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Of course, that is not the case when referring to history as an intellectual endeavor. Notice that I say “intellectual endeavor”, not “academic discipline”. Herodotus was not a member of the academy, and many a historian has been trained only by reading and writing (doing) history.

History, at least writing history, always has a purpose. For the Greeks, the purpose of writing about the past was to emphasize and justify moral lessons. Since then, history has been written for the purpose of creating social reform, supporting a political party, shoring up a public argument, etc.

My point is this: at no time in history has the purpose of history been the listing of dates and events. There must be a thesis, a point of view or guiding idea, a purpose for creating the list. In creating a list, choices are made as to what to include and what to leave out. We must cull our evidence. And in writing history, the reason for the culling is to support a particular contention.

In this week’s readings, I am having trouble finding those contentions.

Trebor Scholz’s A History of the Social Web was the original assigned reading for this week. Despite the fact that is was written last year, it remains in draft form. I tried to find a thesis in the first several paragraphs. He came close with

Emphasizing the role of women whenever possible, this history shows that the interests of those who used the Net as social platform shaped it in the interplay of military, scientific, entrepreneurial, activist, artistic, and altrustic agnedas.

I would not likely allow a student to write a paper using such a thesis, because it is very vague (”in the interplay of”?) and would probably lead to a list. Thinking that perhaps the point was about women, I then counted forty-three men mentioned in the article before a single woman appeared. (Be aware that I wasn’t concerned about this as a woman, but as a historian analyzing a thesis — don’t worry, it’s a common mistake.)

I did read the entire rambling, poorly written, disjointed, short-paragraphed, blog-style thing. A point of view popped up in a couple of areas, but nothing overall, no point to the article. It’s a list.

This morning I printed (I like to print to read, no surprise there) George Siemens’ A brief history of networked learning. Grateful that he mentioned right away the reality of networks existing since, well, forever, after three paragraphs Siemens detailed, not a history of networked learning, but rather the history (there was a thesis and everything!) of computer-assisted global networks and the learning theories accompanying them. I’d like to suggest a change in title to:

Late 20th and Early 21st Century Developments in Theories of Computer-Based Social Learning Network Models for Education

Does that work?

Stephen’s list, entitled A Folk History of the Internet, is a tracking list that said it was a tracking list and invited some participation. It’s just a list of links by year. No claims to “history” beyond the name and the chronological nature of the listing. Honest, I thought.

Now, if only I could get people to avoid using the word “technology” when they mean something like “the internet”…

I raised this idea in a Sept 19 Ustream session (audio from 28:00) and promised to blog about it. At first, the concept was gently ridiculed (”dead people don’t answer email”), but gradually participants began to realize that since most of what we know about others are just their artifacts anyway (particularly if we’ve only met them online), we may indeed be networking with those we read, many of whom lived long ago. (I thought it was particularly important for Stephen Downes to understand this, since his network includes so many wonderful philosophers, like Wittgenstein, about whom he writes as if they were still around.)

If we say that our networks are made up of ties we have with people, then my knowledge (which I define much more deeply than is often done in this class) is dependent on many people who are no longer living. If we say that networks are comprised of hubs at the center of their own networks, I can see Jefferson, Voltaire, Rousseau, Adams, Madison as hubs. If we say they are influenced by power laws, you betcha. Scale free? Definitely. Made up of connectors and those who are highly influenced? Uh huh. Emphasizing weak ties? Oh sure (although I think Jefferson and Madison’s families were close, geographically and as friends).

Dead people have the following advantages in a network:

Less Noise
Their ideas are often well-indexed (though perhaps not prior to the 18th century), and their writing better focused. I do not have to use Search for blog posts or deal with a 404 error when they move something. I don’t have to read what they had for breakfast while looking for something important. (Although it is more fun to know what Thomas Jefferson had for breakfast than, say, Andrew Keen.)

Prior Vetting
Many famous dead writers have had their work repeatedly analyzed within the context of various historic eras, providing not only access to secondary analysis but a history of the application of their ideas.

Context for “New” Ideas
Whenever the Salesmen of our age try to sell us something as new and different, distinct and unique, dead people in the network can provide good balance and a healthy dose of skepticism.

Reminders of our Humanity
If their lives have been researched and studied as well as their work, they remind us of our own humanity. Although all public work is what the author wants us to see, historical biography often reveals what they didn’t want us to see. This reminds us that even great thinkers of the past were subject to the same vices and failings as ourselves.

Their disadvantages are:

They don’t answer email.
Well, perhaps not, but neither do many live people I know.

They don’t have the current research.
Very true, and yet current research is constructed within our current social context. Thus it only has enduring value in historical perspective, which is what your dead people provide: a context for that new research.

They aren’t going to come out with anything new.
Again, many live people don’t either, and every new reading or interpretation does bring something new to the conversation.

They don’t Twitter.
OK, you’ve got me there.

The false assumptions are:

They can’t talk to you.
They don’t talk to you personally, perhaps, but they do talk to you. All of the past talks to you if you are the type of person who enjoys reading and thinking.

They won’t answer.
As with live people, if you pose a question appropriate to the source, you will get a good answer; otherwise you won’t.

We don’t need them here.
The field of educational technology in particular has Marshall McLuhan as a vital network member, to name just one.

Contrary to the Pirates of the Caribbean mentality, dead men do tell tales. When I told a colleague, “what they said was: dead people don’t answer email”, his response was, “no, but they do answer questions”. If we’re going to value meta-cognition as an intellectual skill, it would be good to acknowledge those ideas that help form our perspective, and cite our sources. Filling ones network with dead people will make it deeper, more sustainable, more holistic and more useful.

I found the book to be a very interesting discussion of the way ideas spread, and my particular interest in reading it was my realization that a great deal of our understanding about networks comes from people in marketing. At the same time as I read this book, I was also reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which, although I was reading it to help my teaching, certainly noted many marketing examples.

Determining customer’s desires is what most companies do, in order, of course, to sell stuff. They also want to go beyond that to create demand where there wasn’t any. A great deal of the development of ideas about “networking” is associated with business: in fact, the word itself first became popular in a business context.

I don’t know whether that’s why I’m having trouble applying it to education? Certainly, whenever college professors are subjected to business models (I recall the Total Quality Management movement of the last decade), we wince and insist that what we’re doing is not commercial, and should not be subject to business motives, structures, or accountability. By “accountability” we mean the immediate quantifying justification of teaching, the inability of many people to realize what they’ve learned in college until many years later, and the difficulty in quantifying it even then.

So now we have an entire course that relates learning to networks, and thus by extension to business models, although I know that this is not the focus of research for folks like Siemens and Downes. But with Krebs, certainly, and the focus on six degrees and such, I see the spectre of TQM hovering in the background. I suspect a number of “the 2000″ joining us here are business people, seeking to sell me not only products, but also ideas. Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but I think I’ll just review the Week 3 ideas for now. The main attributes of network are:

• Small Worlds (like six degrees of separation)
• Hubs: highly connected nodes (like Google, or the secretary’s desk at a school)
• Power laws: ideas of power being distributed fairly or unfairly, but usually unevenly
• Scale free: a large number of notes does not denote better connections
• Connectors: as in Gladwell’s book, people who spread trends through weak ties, although Watts and Dodds says that may happen more through people who are easily influenced
• Weak ties: I prefer shallow and deep to weak and strong, but the idea that people with whom you have a connection in only one area may be quite meaningful

Again, I can see all of these in business, and many of them socially. I’ll work on applying them as we go along.

Some of the foundations include the ideas that all tools (technology) carry with them an ideology (a point I’ve carried in my work on the pedagogy of course management systems), learning takes place in a context and in a social way, cognition may be distributed rather than focused, technologies can change our conception of humanity, and networks exist everywhere. The theoretical foundations range from Wittgenstein and Marshall McLuhan to a set of noted contemporary scholars.

“Connectivism is the application of network principles to define both knowledge and the process of learning. ” These networks are not just computer-based, but exist in the mind itself, in society, and in individual cognitive frameworks. The metaphor of neural network-building in the brain can provide one model, but here it’s placed in the context of social interaction and a post-modern technological world of shared concepts and opinions.

So in addition to temporal categories (Week 1, Week 2, etc) I am adding:
* Summaries: summaries of articles or conversations
* Responses: analyses of assigned reading
* Musings: disparate thoughts occurring as a result of thinking about the class
* Conversations: topics I’ll get involved in on other blogs or at the Moodle forum

I want to make things easier to sort, for myself and anyone coming here. I have also added our syllabus elements to the sidebar, to help me get organized. It makes sense that I should create my own “central” area in a decentralized class, and that it be the place where I have my original work.