Connectivism – Page 3 – All The Young (edu)Punks

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Twitter Week 6

Posted on March 2, 2009by Jon K.

Well, it’s not week 6 anymore, it is in fact week 7. I have to say I was skeptical coming in to using Twitter, not believing it to be very useful at all. In fact, I’ll have to conclude that it is useful – just not in a work sense for me. I don’t think I’ll get much out of Twitter for work – except a link here and there to new websites, maybe a few days before Ed Tech Weekly gets to them (which reminds me, need to listen to that soon). In connectivist terms I’m strengthening some connections as well as gaining a bit of depth behind the ideas that people have put forth.

With all that said, I like it, despite the almost constant barrage of marketing (which is like real life, I suppose), it’s a fun diversion from work, or to tap into some other level of work-related thought. So my conclusions? Well, useful informal tool – that could have some learning application (you could run a daily message from a Twitter account to broaden vocabulary, or to clarify jargon). I would be interested to see if students would feel that it was an infringement of their personal space, creepy treehouse syndrome if you will, seeing as Twitter can be a one-way subscription – the account broadcasting can be a generic non-receptive node.

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CCK08 Wrap Up

Posted on February 23, 2009by Jon K.

I’m listening to the CCK08 Wrap Up and one of my favourite topics – lurking – came up again. I stated at the time that lurking was a selfish statement – although you could lurk in CCK08, but take your knowledge elsewhere to a different group or network of connections.

Stephen said this in the chat, then expanded on it around the 53 minute mark:

Moderator (Stephen Downes): Yes – the activities themselves bcome patterns that are mtched to competences or expertise – activities = demonstration of performance

Here’s another drawback to lurking, you get no feedback on your thoughts. Yes, I understand the reflective learner, I’m almost always better when I’ve thought about things for a bit (at least that seems to be the pattern). But if you provide no activities to demonstrate your learning, you have a fundamental problem in getting anyone to recognize your ability in that area. Sure, it may be satisfying enough to know you can do it… but unfortunately, very few people will take you at your word. It’s a lot like trustworthyness – you have to earn it. External sources validate the internal ones.

So I’m sorry I missed the wrap up, there’s lots of things I wanted to add during the session, but couldn’t because I was only 8 hours late.

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Expanding On A Comment

Posted on February 9, 2009by Jon K.

So, in my travels of the web sometime last week I commented (and I’m not sure where it was or else I would link to it):

As information broadcasting grows, people will learn to segment, filter and otherwise cognitively deal with it. It will be interesting to see if this turns into a new form of learning disability or if people who cannot deal with information in mass quantities will have an information psychosis of some sort.

I was wondering if ADD/ADHD might be the brain’s way of trying to cope with information overload – speed up the cognitive process as new information comes in. Then ADD fades for most people as they approach adulthood as they begin to be able to cope with information. Just spitballin’ a theory, which probably has a whole bunch of holes in it already. Time for caffiene.

EDIT: Found the link – http://ulop.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/data-reduction/

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Today’s Horoscope

Posted on January 21, 2009by Jon K.

I’m not a big believer in chance or higher powers, even if I can’t explain something, someone out there probably can come up with a reasonable explanation. Much like conspiracy theories, sometimes people invent connections where there are none, to explain otherwise inexplicable things. My horoscope today is kind of interesting, uh, piece of advice? Maybe it’s a parable for the information age?

Libra (Sept. 23 — Oct. 23)

Information on its own is of limited use, and if we rely on it exclusively, we end up dithering over possibilities and ramifications. Instead, use your heart and intuition to make a big decision, and trust it.

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Twittering Connections as Volatile as the Wind

Posted on January 16, 2009July 29, 2009by Jon K.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Twitter and as such, I don’t think too much about it. Although this entire morning I’ve run into several articles talking about it. One of the major reasons I don’t like Twitter is that it’s not deep. I like reading something that gives me context, something to mull over, thoughts to consider, links to other content and more. Twitter is less. And rightfully so, that’s the purpose of it.

Nevertheless, this article mentions Twitter and uses it as a comparison to blogging to see how social networking enacts power laws. It’s interesting, because it grabs everything under the Web 2.0 umbrella and while that’s maybe useful for an overview, it does a disservice to the entire thing. Web 2.0, like every complex structure is made up of differing parts, many times operating with different objectives, if any at all. I don’t think Twitter works like blogs at all (certainly they can, but for the most part don’t) and I don’t believe that social power structures in each system work the same.

The value of being followed is important, yes. It doesn’t mean that communication is enacted. I could be followed by several thousand others, it doesn’t mean that what I’m saying is understood or even further something that anyone would act upon. That requires real power. So when @BarackObama is followed by a hundred thousand…. that’s power and the cult of celebrity – would hundred thousand follow his blog? Or would a million watch his vlog? Oh wait, maybe they will – it’s called the State of The Nation address… Sure Web 2.0 has created it’s own celebrities, who in turn have influence and power, but really we’re not changing the power structure at all. While social networking is allowing people to connect more freely, real power acts as it has done for hundreds of years.

Clay Shirkey’s article about Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality talks about this, especially well summed up in the concluding statements:

In between blogs-as-mainstream-media and blogs-as-dinner-conversation will be Blogging Classic, blogs published by one or a few people, for a moderately-sized audience, with whom the authors have a relatively engaged relationship. Because of the continuing growth of the weblog world, more blogs in the future will follow this pattern than today. However, these blogs will be in the minority for both traffic (dwarfed by the mainstream media blogs) and overall number of blogs (outnumbered by the conversational blogs.)

I see the value of Twitter as a method to deal with quick messages (the idea that a language teacher could use twitter to provide new vocabulary each day that student could subscribe to is interesting), I don’t see the power laws enacted with it. Perhaps that’s because the power of Twitter is in the instantaneous nature of it, the connection is gone in a second… the lasting impression is not always long lasting.

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Singularity and Connectivism

Posted on January 13, 2009by Jon K.

Last week, I watched a documentary on Alan Moore, who’s a fairly interesting fellow. One of the things that he said was the rate of information was growing at an exponential rate. For anyone who knows calculus, you can half any number an infinite amount of times and never equal zero – you only get so close to zero that you approximate it. In this case, zero is the length of time it takes for human knowledge to double. So doing some internet research brought up this article about the law of accelerating returns. That article refers to the moment that the double exponential growth of human knowledge and the moment when knowledge grows almost instantaneously as the singularity. Mindblowing, especially so considering that it was written in 2001. If you’re familiar with The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, you know the Vogons come and “pave vogons! over” the Earth at the moment that the Earth (as computer) is to uncover the meaning of life, the universe and everything. So maybe everyone’s read a few too many good books?

As a total aside, if you want to create some bad Vogon poetry, the BBC has decided to allow that to happen. I don’t think they understand what they have unleashed…

Now what does this all have to do with education? Well, clearly, a new paradigm will be required for knowledge growth that expands immediately.

In connectivism, it’s more important to know how to access data, than what the data is. Getting information and assessing it is crucial to applying that information in a successful way. It also addresses the concept of singularity and instantaneous exponential growth of human knowledge. Now, the Kurzweil article talks about how artificial intelligence will be able to exceed human intelligence in the next twenty years or so (although this isn’t a fixed number by any stretch). It certainly is only one hypothesis. The article continues on to speculate about what might occur to allow for this singularity.

Bringing it back to Alan Moore, he also talks about the singularity and addresses it in a more spiritual manner – where this singularity might be seen as a spiritual enlightenment. Kurzweil also points to this as some sort of transformative incident, although the article doesn’t really speculate that much about the future beyond the singularity.

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Bruce Sterling about Mobililty and the Poor

Posted on December 2, 2008by Jon K.

I lost this link a while ago. It’s Bruce Sterling talking about (among other things) the emancipatory power of the cell phone. I think that it’s something that I want to keep in mind, because not only is it great globally and socially for a bunch of reasons, but it’s a really interesting thing about e-learning. Will education institutions take the bull by the horns and leverage their knowledge to provide classes and self directed learning over cell phone technology for a small fee? For instance, in the not so far off future, it would be great to have someone take a picture of a sign, have the phone-cam OCR it, access a translator, and tell you if this is the store that you intended to go to, or what’s the description of that dish that looks good in the window… Language training could occur over cell phones – type in what you want to say at the end of the two hour train ride to Shenzen, and have the program teach you how to say it in Cantonese, Mandarin and use the cell phone microphone to perfect your accent.

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Reflections on The Future and Research – Week 12

Posted on December 2, 2008by Jon K.

CCK08 – I missed the Friday session last week, and the review of it is one that I’m sad I missed. It’s a huge relief to have it over. In the future I hope that courses in this reality we go in a couple of slightly different ways.

The Daily – you need some sort of central location to allow people to sift through the vast array of materials before they can select their aggregation of feeds.

Moodle – I would not use it next time. Strongly suggest blogs, and e-mail a listserv (the Daily listserv?) to announce your blog.

Emotionality – Stephen makes a point about emotions and motivation at 9 minutes or so in the wrap up, and how the student should be responsible enough, and intellectual enough, to disavow those emotions. I don’t think that’s right, or even just. I would hope that someone in my peer group would think of the consequences of their actions, and how it might have an effect on others. I would’ve thought that Stephen would consider another’s emotions, and the emotionality of learning – this stuff isn’t as dispassionate as that. Learning is confusing, frustrating, angering, reflecting… It’s part of the role of a facilitator to consider the emotions of the participants. I don’t know if there’s anything else than that.

Twitter – I never really got this technology. I’m into depth of understanding. I don’t think this provides it. I have an account, follow a few people… but largely I’m not that interested in twitter.

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CCK08 Concept Map as of Week 12

Posted on November 24, 2008by Jon K.

Here is my “final” concept map.

Overall, I guess my position has softened somewhat on concept maps. I no longer loathe them, merely dislike them. Maybe they reveal how confused and muddled my thinking is?

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