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Anyone can press the button and write an essay.

In my view, connective filtering mechanisms are essentially like node weights in neural networks. As long as there is a transparent mechanism to add weight to someone’s opinion, then these weights can be used to establish expertise. The more weight someone has, the more their ‘vote’ for another node is worth. Someone might start as a buff, but with enough acknowledgment from prior experts, their weight increases until they may become an expert themselves. One example of this (for stock picking) is as the CAPS system from the Motley Fool.

Re. static vs. dynamic canons: I’m still thinking this through, but I imagine that the higher the dependency of the material on a static canon (i.e. medicine), the more weight would be given to experts (i.e. peer review), and the higher the barrier to entry for buffs. Conversely, if the material was relatively dynamic by nature (i.e. philosophy), then the weights would be more evenly spread out.

Who decides how to spread these weights and which canons are more static than others?? As long as it is a transparent and rules-based mechanism, it can be modified as needed (i.e. Democracy comes in many forms, none of which pre-determines a winner; it is, in a way, a meta-ideology). These kind of mechanisms create a recursive abstraction of the underlying system, so the weights can be moved, but only in a way that is transparent and subject to review itself.

By the way, great posts, this one and others.

Catherine — Thanks, and yes, I do spend time with my students discussing the implications of portraying people of the past as victims, without historical agency. It devalues the actions of people, the things they did to prevent victimhood. But I let them get all upset about what happened first (affective domain), before guiding them into that discussion.

I am not defending “academia”, nor am I suggesting that they’re the ones who determine what is and isn’t appropriate negotiation. But in this field, an “expert” (even one without a degree) is schooled (even by the self) in the canons and method of the discipline. Although it has not always been that way, the current system of practicing and reflecting upon those canons and methodology takes place primarily in higher education. The “community” such trained historians are part of is not the same as the one formed by unpracticed enthusiasts.

Wikipedia is an example of buffology and not history. Take any contemporary event or figures like Palin or Biden; contrast and compare how their entries were done, especially the lengthy and obsessive Palin entry done by many leftist buffs bent on using the Wikipedia to destroy her even as they neglect biden or even McCain; they do this from fear and political hysteria, all the while keeping the tone mannered and faux-historical — buffs are good at that these days.

You say a very important thing: “My discipline of history needs expertise and reflection before it needs a network.” Absolutely. You need to sit and struggle alone with the texts and see what they say before you condition that on opening it up to others also struggling and the schools of thought surrounding how to interpret them. No doubt the Connectivists would say “but the expertise and reflection can be done on a network” — with their little PLEs and whatnot — but here, I think you should be resolute and say “No, that’s distracting, and misleading, and at the end of the day, does not yield the same results.”

However, when you go to this point, I think you go off the rails: “Networks can subsume expertise to inappropriate negotiation.”

Who’s to say? This is the sort of thing Stephen Downes is doing when he arrogates to himself as teacher the right to cull the blog list and steer people away from forums discussions where he thinks it is “too loud” and into quieter waters that people can moderate heavily. The inappropriateness here comes from a claim that the network is open and the network is all, yet the steerage and culling goes on stealthily, then hiding itself behind an excuse as you might give by saying “experts shouldn’t have to fend off buffs.” But…why? I don’t suggest that every historian of, oh, the space program should have to sit and fend off UFO conspiracy nutters all day in the name of freedom, but he should feel some sense of accountability to the public, should he not? What form should that take?

As to your comment about “voluntarily created networks creating knowledge,” it is George Siemens’ thesis that knowledge isn’t created. I imagine he would answer this tricky problem of knowledge created badly by amateurs by just blandly assuming “the network will go around it”. I see that comment all the time from these folks about things they don’t like, criticism, etc. — Stephen Downes ask the question — then gives the answer — that the Network produced loudness and confusion, and then the Network, bless its Holy Name, went around the noisy forums and mannered itself into the lodges of moderated blogs, all Hail the Holy Network which has battled the buffs yet another day and risen supreme.

I’m not interested in Dave incorporating rigour into the process. I don’t want him and his friends to be in charge of “incorporation”. Rather, the process itself has to be defined as to how you arrive at ways to get around the Holocaust deniers, the UFO nutters, etc. That process cannot involve closure; it has to be based on the premise that openness and the ability to keep having the right to float a false hypothesis (a very important concept) can be matched by being able to refute false hypotheses as well to inform the public.

A problem with the movement in public schools to overcome the classical “history written by the victors” is that they rewrite the story so that it is now “history written by the victims” — and and then simply exaggerate and manifest a bias in the other direction through a modern politically-correct lense.

I think you’re saying several important things here

The victors do indeed write the histories, as well as preseve the historical documents. You can’t kill of hundreds of nations and call their land the “wild west” or “new frontier” without re-writing history.

Here’s an example: Indians.com is not an Indigenous website, it’s owned by the Cleveland Indians. Their view of how they got their mascot, who it is named after, etc is completely made up – a nice re-writing of history. Even when presented with the evidence, fans don’t care because they don’t want to face the cognitive dissonance it produces. They dismiss anyone who challenges their view of history as people being politically correct”, or wackos.

If they would listen to a network other than the team, who are actually acting as information impostors, they would have a fuller historical view from which to make up their world view. But the information impostors discredit any information from voluntary networks.

Maybe we could modify the phrase to be “historical documents are preserved by the victors”. They may or may not write “the history”, but they certainly impact what we can use later (ask anyone living in Stalinist Russia or rewriting history textbooks in Japan).

They could be seen to “own” the history for the same reason, but that only prevents the opportunity for analysis when documentation is destroyed, and even then reconstruction if often possible (oral history, artifacts, travellers’ reports). The fact of the destruction also becomes a point of analysis.

Certainly a number of people with wrong ideas are canonically trained — a traditional university education does not necessary weed out the whackos, even in history. My point is that voluntary networks are much more likely to produce far more of them.

Great post – I found it very thought provoking! I started to submit a brief reply but it took on a life of it’s own so I added it as a track back instead

The short version: I prefer to learn this way, but I’m grappling with the practicalities of much of it for formal institutions, and particularly for certain subjects and age groups.

You made several really going points in that respect that I’ll be mulling over for a while I suspect. Thanks for that.

By the way, I’ve been lurking as a reader for some time now and love your posts

Cheers,

Mike