September 14, 2008 – 10:22 am
I (non-core) promise that this will be the last post on this topic. I really want to move on to talk about the neuro-psych and conceptual aspects of connectivism, rather than just the social. However I did want to write one more post reflecting on why the social aspect gets me so darn angry. So much so, that my good friend and colleague, the delightful Mr mbogle gets mad at me ;).
After much soul-searching, it really comes down to one thing: I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member (thank you G. Marx).
To elaborate - I am a privileged individual. I have a decent income and a reasonable amount of time to play with new technologies. I also have the background and IT knowledge to succeed here. However what about the people who don’t?
I consider belonging to a group or a network as a very risky business. It is very easy for things to change and to end up on the outer. Even when I have all the credentials to belong (the right language, the qualifications, the tech skills) I fear that things will swing around and I will be out on my ear.
If we base our curriculums around students ability to form networks based in technology, there will be people on the outer. Whilst we cannot assume that it wil always be the case, it is likely that there will be barriers to people who:
- Are women: Despite women’s increasing use of social networking tools, there is continued perception of technology as a male domain. If the technological barriers to belonging are too high (eg. downloading a program, reconfiguring something, writing an API), then there may be disengagement from women.
- Are older: We have all started to read those articles that show the multi-tasking skills of teenagers. There has not really been study outside of this age-bracket, but the inference is that a reasonable proportion of us more ancient folks do not operate this way.
- Do not have access to technology: It used to be access to books. But now if you haven’t had access to computers during this key period in tech development, you are going to have difficulty.
- Just don’t have tech skills: This one is fairly self-explanatory. Whatever the reason, if you are not a tech-head then it is a huge barrier to belonging in this context.
- Are anti-social: I sometimes just don’t want to talk to people. I want to flap my hands and block my ears and yell “la la laaaaah” at the top of my voice to make them go away. If learning is only presented in a social networking form, then there ain’t much option for people who always feel this way.
- Do not abide by social rules: Some of our most amazing innovators have not been bound by traditional rules of social engagement. I am sure they also struggled with more social forms of learning in times gone by, and found havens in other arenas. If we are to re-develop all our curriculum around social networking, these people will probably be or be seen as troublesome trolls. Its going to be hard to find places for them to channel their energies.
- Have a mental illness: Similarly, people who have a mental illness may find it difficult to learn in a social networking environment. Especially as technology allows a closer and closer simulation of the world outside the web. A lot of people with mental illnesses have found wonderful connections in online communities. They have developed support networks by choice. However what happens if it is no longer a choice but is a forced engagement for the purpose of learning?
- Have a disability: Whilst the technology to overcome disabilities in an online world is coming on in leaps and bounds, developers continue to create technology that is not accessible. Huge barrier.
- Have a life: We all complain about the “build it and they will come” developers of tech. The deafening silence is partly attributed to people who have something to do outside of playing in this space (a job, a family, a social life). Having a life is a barrier to engaging in these networks.
In closing, I guess I am asking all those people who are thinking of redeveloping curriculum using this approach to teaching and learning to consider the barriers that their students will face. Test your processes thoroughly with your target audience to ensure that the tech barrier is not too high. Also, you may want to hedge your bets and also present some or all of the curriculum using more traditional approaches to account for participants who have difficulty with the “social” aspect of social networking.
September 10, 2008 – 4:56 pm
My my. It is so much fun being an angry, grumpy person on a blog. The holes you can poke in things. The arguments you can provoke. It is a delight for the misanthropic.
The current theme bringing out the argumentative sod in me is the idea that “connectivism = group learning = always positive nice and touchy feely”. I have not yet heard George and Stephen put forward this view. However it does seem that as a group predominantly made up of caring, sharing educators the participants in CCK08 are going to put forward the view that group learning is king (cos it is nice, and we all get to share nice stuff with one another).
I do believe in learning (or connection making) as a socially motivated activity. However that social motivation can just as easily be competitive as collaborative, and in some cases I believe that it may be more effective. Even those who seemingly learn in isolation may have a social motivation (eg. a qualification that is recognised by others, or to write a book that is read by others).
Learning does not need to occur in a group to be social, and the experience does not need to be positive to be learning. You can learn a lot of nasty habits in a group.
Of course, as educators we are concerned about “what” people learn. As such we would prefer that we have models that promote effective learning of “good” habits rather than “bad”. However I don’t believe that this means we have to make our networks all operate in a happy/postive way all the time.
I noticed the postings under the title of Sceptic in the course Moodle and had a bit of a chuckle. I have been a member of online discussion forums for years and seen this cycle again and again. The happy participants who are all in agreement get challenged and stirred up by something or someone. And debate is sparked. The challenge is rarely original, and that is rarely the point. The network learns from it not only the subject of the debate but the rules of how the network wishes to operate. We as educators need to switch off a little of our expectation that everyone must behave nicely, must participate, or that the group must function in a particular way (or at all) for learning to occur. Instead we must ask ourselves what is being learnt, as the dysfunction may be bringing about exactly the kind of learning we are aiming for.
Bring on the angry people!
September 10, 2008 – 4:27 pm
My first impulse when anyone tells me I can’t do something is to say “oh yes, I bloody well can”. Stephen Downes described knowledge as a connection which once formed cannot be undone. “You can’t unsee Waldo” (or Wally for other english speaking nations).
Other people have described a similar phenomenom of “Threshold Concepts” - a basic idea that is still hard to grasp because it requires a “way of seeing” the world. Once you move through that doorway, you cannot go back. They talk of a state of liminity, that point of being close to the threshold but not quite through or committed to going through.
I have experienced what has been described, and it certainly makes sense that some connections or knowledge have these qualities. However I imagine there is more to it. I was first introduced to these concepts under the guise of “Generative Learning” through my lecturer Lyn Schaverian. One of the ideas that we explored is that stimuli can break, bend, amend and extend connections. And that this is the process of learning. You can “unsee Waldo” if you have additional stimuli, such as being told that the figure you have picked out is in fact another stripey hat wearing fellow. I will be interested to hear what more is said on the subject.
September 6, 2008 – 11:04 am
Recent reading about education and online technologies has led me to conclude that we a more than a tiny bit obsessed with children. Not in a bad way, of course. But the buzz of the moment (and the last few moments) is around how young people absorb, create and disseminate information.
I hate kids. Okay, slight exaggeration. But I got into education through an interest in adult education. All this focus on how young people learn and the importance of them having modernised information literacy skills makes me wonder if we have implicitly given up on adults learning them.
How does this sit with my previous post? I guess I want to push the following ideas:
- We should not ignore adults in our studies of how people use web2.0/3.0 to learn
- We should not assume that all adults will find web2.0/3.0 learning hard
- We should not assume that all children will find web2.0/3.0 learning easy
- We should assume an audience with varied skill levels and pilot or test our educational designs rigorously
- We should endeavour not to exclude anyone from the playground based on age or comfort with web2.0/3.0
September 6, 2008 – 10:31 am
Comments such as “my son can process all the information on screen at once, but I can only focus on one thing” are illustrative of neurological adaptation forces at work.”
Foehr, 2006
I can pretty much guarantee you that each individual sees the world slightly differently. We may be looking at the same thing, but we will pick out different colours, remember different parts and understand it all very differently.
Foehr’s study looks at how teens multi-task and process information. The quote above boils down the study nicely to saying that younger people in our society are developing a different way of seeing the information they encounter through multi-media. I personally would not limit this to being about “younger people” as I see many older people do it to (to varying degrees). However the study only looks at one age group.
This presents a design challenge for educational and web designers presenting content to a varied audience. Simplicity or multiplicity? Even to present the option of allowing the end user to decide how much content is visible may introduce complexity that some users will find alienating.
I don’t have a conclusion, only a question. Is audience segmentation the only way to deal with this challenge?
September 6, 2008 – 9:15 am
The main site is connected to the twitfeed.
The main site is connected to the flickr.
The twitfeed is connected to the twitter.
Dem sites, dem apps, dem web 2.0 bits.
I’m currently clustering my web 2.0 apps to minimise double posting and make all my technologies talk to one another. It looks something like this:
Art and Design Cluster:
September 5, 2008 – 6:33 am
Punch card programming and algorhythms, it is hardly the stuff of romance. And yet that was what connected my parents. They met at college, fell in love and married. And despite all intentions to the contrary had incredibly IT literate children. My mum once said that she would have been disappointed if we went into computing. However here I am working in educational technologies after a detour through training and professional development.
I have never had formal training in IT. We always had a computer at home, which bred a kind of fearless and practical attitude to its use. I taught myself how to use desktop applications, and later went on to train myself how to code in HTML & CSS. I know a bit of PHP and SQL, and my dearest dream is to find the time to learn Ruby on Rails.
The problem I have encountered is an attitude around IT. As soon as it is known that I know how to use a computer, a series of assumptions arise:
- I must be an “IT person”
- I must not know anything about more academic subjects, like educational theory
- I must be doing something at once specialised, but also strangely mundane and administrative
- I must somehow be less womanly (although some of the old school guys tend to just assume that I don’t know enough about tech)
My experience has been that people have difficulty in understanding that technology is something that can support a specialisation, rather than be a specialisation. I also find that they have difficulty realising that an affinity with technology has a cultural dimension, that I was brought up with a way of seeing that allows me to find the logic of applications easily.
My experience suggests something of the barriers that will be faced by younger people with their increasing affinity with technology. They may not have studied formally, may not know what is “under the hood”, but they feel comfortable using it because they have learnt that way of seeing. Of course not all of them will have this affinity, but many will. And the cultural divide will be wide.