All The Young (edu)Punks » complexity http://www.robotvsrobot.com Jon K. - drunk on electrons Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:23:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Complexity http://www.robotvsrobot.com/2010/02/08/complexity/ http://www.robotvsrobot.com/2010/02/08/complexity/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:56:36 +0000 Jon K. http://www.robotvsrobot.com/?p=297 It's interesting to see the theme of complexity pop up in unexpected places. A couple nights ago on the Daily Show with Atul Gawande. He was talking about how complexity is a problem for many experts, and how a simple checklist can save lives, but many experts felt that a checklist was too much of an ego bash to  take. And I guess he was plugging his book, the Checklist Manifesto. Guess that Connectivisms ideas about complexity are getting around. I know that this isn't  a new idea, they are in fact, fairly old. When we go through our primary school education we learn using building blocks (and pretty much the same building blocks that we've always learned with). We learn a new concept, repeat it until it becomes second nature, then build on it. What ways can a simple tool like a checklist improve education?

As subjects become more complex, perhaps we could take this approach to remind educators (or ourselves) that even though we are at an advanced stage of understanding a subject - perhaps deeper and aware of more facets than our learners - we should always consider the fundamental underpinnings of those topics. Maybe checklists can assist us in seeing patterns where grouping makes sense; that makes checklists useful as a sensemaking strategy.

]]> http://www.robotvsrobot.com/2010/02/08/complexity/feed/ 1 Reflections on Chaos and Complexity – Week 6 http://www.robotvsrobot.com/2008/10/20/reflections-on-chaos-and-complexity-week-6/ http://www.robotvsrobot.com/2008/10/20/reflections-on-chaos-and-complexity-week-6/#comments Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:26:38 +0000 Jon K. http://dietsociety.edublogs.org/?p=14 CCK08 - This week was interesting in that the ideas put forth have been things I've been saying for a while. Life is complex. Nothing is simple. Chaos and complexity is illustrated  well by the everyday classroom, and the things that can occur in it. The same material taught the same (and it could be argued that it's never exactly the same) way has different outcomes depending on the contextual.

Complexity. It's funny how the two courses I'm currently taking and the myriad of stuff I'm doing outside of schoolwork has a way of intertwining. I'm applying some of the things that the Connectivism course is doing to my Distance Ed course I'm teaching. The stuff that the Brock facilitation course talked about this week was context-heavy: that's a big piece of the Connectivism course. Serendipity? Maybe. I don't want to believe that anything is that mystical. Might as well start believing in unicorns and pegasii too. It does, however, speak to the idea that things are interconnected in ways that we don't always see. Could that be the real-world application of connectivism?

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