Unanswered Question
I attended some of the Online Connectivism Conference – OCC2007 last week, organised and facilitated by George Siemens. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to thow myself fully into it in the way I would normally approach something like this, which I consider to be important and worthwhile. The timing just didn’t work out so well for me, but I did manage to hear most of about three elluminate sessions with George himself, Will Richardson, Bill Kerr, and Stephen Downes speaking, missing two others entirely. I really should have kept a copy of the survey-monkey questionnaire I filled in afterwards, because I wrote some comments on the use of simultaneous text chat, with slideshow and audio presentation on that. Never mind – that’s something to try and remember in future.
Stephen Downes spoke in depth about what is known about the nature of networks, but I missed the beginning so I may go find the archive recording and listen again.
Bill Kerr stuck up for constructionism and Logo – so good for him.
George Siemens ran the show with great skill, keeping people informed of what was happening when, and encouraging a high standard of discussion.
There were constant chatterings going on in the text converation area, sometimes related to the presentation as it happened, and sometimes not. I was easily lured in to get involved with those, sometimes to the detriment of concentrating on the prepared content being delivered by the knowlegeable speakers, so I covered up that half of the screen on occasion in order to listen better.
At the end, it was decided to break the conference moodle space wide open so that it is now a publicly accessible web resource – no need to register to read – great move.
There’s a thread called “Biggest unanswered questions” and I’ve posted this one:
My biggest unanswered question is about the politics of connectivism. I’m not convinced that neutrality is an option, that the theory of connectvism merely describes a phenomenon that has been observed, that it explains a way in which learning happens. If we embrace the theory and refer to it in our own practice then we are helping to spread an idea, a perspective, which has implications and consequences.
I’d like to explore what those implications and consequences might be.
No related posts.
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
> Bill Kerr stuck up for constructionism and Logo – so good for him.
LOL, I guess we need more than connection then
What I was trying to say was that you needed to understand the past in order to create the future
More at http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/
Hey there Andy!
I took your suggestion to have a look at this online connectivism thing. I’m on a slow dialup so I used the printout version.
Pro- I loved the fact of people (distributed) could all get together simultaneously.
However, it identified the sender but not the intended recipient, consequently it was difficult to grasp the threading of separate conversations. Much seemed superflous chatter. It made for tedious reading.
I am used to using a highly refined system that I employ for communication with ET’s via telempathic contact. It would not work without protocols, which are something like roberts rules of order. After all , if you claim to be hearing voices, they have a room for you and a dose of Hallidol that will leave you drooling. So the first rule is one speaker, and I think that was used in the transcript by identifying the speaker by name . The second rule is for the listener and it is telling us to silence the internal dialogue and actually listen with full attention, instead of thinking about what you want to say next in response or having your attention float off somewheres else. When you are communicating with individuals who may be in fact LY away, though this is not a real factor, as there is no real signal attenuation, a wandering attention is a conversation killer even when a person is standing right next to you, and this is a well known phenomena to us all.
Wei also use a technique that is symbolized by a circle with a dot in the center. (sun) The dot, the speaker; The circle, a form of consensus reality. It is group think expressed by one elected representative. In this, instead of a passive audience of active listeners, wei have a group of active projectors who have all downloaded into one mind chosen to speak the totality. A lot of the time we have humans trying to do this even though nobody gave them real license or authority to do so, and we are all familiar with this kind of insult to our intelligence.
I have worked on ideas a lot closer to the matters you have drawn me to than this, but I hope you find this to be good food for thought as we dig deeper into the posiblities that present themselves. I am not at all sure that there are actually interested in the details of this kind of work as i’ve not had sufficient feedback. It has been reported that children in Nepal have been using symbols and such and are apparently in communication with ????? but I have not seen any detailed doccumentation. It is my belief that suddenly there will arrive on the scene a critical mass event of conscious collectivism with quantum learning. Its been observed in animal species that one learns a new trick and it is seen to spread through the species at lightning speed. The one I recall best was regarding Lemurs on Madagascar. Because of deforestation they were forced to resort to eating fruits formerly ignored as they upset their digestion. One found that by eating charcoal left from the slash and burn, it solved the problem. This behavior spread to lemurs in isolated islands of forest without direct travel or links. However , my point was that there will be no possibility of maintaing secrets from one another, and for most of us, this will be very difficult to swallow. We usually call this Transparency, but who is thinking in absolute terms????