent to which they help students manage their online identity, and the second is how they manage their own boundary between personal and professional life.
  • The over-adoption of tools can lead to what has been termed ‘creepy tree house’ syndrome (Stein 2008) when authority is seen to try and invade a young person's social space.
  • There is strong resistance from students to universities and lecturers making formal use of social networks as this is seen as an invasion of their social space (e.g. Madge 2009).
  • For the teaching function of scholarship then the question is ‘How can educators utilise the potential of these tools without destroying what makes them valuable to students?’
  • I would suggest the following as the most challenging for digital scholarship: Moving beyond the superficial – many successful Web 2.0 services essentially allow a very simple function, for example, sharing a photograph. Can we use the same techniques for deeper, more difficult tasks?
  • Understanding quality – this is not just about maintaining current quality, as this may not be appropriate in many forms, but appreciating when different levels of quality can be used.
  • Managing online identity – there is a tension for scholars and their students in gaining the benefits of a social network, which thrives on personal interactions, while not compromising professional identity.
  • Ownership of scholarly functions – there is also a dilemma regarding how much of scholarly discourse and activity we give over to cloud computing services and whether the benefits in terms of widespread use and (often) superior tools outweigh the potential risks.
anonymous

Modelling, not shaping - 4 views

  • There is strong evidence that we need to integrate learning into our work in order to deal with the increasing complexity of knowledge work. The valued work in the enterprise is increasing in variety and decreasing in standardization. I have suggested that communities of practice are the bridge between work teams and open social networks, with narration of work an enabler of knowledge-sharing, and of course, modelling behaviour.
  • Communities are more like dance halls than factories. Platforms that have too much control will not be adopted on a community level. As a consultant, I would like to be able to recommend a variety of these platforms, that can inter-operate on some level, so that enterprise communities can choose the most suitable ones for their stage of development.
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