Heli on Connectivism

We are studying groups and networks and I am wondering why just  these concepts. Stephen’s image shows that groups are bad and networks are good and up-to-date.  I can follow the purpose and understand the differences, but I totally disagree with using group in this connection. I am searching  new headings for the description:

• Institution  versus Open virtual community
• Energy diminishing versus Energy fostering culture
• Restriction versus Empowerment
• Normal and realistic versus Ideal world

Groupthink means thinking in same way and stopping critics, but the group as such can be whatever. It is good to remember groupthink in order to avoid it. You have to allow diversity, autonomy, openness and distributed democracy for this purpose. Perhaps Stephen means just this: if the left heading were groupthink I could follow it.

But anyway I miss something about energy or empowerment to the right side: knowledge emerges in open, supportive, respective culture. I use Stephen’s Seven Habits as learning material. Is there something about energy? Flow? But who are highly connected people? They must have all those seven attributes and … what else?

How about groupthink in CCK09 – can we see it somewhere?

Walking in a beautiful autumn landscape inspired me to think metahorically. I need this epistemic style for describing human growing, scientific and whatever knowledge (I’m not exact today- it is Sunday ) . I took a photo about three pines and a climbing plant and the wall (I live in that house, just writing here). I have many ways to use this photo as a metaphor.

networking or connecting

First I tell about our facilitators: Perhaps Stephen is the red climbing plant who has his philosophy wall as his main support but he is flexible and climbs with pines as well ( that is perhaps easier and opens new landscapes). George could be the pines. He has roots in land and uses many sources: educational and societal sciences and people’s experiences about real life. Stephen is more ‘in the air’ and explores  new possibilies, for instance he jumps from neurosciencies to all other levels in human life, for him it is OK. (Just listened last week’s Ellumination, so I have this in my mind).

I have to continue: it is not Stephen and George alone who construct connectivism, we all do. What are my pines and climbings and walls and should I say something about breathing (I don’t remember the right concept for plants).

I have studied mostly psychology, especially developmental psychology and education and societal sciences and I have worked a researcher and a teacher for decades. I know that I cannot follow all sciences that for instance networks are built in. I have to recognize my borders though I am developing all the time , I took that photo with my new mobile and put it here. You have some old ladies here in CCK ( hi Sia!) so please don’t say old people cannot learn computer things

I must be open to diversities anyway. It’s good have partners with different backgrounds and try to follow their odd thinking paths .. it is an adventure. Our ellumination about Network (2nd week) put all concepts in a bowl and then shook it. And what happens in our minds? connectivistic learning? Time will tell.

How to describe and visualize interactions in networks? Static pictures are not enough, we must have flashes or videos. Keith Lyons helped again, I found this video Evolving twitter communities in his last blog post ( I couldn’t link to it, so I linked to YouTube).

“This is a dynamic network, showing what companies the 200 most prolific tweets were talking about. Both people and companies are nodes, and the edges change over the course of the day. Everytime a person tweets about a company, an edge is added connecting that person to the company. After 30 minutes, the edge decays. The companies are labeled, and the individuals are anonymized here.”

I like this. But so what? This is the way we live everyday, all the time and our brains can follow and pick up what is needed from the mess. This is one of the best external visualizations about networks, but… the point is to interpret the happenings inside human mind and external remains external.

Another blog that touched me during this CCK09 week was a young man who said that it is very easy to recieve the concept ‘connection’ because it has always been in the focus of developmental psychology. I agree with this opinion, my way is the same. Developmental psychology haven’t used the concept ‘connection‘ but ‘interaction‘ because it tells about mutual influences. Dialog is an appropriate concept, too. How can I interpret all the meanings of connection: internal and external (my vocabulary gives only connexion for trains or ships). Three levels given buy George (neural, social and conceptual) – this is basic knowledge in psychology, no news in it, easy to accept but doesn’t help me.

Should I re-invent or rewrite in my mind all my knowledge if I already have it? Psychology has produced great amount of knowledge about human actions in groups, teams and networks. Same unperfect people acting in all these social environments and repeating mistakes and perhaps new ones in this rapidly changing world.

I have continued my path by reading again Anna Sfard’s and Etienne  Wenger’s writings and I see many important steps forward. Learning by participation and communities of practice have been meaningful concepts for me. It was nice to meet my old thoughts again and reorganize my mind (what does that mean?) The concept ‘brokering’ opened my eyes (my mind?) some years ago. Borderlines are interesting places: for instance I have come from an old-science-university to an university of applied sciences and I am most interested in practical problems, theories are not enough any more. So my place is nowhere in RL and I greatly enjoy to participate this open global course. I need this for prevailing decent motivation in my daily work (thanks to my friend who said this in CCK-Moodle).

It is obvious that we have to proceed from great amount of knowledge to ways for dealing with it, complex situations in complex world. One human being cannot anymore be an expert and it is better or even necessary to build up networks and projects. And so we have done. My attitude to projects is confused, a project means more ‘a joke’ than ‘a good job’. All projects have not worked as they should and there are unrealistic plays which no one believes in (I hope you can follow my simple English).

But I still believe in networks, why? My networks are honest, I build them for myself and they are open. I love the decentralization of networks, it means dynamics and  freedom to act in different ways and think whatever. I agree with the importance of diversity. Diversity is Ok when I can choose my ways, participate or not. I do not like griefers or trolls in internet, they have wrong diversity in their disturbance actions

Communities of practice (Wenger 1998, Cambridge university) are described as voluntary groups in a work place, people who have same interests. In spite of this, communities of practice seem to  have both good and bad elements in their action. All that is said aloud is not knowledge or true in any way, shared ignorance is not better than one person’s ignorance. I can see the same phenomenom in networks.

My first step in microblogging happened in a case that I followed a conference about research methods and I was very eager to follow what people told, I was in my workplace and could not participate in the conference. But I soon understood that I had waited too much: those who commented by microblogging where newbies and didn’t know much about scientific methods, it was their first time. This opened my eyes that microblogging (and blogging) and networks are as vulnerable as all human interactions are. Trust is needed but it shouldn’t be blind.

Something happened in my mind when CCK studies began. I have to reflect myself in order to participate .. I can’t write to colleagues  if I don’t recognize my own perspectives. What am I doing here actually?

I work in teacher education for adults coming from work life. We don’t have fulltime students in classrooms, they are working and they live in different parts of Finland. So we use virtual learning platforms and social media. Our pedagogy has been up-to-date those two decades I have been here. We have been pondering all learning theories all the time and “invented” personal learning plans in the year 1988 and the great impact of networks soon after that. Students are organized (or they organize themselves) to learning circles with peer feedback etc.)

I have developed my online teaching since the year 2002 and I prefer it. I have a blog in Finnish as an online teacher and I take part in Finnish social media community. I participated in CCK08 in order to follow global discussions about connectivism. And I am here again, I cannot stop coming

This time I try to be more conscious about my perspective: I am asking questions about the “best online pedagogy in the world” and I suppose something like that can be found in CCK09. My orientation is practical, theories are not enough.  In my previous post is dealt with conceptions about knowledge and epistemic styles. In practice you must have skills to all epistemic styles and the ability to choose and combine them:

So I intend to use 1) theoretical data, knowing via thought, 2) empirical facts, knowing via senses and 3) metaphorical, experiental, phenomenological data = knowing via intuition and insight. The criteria fo acceptance as knowledge are in same order:

1. Ist it logical? Is it theoretically sound?
2. Can it be experimentally proven?
3. Does it fit to my experience? Does it feel right? Because I am an expert in online pedagogy I can trust my feelings about rightness. (But I had to read that first, I had forgotten it).

I am not studing only connectivism, I am studing all interesting up-to-date theories about learning and networking – and I am not the only one in the course who has this perspective. I added Frances in my blogroll and found Ning and Diigo groups with this broad perspective. So my next problem is to take time, decide where to participate.

Sun is shining just now, I have to go out, it is not allowed to sit all Sunday with my computer when beautiful autumn is outside.

This is my first step in second CCK09-travel. I always try to find my way, not George’s or Stephen’s or others’. I already know some students and I am convinced that I’ll get ideas from them .. so I must have my mind open. But I have to know what there is in my mind that influences me, I cannot be quite open. I have to ask myself about

• my knowledge building, my habits and ways in constructing my mind
• my values, do I have any so important that they direct my thinking and feeling
• what do I already know about human learning and knowledge? What is closed and what is open in my mind?

These are heavy questions, I feel tired at the beginning of the job. Last week I found some good sources that I have studied in 1990’s and I wonder why I have stopped thinking during last years, have I? I believe that basic questions in knowledge acquisition do not change, not all of them, not totally. I read again a Finnish dissertation about “Knowledge in Interactive Practice Disciplines” (A. Sarvimäki, University of Helsinki 1988). I am not interested in all knowledge, only knowledge used in  education or other interpersonal, interactive disciplines (theory-in-practice). Pragmatism is my choice: what is working in practice and why is it effective and so on. Argyris and Schön: Knowledge in Action is in my bookshelf. Knowing in practice is more demanding/difficult that knowing in theory.

Knowledge is divided in “knowing that” = propositional, declarative, language and concepts, models. Knowledge is “knowing how” = procedural, how to do, what are the phases and so on. How about “emergent knowledge”, where does it come, how is it possible? The contextual nature of practical problems … what does it mean? A dynamic aspect is needed:  Skill in reading situations and flexing in interactions…

I am pleased with three epistemic styles: rational, empirical and metaphorical.  When I am rational I conceptualize and think in logical-illogical ways. When I gather empiria, I perceive (and sometimes misperceive). Most interesting is the metaphorical style: that’s why  I have to use pictures, symbols, which are universal or  idiosyncratic. For instance my photo about destabilizing in my previous post, Jenny recognized it at once and Ailsa remembers my images in CCK08. There is silent knowledge (Polanyi) and intuition in expertice.

How in the world we can construct any new theory of human learning? What is a theory actually? If I forget or leave that open how can I define criteria for good practice in my CCK09 studies? Too difficult, I must go out and walk ..

I will destabilize my participating as you can see:

my way