Lisa’s CCK08 Edublog

Taking off from Carlos González Casares’ reply in the Moodle forum on “The Importance of context”, I am thinking about my own participation in this class. Keep in mind that I consider myself not just a “for-credit learner” but also an “actively engaged” participant according to George Siemen’s list.

Carlos wrote:

Use the social media of the web to learning is easier by a more active way of participation because of the continuous overload of information. But in a contradictory sense a more “active” participation increase the overload of information and reduce the time to interpretation.

In this format, when I participate actively (by posting in the Moodle forum, or blogging, or commenting on another’s blog) I increase my workload immediately. This is ironic, because in participating I am attempting to understand. To understand complex ideas, I need to simplify them and organize them. Yet each post or reply creates a vested interest in that particular discussion, and I then feel obligated to follow it and see if anyone has replied to me.

Is this ego or just fear of missing something? I’m not sure. Is my reductionism necessary for me to understand? You bet. But if my participation causes an ever-increasing need to participate, then efforts to cull out my readings and just follow a few people are undermined. I’ll respond less to others in an effort, not to reduce cognitive dissonance or pause to interpret, but in an effort the sleep and eat.

It is indicative of the problem that I read someone’s blog post yesterday on how important it is that we all go outside and enjoy the pleasures of the season changing to autumn, and now I cannot find the post to link to it here. The overload builds on itself, and the desire to participate decreases.

If this is true of me now in this course, perhaps it is also true of students we might have use the methods of connectivism in their own work. As we head toward the weeks where we’ll discuss instructional design and the role of educators, I wonder whether my own “do I really want to participate here? won’t that increase the work I have to do?” response wouldn’t also be an issue for students.

There has been much discussion in the class about the difference between connectivism (which focuses on the links in the network) and constructivism (which focuses on constructing knowledge individually with instructor guidance). And although it’s quite clear the differences between the two, as a class member, I am feeling a sense of constructivism.

The class is certainly set up to provide plenty of connections and opportunities for many kinds of networks, and I would like to be focusing more on the “pipe” rather than the content. But I’m seriously struggling with that.

One reason may be that I’m formally enrolled in the class (unlike the 2000 other people), which means I put additional pressure on myself to do all the readings, and make sure my output is timely and appropriate. To participate in the network this class entails (for we are guinea pigs to a connectivist experiment as well as students), I’ve got my blog, my feeds for Google Alerts, cck08 on several search tools, my aggregators, links to others’ blogs. I go to the Moodle forums because much of the conversation is taking there instead of where I expected (i.e. within the blogs themselves), to George’s and Stephen’s various blogs too.

I feel like I know where the class is (even with many rooms) and I’ve been given the plans, but now I’ve had to assemble my own desk, and tried to shape it for me even though a schematic have been provided. Then I’m putting my own textbook together, making judgements and decisions about what is most important to read. I gather my multimedia from the various sources, and determine which box to put them in (mp3 player, web access on desktop computer) and I take in much input and information.

So even though I would like to focus on connections, like most people in Week 1 I suffered from being overwhelmed, and now the sense of construction is even stronger. I am not free to just learn what I want from my connections. There is a set structure, and certain ideas I am supposed to not only grasp but be able to display in a concept map. I must construct not only blog posts, but a visual concept map, using the resources and guidance provided by instructors and colleagues. So thus far, the class itself is feeling very constructivist to me.

http://wordle.net/

Such a cool and trendy thing to do — thanks, Christy Tucker! (Looks like I’m a little enamored of Stephen’s ideas, though, which may well be the case.)

Knowledge in itself is wisdom.

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Content can not be separated from learning, which connectivism does, by saying that the path is more important. There is little to go along that path without content (for example, student cell phone conversations that contain no content, only connection).
Kerr is right — the slogans of connectivism are important for generating discussions, not settling issues.

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I am continually writing “already true” in the articles.

The goals of teaching are antithetical to the goals of learning. The goal of teaching is the inculcation of values inherent in a subject and the promotion of a set of norms that fits the subject into the overall realm of knowledge as has been determined by historical forces. No one takes a class to learn such a thing.

The role of schools is to teach, not adopt the currently trendy communication style as if it were the content. The technologies should be used to stimulate communication and collaboration, which is what they do best. The use of such technologies for augmenting knowledge through communication does not create the knowledge.