Open Education Connections

The developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community.

Computer-supported communication is everywhere, but it is situated nowhere. It is I-alone that is reachable wherever I am: at a home, hotel, office, highway, or shopping center. The person has become the portal.

This shift facilitates personal communities that supply the essentials of community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social identities, and a sense of belonging. The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity. Just as 24/7/365 Internet computing means the ready availability of people in specific places, the proliferation of mobile phones and wireless computing increasingly is coming to mean an even greater availability of people without regard to place. Supportive convoys travel ethereally with each person (Ling & Ytrri, 2002; Katz, 2002).

Networked individualism should have profound effects on social cohesion. Rather than feeling a part of a hierarchy of encompassing polities, like nesting Russian dolls, people believe they belong to multiple, partial communities and polities. Some may be global, such as is found in electronic diasporas linking dispersed members of emigrant ethnic groups (Mitra, 2003). Some may be traditional local groups of neighbors with connectivity enhanced by listservs and other forms of computer-mediated communication (Hampton, 2001), for NetLab�s research has fit into the growing realization that the McLuhanesque �global village� (1962) complements traditional communities rather than replacing them. McLuhan argued, �the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.� Yet, in a person�s �glocalized� world (Wellman, 2003, in press), extensive local involvements fit together with far-flung communities of friendship, kinship and shared interest. This is especially true today when almost all computers are physically wired into the Internet, rooting people to their desk chairs. Yet even as the world goes wireless, the persistence of tangible interests, such as neighborly get-togethers or local intruders, will keep the local important. E-citizenship will be both local and global.

When knowledge is subject to paucity, the process of assessing worthiness is assumed to be intrinsic to learning. When knowledge is abundant, the rapid evaluation of knowledge is important. Additional concerns arise from the rapid increase in information. In today’s environment, action is often needed without personal learning – that is, we need to act by drawing information outside of our primary knowledge. The ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill.

How are learning theories impacted when knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner? What adjustments need to made with learning theories when technology performs many of the cognitive operations previously performed by learners (information storage and retrieval). How can we continue to stay current in a rapidly evolving information ecology?

Learning, as a self-organizing process requires that the system (personal or organizational learning systems) “be informationally open, that is, for it to be able to classify its own interaction with an environment, it must be able to change its structure…” (p.4). Wiley and Edwards acknowledge the importance of self-organization as a learning process: “Jacobs argues that communities self-organize is a manner similar to social insects: instead of thousands of ants crossing each other’s pheromone trails and changing their behavior accordingly, thousands of humans pass each other on the sidewalk and change their behavior accordingly.”. Self-organization on a personal level is a micro-process of the larger self-organizing knowledge constructs created within corporate or institutional environments. The capacity to form connections between sources of information, and thereby create useful information patterns, is required to learn in our knowledge economy.

Albert-László Barabási states that “nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p.106).

Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

Principles of connectivism: Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions. Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources. Learning may reside in non-human appliances. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality.

Knowledge that resides in a database needs to be connected with the right people in the right context in order to be classified as learning.

“quantum theory of trust” which “explains not just how to recognize the collective cognitive capability of an organization, but how to cultivate and increase it”.