#fslt12

Have to admit I don’t like this particular form of writing for this purpose. I’m taking the class so where is the class? If I wanted no interaction I could simply step outside and attempt to start a conversation with any one of the 2000 people who live within a 300km circle of me and experience exactly the same feedback.

The more MOOCs taken and the more time spent online, it’s pretty clear there at least 2 schools of distance education. First are the folks who take the course through their computer. They aren’t distant, just distributed about and may as well be sitting at the back of the classroom or under a desk.

Then we have true distance people who have no other means of receiving the content and teaching here who didn’t attend school before, don’t really attend now and are completely invisible to the school. In the U.S. these people are called “Non-Traditional Students” as if they were from another planet. Have to admit I don’t understand what is meant by “teaching” the outside group.

Time to start again, again

The search for a philosophy that continually disproves itself goes on. How I learn and what I know drift by without obvious recognition. The last 2 weeks I’ve explained myself to at least 25 people certain that they are getting it wrong and don’t understand. Need an operational identity that I don’t get so excited about. Something that doesn’t tempt embellishment. Be my own test subject, but with a practical wooden head.

CCK11 C-Map for partly understood material

Learning net for difficult concept search – How do I approach a search for unfamiliar material I will be accountable for This one is related to the learning I do daily. I think it fits better with the idea of learning as discovery driven from within. Not sure how this would be trained.

CCK11 concept map

Maybe this attempt will work?

Concept Map in table and text box format

Finding time to make this mess look good

I’ve lost interest in Connectivism, which is making it hard to continue with the course. The more I think about it the more it feels like an attempt to lay a brand claim on an existing phenomenon, not to actually present anything new, nor to even explain itself.

Anyway, there’s clearly no respect for questioning or for those who would even mildly challenge this apparently private piece of intellectual property. So why bother with it?

Carmen Tschofen referenced this article at the very beginning of the discussion thread at Attacks on Connectivism.

Network Promises and Their Implications

http://rusc.uoc.edu/ojs/index.php/rusc/article/viewFile/v8n1-bouchard/v8n1-bouchard-eng

>Once we agree that “information as data” is easily available to all, and that machines can do pretty much anything that an intelligent person can do, we are confronted with what is missing from this picture, namely the negotiated construction of knowledge. This is perhaps the most intriguing development resulting from the advent of the network age, although it is more reminiscent of small village cracker-barrel exchanges than futuristic networks: humans need to agree on stuff, but before they can do that, they need to talk about it.<

 Scott

The Selfish Node

Simple problem I think applies to connectivism.

The power of a network resides in the product of interactions between “nodes”, which is a real and measurable thing. Power in life is based partly on how well you play with others, but recognition, and goodies are awarded on products directly tagged to you or your small team.

So if I go to so-and-sos blog, encounter an idea triggering comment and am inspired with a fabulous insight do I: a) be loyal to the spirit of the network  to increase the knowledge base and respond right there at their blog? OR b) do I run back to my blog and publish for the greater glory of myself?

If I hold to the value of the net to continue producing great ideas then the answer is “a”. Reality for most people though is recognition and rewards go to unambiguous originators. Who here is rewarded for contributing to the greater good?

Scott

#CCK11

Discover Magazine http://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/feattech/?searchterm=social%20networks

Great article that I think originally came from CIDAR at Athabasca University?

Improper attribution is my responsibility here and I apologize not because I’m taking credit for creating the material only because distributed knowledge still originates somewhere. A network facilitates the birth and development of ideas by the provision of a fertile environment and attentive contributions, (often from virtual strangers which is a quality worthy of exploration) but is neither seed nor vessel of gestation—no idea’s parent. 

Maybe an idea, as an objective collection of contributions, eventually reaches a form of independent being on a network? Yet it still has “parents”, a “family” blood line and an identity built of its history that deserves recognition. Guess I don’t know this links contributor in reference to who it was that brought it to my attention—I think that’s something important in a network.  

A small clip from the article below:

“No doubt you’ve experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another’s careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done. When you find yourself in a karass, it’s an intuitive, unplanned experience. Getting into a granfalloon, on the other hand, usually involves showing two forms of ID.

Excelente artigo que eu acho que veio originalmente Cidar na Athabasca University?
atribuição indevida é a minha responsabilidade aqui e eu não me desculpar, porque eu estou tomando o crédito para a criação do material distribuído apenas por saber ainda se origina em algum lugar. A rede facilita o nascimento e desenvolvimento de idéias através da existência de um ambiente fértil e contribuições Atencioso, (muitas vezes de estranhos virtual que é uma qualidade digna de exploração), mas não é nem sementes, nem navio de mãe gestação idéia não é.

Talvez uma idéia, como um objectivo de recolha de contribuições, eventualmente atinge uma forma de ser independente em uma rede? No entanto, ele ainda tem “pais”, uma “família” linha de sangue e uma identidade construída em sua história que merece reconhecimento. Acho que eu não sei esse contribuinte links em referência a quem foi que trouxe a minha atenção, eu acho que é algo importante em uma rede.

Um pequeno clip do artigo abaixo:

“Sem dúvida, você já experimentou os dois tipos de redes em sua própria vida, muitas vezes. O Karass é que o grupo de amigos da faculdade que têm ajudado um ao outro de carreiras em uma centena de maneiras sutis ao longo dos anos, o granfalloon “é o departamento de marketing da sua empresa, onde todos têm um lugar meticulosamente definidos no organograma, mas nunca nada é feito . Quando você se encontra em um Karass, é uma experiência intuitiva e não planejada. Começar em um granfalloon “, por outro lado, envolve geralmente mostrando duas formas de identificação.

The wierdness of networks #CCK11

The oddities of networks: Just when I come up with a policy to free myself from clutches of the net the human side emerges from the tangle to remind me of the power of kindness over dogmatic statement. How can an abstraction (as the net felt yesterday to me) respond in such a “sympathetic” (as in empathic) way? Does the network somehow resolve itself into a useful reply by force of number? Or is the vastness of the resource, by density itself, able to spawn a few kindness particles almost spontaneously? And if the net is merely an enormousness of stuff, why not an anti-kindness particle?

So a new mystery appears here in the form of a bias towards helpfulness? But that pushes us towards re-abstraction by giving the net intention where none exists. Instead, I’d propose a more human explanation. A particular message released into the net attracts a particular response—a resonance.

My impression is this isn’t a network phenomenon though. Instead it involves many individual listeners hearing something that brings out a response in them strong enough to be expressed. This is CONTACT? Contact made more likely by the sized of the listening population. And it is size we mistake for network when really it’s more like a collection of like-minded individuals than a collective soup of good intentions rendered down to form a network.

It might be that the higher concepts of networks are beyond me. Or I understand them through different terms and images. I generally accept things that work without always insisting they explain themselves to my satisfaction. I could accept the idea of a group growing so large there was no way to grasp it with our normal tools of perception thus forcing a new set of terms and understandings into play. Maybe that’s it? A soccer team with, say, 20 players on the field at a time can function by player experience and minimal coaching. A Massively Open On-field Soccer Extravaganza (MOOSE) with hundreds of players would need theory and probability just to know where the ball was. Deciding on who gets to be coach could generate a few PHD’s and chair 3 departments. Scale changing the way we need to understand.

Regardless of all this, I take it as wise advice to be balanced in my views on this damned network stuff. In the real world a fellow worker apologized to me today for being rude to another fellow worker in front of me that I was reported to have told the boss about. I’m not even officially part of this 7 person team, stay mostly quiet, work in a separate office, wasn’t even present when the alleged rudeness incident occurred and never rat people out anyway. But the forces of political evil are beyond my powers to resist and I feel the urge to theorize that rudeness unwittnessed and unreported can, nonetheless, be brought to manifestation by the powers of misunderstanding alone and something like connectivism is but chicken feed by comparison. Have I fallen into the bad side of connectivism here? Knowledge corrupted by distribution?

Last observation. It’s been mentioned that networks tend to be “flat” or without the “textures” of direct human contact as above. Anyone understand what this means?

Scott

I think this comment on yesterday’s rant is perfect (translated by Google):

Hello, cool! I need in my work so much more real people than the virtual, but knowledge is the social network. Between different people and going beyond their usual environment. Be more flexible and let yourself go, put your ideas your memories, knowing that everything is brighter! :)
It’s true, needing humans in a variety of role functions has been vital to knowing and navigating the world in the past. Now the net adds a new layer of possibility.
I do need both but was feeling estranged from the net side by all this theory and abstractification. Sometime things just need to be themselves as they appear without being objects of study.

#CCK11 out of place

I’d be curious to know how many people prefer the disengagement of online life over the place they physically occupy in the real world. It still is the real world, network theory or not.

Two threads here. First I’ve hit a wall on trying to sustain belief in the highly abstracted notion of networks being anything other than metaphor or simulation.  How many steps away from living in the apparent manifestation of the universe where I can Actually kick my computer and Hurt my foot do I have to go to support something that’s only here when the electricity is working?

The second thread is I would trade activity on the net for real human contact unmediated by this damn machine (sorry folks) in a second were I a better person and more tolerant of the people I come in contact with daily.

As a new resident in an unfamiliar town the first thing I did was get very ill and fell back on contact through the net as a substitute for actual physical contacts. With out a doubt I’ve met some fabulous people who I hope to be in contact with for many years to come (or in internet years anyway, which are measured in weeks like dog years).

But none of these people are real. Only contacts that reside, I’m not sure where, as ideas of people who populate abstractions in service of metaphors and I wonder if this is some sort of cyber alienation that will come over all of us when our brains tire of this corner of the carnival?

Alternately, this could all be driven by being too far north, too far into the winter and having too many deadlines to meet.

Is it rude to wish to spend more time with real people? To stop trying to make sense of the net by inflating to a level of importance in human history when in the experience of human existance here and now has become so compelling as to be irresistible?

I propose we declare week 3 a Screw Theory and Cut Class week! Cast your role as compliant node aside and just be deliriously unconnected!

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