Heli on Connectivism

Now I am enjoying some papers guided by CCK09 week 6 Complex adaptive systems. I found the wonderful sites of  SantaFe Institute, really easy and motivating to use. They will be my favourite sites…

Another source worth of reading in my opinion is Francis Heylighen, Free University of Brussels. He deals with complexity and information overload in society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control. It is possible to predict causal effects but not human behavior. The amount of information in society and the speed followed by open publications increase and we get data smog that covers real knowledge. We have tools to organise flows of informations but here is again the overload, the overload of opportunities. I don’t know how to find any valuable from my Google Reader or iGoogle or Twitter, but I find a lot of data smog all the time.

It is a paradox that the only way to use complex and open systems is to make them more simple and restricted. So I build a system of  ‘people I can trust’ in my mind and choose what and whom  to follow. But if I have never time to read or think I can follow many wrong prophets. One of the problems is that those who now only technology have a strong voice in social media and others can follow them quite blindly. This is a bubble of social media that is good to see, I opened my eyes while participating in a discussion in Finnish last week. Young guyes take the power with poor understanding of substance things, they have done it some years because it seems normal to other participants. This means losing control and unpredictable influences. There is no friction in tweets, nuisance is open to everybody so let’s use it to be postmodern up-to-date people 

To understand developmental dialectics is needed again: every property and opportunity turns to its opposite and you should be careful and open all the time ,which is impossible. Thanks to F. Heylighen who deepened my thinking and gave me devices to see what’s happening. And thanks to open CCK09 which seem to be an excellent orienting course (source?) to knowledge and connections needed to .. what? to live and learn and participate today.

Yesterday I turned this blog to an European project and found the question why it was possible to study globally but harder to work in small groups of different universities. And today I found a discussion about the same theme in elearningeuropa pages (communities> discussions):

“Web 2.0 is about social networking and the impact it has on learning or learning 2.0 is that it supports and enables learning networks. Rather than trying to limit the social networks in the boundaries of educational environments I would sport George Siemens and his theory of connectivism arguing that learning networks need to be open, with the learner in control. Learners should be able to choose networks that they trust and belong to. Web 2.0 is promoting and supporting such openness and connectivity the challenge is for educational institutions to develop a supporting culture of sharing and exist as an ecology not in isolation.”

And following:

“Yes, I think that the topic of “connectivism” by George Siemens is very interesting and challenging too.
I would agree that learning networks should be open and that learner should be in control of their learning and so have the chance to chose the networks they trust the most.
But still as you said “the challenge is for educational institutions to develop a supporting culture of sharing and exist as an ecology not in isolation”…. and this is very very challenging today…. I have no idea how institutions could overcome “competitions among them” and “privacy issues” among users, since in my experience even publishing an individual assignment in the provided course forum was not an easy task for the more shy or introverted student. In my experience it is not easy for any students to share with other peers (imagine if with milions or bilions of people..) their assignments, because they will receive a mark for that….I think this is still a tricky topic which need to be further researched and investigated.”

I love these writings and agree with them mostly. But it is not at all impossible for students to work openly, I have many experiences about success in shared knowledge and shared assessment in my online courses. People can share but institutions have problems in sharing because of continuous competition. So the project must be really useful to all participants? Usually it is, I suppose, otherwise it doesn’t begin.

Sharing is a skill that can be learnt.. and millions of people do it every day. For instance I am shy and introvert