I was reminded of my theory regarding students having cat or dog learning styles.

Then I made the connection to this week’s topic: groups versus networks.

Groups are full of dogs, eager to do what the others do and all be accepted. The alpha dog sets the agenda, and everything is distributive. As Stephen Downes puts it, they “risk anything for that team feeling” (2006). They do work together, are rule-bound, and for the most part subsume individual identity. They even “form linear hierarchies“.

Networks are how cats operate. Cats form connections for their own autonomous purposes, and only when needed. They will cuddle up to a human being, or another cat, to keep warm one day and not notice you the next. They are sociable only when it pleases them to be so, and often don’t seem to recognize their own similarity to other cats. You can’t get much more open and diverse. I couldn’t even consider them to form a community.

They say that dogs have owners, but cats have staff. The autonomy of cat thinking makes them supremely independent and able to ignore many external social checks on their viewpoint. They do not organize well, and their selection of nodes for their network can be extremely limited. Occasionally they choose to live in colonies (according to the article, when food is abundant), where they tend to live and let live. But is their network effective? If the cat is getting what she wants from it, then by definition it is. I do think, however, it would very, very difficult to rate the benefit of her network from the outside.

Connectivism is a learning theory based on the premise of knowledge distributed across networks of connections. During the first several weeks of this class, I have dealt intensively with the issues of connectivism in numerous blog posts, but for this short paper I will delineate connectivism with a little “c” (the practice of learning through connections) and Connectivism with a big “C” (the theory). My position on connectivism is that such a mode of learning has been popular for centuries, among people living together and those communicating at a distance. The sources of knowledge for this kind of connectivism can be people, letters, or books, artifacts of lives past or present. My position on Connectivism is that it is a contemporary learning theory that seems dependent on particular conceptions of knowledge and a perspective focused on contemporary computer-based internet technology. I have no problem with seeing it as a theory. The whole field of studying learning is so new that I find the argument over whether it is or is not a “real theory” not only distracting but somewhat absurd. If behaviorism and constructivism are learning theories, so is Connectivism.

I have many areas of agreement with connectivism (the practice). It is an excellent explanation of a way that people can learn. Its pedagogical approach can be pragmatic and useful, particularly in Downes’ Educational Theory of the student’s job being to practice and reflect, and the teacher’s job being to model and demonstrate. In one extension of connectivism, Cormier’s rhizomatic model, I see great usefulness for understanding the connections among educational technologists, if not other disciplines. I also appreciate the cognitive acknowledgement that informal learning (a la Jay Cross) is important, as are contacts we may have with others who are experts in their fields, or who are learning similar things as ourselves. I agree strongly with the contention that pre-literate, story-telling cultures are just as connectivist, if not more so, than ours (Om Design notes the Maori in his Moodle forum comment of October 1). Connections to ideas and people are everywhere, and are infinitely useful to us.

I have three main areas of disagreement or concern with the concepts inherent in Connectivism (the theory). The first concerns the definition and validity of knowledge. I appreciate Downes’ idea that true knowledge means you can’t not know something (2005); it is engrained. I see knowledge and wisdom as higher forms of cognition, and thus I have concerns about the idea that “knowledge” achieved through weak connections is automatically as “valid” as more traditionally developed knowledge. It is a small step toward disregarding the quality of information (whoever may determine that); I agree with Mike Bogle that it may be necessary to modify open learning with something that ensures some “well-informed ‘nodes’”. For this reason, I am thus far unable to go along with the idea of the “pipe” being “more important than the content” (Siemens 2004). My second area of criticism concerns presentism, the tendency to disregard the past or apply contemporary standards to people living in the past. Regardless of the bizarre, sometime séance-like reaction induced by my Networks of Dead People post, the elements of Connectivism that disregard the past I see as faulty, despite the assurances that “our focus needs to be on the big changes of history, not the current instantiation of those trends” (Siemens’ Moodle post Sept 28, 2008).

While attempting to explain the diversity of learning, Connectivism nevertheless establishes its applicable base in contemporary technology and today’s sense of being overwhelmed by information. To say that the “half-life of knowledge is declining” (or, as Viplav Baxi put it, “terribly fluid”), is to see knowledge as transient, to view the past dismissively, and to put far too much worth on the present and its glittery toys. Thus my last objection to Connectivism is the moral implication, which I’ve written about particularly in response to Barry Wellman’s articles (Little Boxes and response, Networks for Newbies and response). What I am seeing is a tacit belief that the move toward an intenet-connected world, a world of “networked individualism”, is a good thing. There is an implication throughout the course that not only do people learn this way, they should learn this way. The social disconnection and selfish individualism exemplified by voluntary, self-formed learning networks is not necessarily a good thing. It may be a reflection of the very worst in human nature: greed, self-centeredness, presentism, knee-jerk cynicism, cocksuredness.

There are a number of areas which I need to explore further. I would like to see modern networks compared more directly to those of the past, to place today’s networks in a historical tradition, a major determinant of validity for me. I cannot accept a novelty as being very significant. Paradoxically, I also have trouble accepting as an innovation something that may just be a scaled-up version of the historic networks I understand, as when Kerr notes that simply more people and more connections does not make for a new theory. I also need to examine the problem of assessment, brought out in Jason Green’s questions about “copious assessment” with learners who are not like those of use taking the class. My own definition of knowledge means that not all learners will attain it, so how does one assess “learnedness”? Cognitive networks, although being sidelined in this class, are of great interest to me because I suspect (like Ken Anderson) that it is there, more than in the social pipe, where the learning occurs. Cognitive connectivism would resonate much more with my own learning style. Additionally, I need to read a lot more about the idea of knowledge being “distributed”, a concept I am having difficulty grasping intuitively. Last, I need to better understand why the internet seems to be so central to Connectivism. According to founder George Siemens “[c]onnectivism focuses on the inclusion of technology as part of our distribution of cognition and knowledge” (2008). What is meant here is web technology, not printwork. Perhaps, as I suggested on a concept map, that is the main difference between Connectivism and connectivism.

Selected Resources

Cormier, Dave. (2008) “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum.” Innovate 4 (5).. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://www.innovateonline.info/?view=article&id=550

Downes, Stephen (2005). “An Introduction to Connective Knowledge”. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://www.downes.ca/files/connective_knowledge.doc

Downes, Stephen (2006). “Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge”. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper92/paper92.html

Kerr, Bill. “A Challenge to Connectivism”. Connectivism Conference Presentation notes at learningEvolves wiki. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/kerr

Siemens, G. (2004). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm

George Siemens (2008). “What is the unique idea of connectivism?” Connectivism Blog . Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://connectivism.ca/blog/2008/08/what_is_the_unique_idea_in_con.html

Wellman, Barry. Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism. 2002. Retrieved on October 1, 2008, from http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/littleboxes/littlebox.PDF .

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 were useful things here. The idea that nodes in a network can be organizations, groups or nations as well as people, works for me. But then we got into the ideas that society is moving from Little Boxes to Individualized Networking and slide 18, where I realized Little Boxes are highly idealized. The world he describes never existed, and thus should not be used as a historical foundation unless the conclusion is a similarly idealized networked world. As with several things we’ve been reading, I’m never sure whether the author is saying that this is how things are or how they should be. The implication in Wellman is that there was once a locally connected world, and then it passed through a transitional period of “glocalized” connections (when? Levittown in the 1950s?), and now we are in the Brave New World requiring/demonstrating/promoting Networked Individualism.

Since Wellman’s “Networked Life before the Internet” (slide 41) comprises 99.99% of all human history, it might be a good idea to look a this historically, not just in terms of Little Boxes, but more broadly.

There have been several times in Western Civilization (and we should all be clear that most of this is confined to Western cultures) that perceptual shifts took place which undermined local connections. Let me present two.

During the Hellenistic Empire (following the death of Alexander in 323 BC), the Greek ideal of the polis was battered by a larger cosmopolitanism. Because of the networks created by Alexander’s conquests, and the manner in which he solidified them, the world got much bigger not only for Greeks but for Persians, Jews, and many others.

c. Holowlegs at Flickr

Alexander, traveling with a group of scientists and scholars, had his generals intermarry with royal women along the way (yes, often by force). His generals thus established dynasties (such as the Ptolemaic dynasty that produced the Hellenistic queen Cleopatra) and a system whereby anyone who wanted a role in the new trade networks had to speak and write Greek. Common currency and open trade routes helped assure prosperity if you chose to buy into the system.

For many, the new cosmopolitanism caused an identity crisis. Instead of seeing yourself as a member of a kinship clan or a polis, you began to see yourself as an individual and a citizen (cities, more than a few of them named Alexandria, were the hubs or nodes of this network). The Hellenistic philosophies of Cynicism, Stoicism and Epicureanism provide examples of the variety of responses to this (all emphasize the life of the individual). The art of the period, full of emotion and individuality, also express it. There was a sense of alienation in the cities and a need to find connections, as classical Greek ideas were seen increasingly as obsolete “knowledge”. The founding of Christianity is related to the feeling of alienation in a large world. (If you’re really into this, I lectured on it recently in class and my slides are here.) Ultimately the Eastern and Western Roman empires would divide, with the eastern individualism falling to the spread of Islam, and the western succumbing to the rise of the Roman Church.

The second example, and perhaps more of a lesson to us now, would be the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. Again, trade networks were at the heart of the shift, because with trade goods travel ideas, in this case from the Arab world, which had preserved and enriched the works of classical Greece, the Hellenistic emprie, and Rome. Some of the ideas threatened the Roman Church’s hold on what constituted proper knowledge, but all of them enabled ideas of individualism to take hold after centuries of medieval communitarianism. Community had been terribly important to people in medieval times; their networks were local and even spiritual goals were subsumed to the needs of the community. Only the scholars, writing in the universal Latin language, had possessed a broader network.

Man put in the position of pitying God, in Michaelangelo’s Pieta.

But the “new” ideas threatened the old holistic view. Classicism (think Petrarch) led to humanism (think Pico della Mirandola), and people (at least middle class people and scholars) began to promote the ideas of humanity as individualistic.

With that idea came a loss of moorings, a sense of sadness as the security of medieval Christiandom, with its sense of community responsibility and its promise of individual salvation, was shaken. As pointed out in a wonderful documentary on Renaissance Florence, you can see the sadness and loss in the art and hear it in the music. Morality now had to be determined by individual human beings rather than the Church, the mouthpiece of God. The result was Machiavelli’s The Prince (power for the sake of power), war for political instead of religious reasons, and with the Reformation the possibility to kill each other for both political and religious reasons.

When a culture perceives a shift from localism to cosmopolitanism, there is thus a tendency to glorify the individual, to see him/her as the heart of the system. In that tendency there is a loss of community values and goals. There is an argument about what constitutes knowledge, and who controls it. There is also a moral void, which gets filled by something, often a centralized power. In our description/promotion of a world shifting from local to “glocal” to individualized networks, it would be foolish to ignore both the historical similarities and the possibility of moral crisis.

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”…

Actually, I don’t love it at all, especially the way it automatically puts in a link idea mid-arrow. But I am getting used to it. And I realize this isn’t really a concept map: it’s more of a chart with connecting links.

One thing about concept maps — I can’t have one for the whole course (due in November). Each set of ideas I’m making into its own map.

My own (so far small but global) network came into play with this one. After meeting in Webex with Steve Mackenzie and Maru del Campo on Sunday, I added the all caps words to the bottom of each column.

(Click on it to see it bigger — it’s too hard to read here!)

I do notice as I make these that the process is forcing me to see things differently. I have to find ways in which things connect, and if I “think” they do but they really don’t, I have to abandon the idea or clarify it. It reminds me of when I was writing big history papers and laid all the index cards out on the floor and moved them around (although, technologically, that was easier to do than this is).

When I first read Dave Cormier’s Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum upon its publication this summer, I was intrigued by the metaphor and saw that it helped provide a needed connection between connectivism and community. Now that I’ve done a great deal more reading on connectivism, and responded so negatively to some of its premises as portrayed by Barry Wellman, I have a much more pessimistic view, unless we limit Cormier’s arguments to new disciplines only. Even then, I’m concerned.

Iconoclasm concerning new disciplines is OK

Right up front Cormier seems to restrict his thesis to “new and developing fields”, and that’s exactly where it should stay. “Disciplines” such as educational technology are in the infant stages, and like infants have a great deal of exploring to do before they come into their own. New journals and blogs spring up overnight from people who are doing extraordinary things with the web in expanding educational opportunities and connecting in fascinating ways. M.A.s and Ed.D’s are popping up all over, with certain individuals and their ideas (Siemens, Downes, Cormier, Couros, etc.) rising to the top through both popularity and usefulness in today’s world. Their community is their curriculum, for sure. Their curriculum is based on recognizing, creating and sustaining community among others interested in a very fringe field dedicated to very large concepts. I love living in that community myself, but I am aware that it is new and trendy, and subject to its own changing norms. In last night’s Elluminate meeting, Cormier was fine with admitting his idea might not apply for all fields. When talking about the field of educational technology, it makes perfect sense to attack traditional authorities, identify rhizomatic models as “overtaking traditional models”, and see the “old notion of knowledge” as “frozen in time” with its gate-keeping publication restrictions. Publishing on the web is open, and the freedom is somewhat dizzying.

The problem with interpreting these ideas beyond ed tech

So dizzying that it’s tempting to apply Cormier’s approach to the rest of the disciplines. The assignment of his article as a reading in this class suggests that it should be interpreted more widely than just in new fields like educational technology. So does his occasional broad reference (he mentions websites that create collaborative “snapshots of the knowledge of a particular field”, but all those websites are about educational technology). If one applies his argument at a larger level than new fields, one comes to the conclusion that it is promoting rhizomatic, community-developed knowledge as the response to the speed of change in today’s world, the impossibilty of traditional verification through disciplinary experts, and the almost instant obsolesence of new understandings. No need to kill the gate-keepers; just go around them.

My discipline (history) is very old, even though many of its current methods are new. It is grounded in a tradition, however inconsistent, of the university elites who seem to be under attack in these theories that not only try to describe our changing world, but justify it. Cormier consistently attacks “canonical” sources of knowledge, and all traditional fields have a canon which is not quite as “fluid” as that of the new disciplines. But even with the new areas, frankly, if there is a “delay” that “could make the knowledge itself outdated by the time it is verified”, then it isn’t knowledge at all — it’s a fad. And if groups of voluntary participants “not only explore an established cannon but also…negotiate what qualifies as knowledge”, what’s to keep them from ignoring the canon all together? Nothing; the “rhizomatic knowledge-creation process is already overtaking traditional models”, curriculum itself is “constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.”

My discipline of history needs expertise and reflection before it needs a network

Some history students are very “engaged” in the learning process. A certain number come to class as history enthusiasts. They’ve read a lot of sources and secondary popular books, and spend much time watching the History Channel. They are history buffs. Most cannot construct a historical thesis, much less prove it with evidence. Doing so is the heart of the elitist canonical system historians endure. Enthusiasm is great, but is it not knowledge and does not substitute for knowledge. As in many fields, one uses a pattern of data, to information, to understanding, to knowledge, which can then be applied beyond the discipline. Historians negotiate this understanding and this knowledge in those nasty peer-reviewed journals, where deep differences of opinion lead to reassessments, rexamination of facts, research, and the development of new paradigms arising out of conflict. History is not at all a static field, and its methods are a fairly consistent combination of scientific inference, externally verifiable sources, and the internal goals of the historian. It is not rapid, it is deliberate and requires reflection. As my colleague Ignatia notes in her blog, “reflection demands time”. Quality may not require time in the field of educational technology, but it does in history.

Networks can subsume expertise to inappropriate negotiation

Networks may or may not have any canonically trained “experts”, and if they do it’s possible that no one would listen to them anyway. Historians tend to be pretty boring, not usually the type of internet participants prone to flaming and attention-mongering. The buffs will be the ones verifying, negotiating, “testing” the ideas. Knowledge that is “tested” in a community of enthusiasts unfamiliar with traditional methods and canonical works that came before them is not tested at all. It is shared, collaborated, socialized, negotiated, patterned, and developed, but it isn’t knowledge. To say that a voluntarily networked group of enthusiasts create knowledge would be going beyond giving them the benefit of the doubt. It would be like doing history without historiography (the study of previous historians’ ideas over time). It might lead to an understanding of historical perspectives, but it could as easily lead to a consensus that extraterrestrial aliens built the pyramids. It’s already possible to use historical sources in a semi-scientific way to argue some bizarre things (FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed ahead of time and didn’t tell, the Holocaust didn’t happen). Faulty analysis needs only a bit of encouragement (a Hollywood movie, an internet community, a title like “Institute of Historical Review”) to justify its existence. My discipline has enough problems without bringing in every idiot who saw “Troy” and thinks Achilles had a California accent. To point to the ed tech community, which is enthusiastically led by people who are the products of the very same closed educational system they seem to wish to tear down, and use it as an example of connectivism, is a false lead. Dave Cormier is, I think, aware of this. We must be very careful where we apply the theories of networking.

A side note: It really disturbs me that this class is making me look like Edmund Burke and others who argue that traditional foundations are important. I myself have continually tried to “work” the educational system; I don’t have a PhD for precisely the reasons of traditional, canonical gate-keeping that all these wonderful innovators are arguing against. I am one of the most technologically and web savvy individuals at my institution. The result is that I’m having an online identity crisis.

Like many institutions, we have been under pressure to develop Student Learning Outcomes that can be assessed. As a great proponent of academic freedom, I have helped developed for my discipline some very broad outcomes that give each instructor the opportunity to assess similar skills while each using their own examples and tests. I am thus free to create my own evolving list, in addition to the formal SLOs, of things I think students should be able to do as a result of taking my history class.

I’ve begun a pattern of lecturing with slides every Monday, after they’ve done their homework. Their homework consists of reading a chapter from the text and writing a mini-essay with a clear thesis, supported by information implied by the list of chapter terms. This way they have to use the material, not just read it. Then I’ve been making the lecture available in audio also, which I hadn’t planned to do, but my little Phillips MP3 player, Zoho Show, and Slideshare has made it drop-dead simple.

But on Wednesdays, I find myself (yes, that’s really how it feels) doing other things that are more modeling and demonstrating. One of the skills is text glossing, and instead of explaining it, I photocopied a scene from Oedipus Rex onto a transparency, and sat at the overhead glossing it with their help. Here’s what we developed:

I’ve also handed out maps, have them try to place things on their own, then encourage them to compare what they’ve done with not only their book but with their colleagues, to consider their colleagues as sources of information. I’ve handed out a document, given them class time for reading and reflection, then had them take those ideas to their groups. My attitude is good, I have lots of energy doing all this, and the students seem to be responding, although I can tell the class is very difficult for some of them.

So although some of my posts may make me appear overly skeptical, I am learning a great deal that I’m applying right away, even within the context of our assessment-bound, expert-ruled, poorly connected, industrialized community college experience.