I’ve realised that studying in any formal context is not really high on the priority list at the moment.  I am not going to get a pay rise for it so at the moment I’d rather be posting examples of my kids work like this and sharing it with other teachers than reading lots and spending lots of time thinking about Connectivism.

The main two things I have spent time thinking about as I have read this weeks posts and tweets are:

• If I am ‘the space through which stuff passes’ then whether (and how) I decide to participate is of consequence.  If I don’t participate or am not open to participation I represent a deadend or a roadblock.  If I do then I can’t know my impact and whether it will be a positive or negative experience except in superficial ways.
• Openness (to ideas, knowledge, divergence, practice, questions, people) is important in learning.  A process that alllows you to actively practice openness is useful in helping you understand where and how connections are being made.

So instead of doing the readings I’m cheating and going straight to my network.  I read How to Save the World regularly because of it’s openness.  I get lots of content on straight educational technology and basically it confirms there are other people out there thinking similiar things and sometimes alerts me to a new tool or resources.  How to Save the World is where I go to get a different perspective – someone who is really committed to thinking holistically about the world, someone who reads different things to me, someone who works in a different field.  For me this is really important for my learning, going outside of the norm.  Anyway so I’m cheating I’m using his list of questions to think about Connectivism.  I understand that my answers are superficial, that there are plenty of underlying complexities but these are my answers for this moment in time as if I was explaining them to someone who was new to networking.

How do we best decide who to include in our networks?

In my job I have been trying to build a community.  A community of readers for my blog.  A community of blogs within me.edu.au that I can read.  A community of communicators on twitter.  I follow lots of people in lots of contexts.  Part of how I have been doing that is by friending/following/subscribing to lots of people on Twitter, me.edu.au, edublogs often this starts a relationship.  Sometimes this is a one-off connection, sometimes it’s deeper.  Some people I watch closely, some not so closely.

Then there are lists.  For example this elearningtwits list.  Someone, somewhere who knows other people who are interested in similiar things puts together a list for example this list of Australian educational Twitteratti and suddenly the connections that I was making seemed closer.  To me this is similar to Facebook’s friend recommendations.  Whilst it is a manual processes it is useful for me in finding people who who deal with the same curriculum issues, the same weather as me.  Not only this but the nature of Twitter meant that not only was I making friends with people on the list but also their friends.  I was also getting lots of friend requests from educators in much more similiar circumstances to me.  Lots of the people who have sort of limited networks of between 10-100 people in Twitter have been the most fun to interact with but I probably wouldn’t have found them without the list.  It was a pretty remarkable day.  It made me appreciate how if I could only keep one tool it would be Twitter.  It’s simple.  It’s rich.  It’s personal.

How can we learn to accommodate more people and build deeper relationships with those in our networks without sacrificing other important activities in our lives?

This is hard.  For me one really important interaction can be as influential as many other non-important interactions.  A peripheral connection with certain people can be as important as a constant connection with another.  If I go with my gut, with what feels right it seems to work out pretty right.  Overall though the more connections, the more open I am the more learning seems to occur.

Maybe too for me it’s about being both diverse and passionate at the same time.  So that each interaction is useful in more than one way.  For example I enjoy listening to music, a little bit of art and it makes me feel pretty good to help others.  So when I read blogs and use my networks I gravitate toward people who tick more than one box.  For example I read a film educators blog that gives me ideas that I can transform for my classroom.

How much time should we invest in networks, with which members, in what ways, and how do we make the most of that time?

I think also it’s important to realise when the connection isn’t as fruitful.  When something, a relationship, a quest or information, analysis of a question, isn’t going anywhere.  It seems to me that as a relationship deepens it can actually take less time to keep it going.  You have history.  You know what you’re talking about.  It’s more that if you have an important question you can rely on them to give you a more considered response.

Some of the best professional relationships I have include a web-developer whose way of thinking inspires me.  I’d prefer to follow a way of thinking that is open and interested than people who will just share a link to a maths resource.  By focusing on like minded idealists like myself who share practical ideas or offbeat viewpoints I am able to draw from an extensive pool of people who can give me lots of different ways of looking at things rather than validating or negating my view point.

I always like adding new people who have a different perspective to me or to the people who I’m used to listening to because they challenge me to really think about my beliefs, about other ways of looking at things.  They open up new doors to resources that have been overlooked.

How do we discover the people who should be in our networks, but currently aren’t?

So one way is the Twitter list example – it just appears on your doorstep because someone else has made the connection for you.  Sometimes it’s through work or reading a blog.  You then follow up a person and follow them around on the web for a while and decide whether they are follow closely type person.

Also I have been listening in on the conversations for ACEC08 which is a educational technology conference in Australia and I’m finding that although the conference is face to face I can kind of meet people and get an idea of people who might be interested to work with, read, listen to.

It will be interesting to see how these relationships progress – if they get deep enough to warrant a two-way buy in or if they remain peripheral.

If learning is, as the instructors of this course contend, nothing more or less than ‘making connections’ (neural, conceptual, and social), how do we learn to learn the things in the chart above and the other things we need to learn to be self-sufficient, useful members of communities – to be who we were intended to be?

I think part of it is learning to listen to our emotions as we learn.  If something feels like it isn’t going well.  If nothing is happening.  If we feel frustrated.  Then we need to consider where is this feeling coming from.

As well as this I think the web is a pretty honest medium.  You can easily get a sense of who is an d*&khead on the web.  You might see a pretenious, egocentric tweet or get your comment deleted from a blog post and you get a sense of a person.  The reverse is true too.  True passion and a good nature opens connections rather than closes them.

The things I have had to learn in a practical sense so that I can feel like I am connected to things is basically learning to take step back and listen to what I’m feeling, make assessments – much less on how I will be perceived by others and much more on what does my contribution add to the whole or add to my own life experience.  I wrote about this in a previous course here.

How do we discover what it is we need to learn?

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How do we learn to critically assess what we see, hear, and think, and overcome the prejudices, prejudgements and worldviews that block us from being open to new ideas, insights, perspectives and knowledge?

If making connections is the goal then isn’t being involved in very different spheres one way of preventing ourselves from going down narrow paths or buying into narrow ways of thinking that don’t allow us to open ourselves to connections. Perhaps in the future those who keep their fingers in the most divergent pies will be as valuable as those who go very deep in one aspect of knowledge.

We all have learning ‘disabilities’ of one kind or another.  How do we recognise and overcome them?

By listening to the people in our network when we speak – who listens, who responds, are the responses increasing the connections or narrowing them.  By asking what they heard.

In my current teaching role I’m teaching kids with learning ‘disabilities’ I’m excited about the possibilities for them.  Within a network they are able to play small but important roles in many different ways.  I think if we as a society want to solve the problems of the future we need to find better ways of coming up with solutions – not just the solutions themselves.

By understanding accessiblity and providing options both for ourselves and for others we strengthen our neworks by increasing the number of connections and the ways that we can make connections.  This is potentially the most exciting aspect of the change in the way we learn and innovate.

I started FOC08 and found it difficult to connect with people and content.  This time I’m trying a different approach.  I’m teaching, working loads and still want time for free expression so I’m going to limit my interaction to just a sprinkling of readings and a couple of new thoughts each week.  I wonder if I’ll connect with anyone with this level of interaction.  So far so good, the Hub

This Weeks Overview

Connectivism Wordle

Important Ideas for The Week – What about the kids?  It’s just a course?

The readings this week got me thinking about the future, what will it look like for these kids I’m teaching.  So I think this idea of slowly changing the way we work so that we can better understand things like Transmedia Navigation is really important.  We won’t figure out how we can best equip young students with the right skills for this kind of participation until we understand it ourselves.  We won’t understand it ourselves unless we participate.  Hence why I am involved in the course.  So I wrote a post on the blog where I wear the hat of Primary School Teacher to generate some discussion over there.

Stephen’s remark that things that are most course like – for example everyone descending on the course at the same time – feel the least natural.  This really resonates and yet I don’t feel really connected to the idea of Personal Learning Networks either.  The great thing about a course is that everyone does come together at the same time, it is also a pain.

From my internet I want the extremes either the pushing the envelope thinking or the connection to the mundane everyday of everyone else.  So I think one of the reasons that I’m really paying attention this time is that I receive a regular email from Dave Pollard and I always find him to be a good anchor.   He provides the pushing the envelope thinking so if he’s listening I’m listening along also, and he is listening.  My next step is to find someone who I can connect with who is providing the mundane Aussie perspective – connectivism in everyday life.  I think that with a theory like this it’s what you do everyday a little bit that will be where the rubber meets the road.  This is not simple and it’s not just about Twitter.

Question of The Week

• In the broader social context how can we construct an environment that motivates a variety of users to contribute so that any idea of ‘truth‘ is at least somewhat representative of the community in which it is being analysed?

I’ve listened to bits and pieces of Clay Shirky before but listening to his entire talk made me think in a practical way about the impact of large numbers of connections and the fact that having more numbers of things increases these connections exponentially.  The thing I think we need to be careful of is that we are using our numbers and our connections for.  I’m starting to think this idea of ‘value’ will become more tangible and measurable than money, maybe our currency will change over time, certainly sites such as BookMooch suggest this might be the case.

Now I don’t care much about money I’m not an economist or anything like that but I do care about what people in my world care about.  And obviously a shift in economics is going to have an impact on our education, social lives and the way we draw meaning from our lives.  In trying to understand this idea I have explored lots of different angles

The Wikinomics playbook talks about the shift towards a paradigm where ‘the goals is a refined idea… not an idea beaten into consensus!’.   I think a focus on the abstract concept of money is part of the problem and that is why we end up with inferior stuff all the time. We all know this that because the deadline, profit, money has to happen we put all the really good ideas on hold and let them go bad, and most of what we do is inefficient and generally bad for long term growth.  Now this seems to effect us both indvidually and in business.

The current world is a world of goals and achievement, they are how we decide if we’re doing the right thing. Goals and achievement seem to be the wrong language for our new world. They suggest that something is over at a point.  But it is never over and usually this prevents us as workers from doing a good job or learners from learning new things.  It makes us fear anything that will take us off the path of achievement and goals.   But if in the world we are moving into they lose value what will they be replaced by?  I think it will be a much stronger sense of true value and the processes that are influential in ensuring this.  Thinking about things in those terms makes articles such as this one, the standard look at your outcomes the create action plans etc.. a bit hard to swallow for me.

So my thoughts on the ‘value’ of work have intesected with a couple of articles I have read recently about the growth mindset and being ‘Open To Growth‘ and that this helps us feel connected to others and at the same time achieve more and feel more valued for our achievements because we’re not competing and always feeling bad that someone is doing better.  Whichever way we look at it these ideas of value, achievement, growth and worth all mean that the way we approach our everyday work needs to change.

It almost needs us to reverse our thinking:

• We need to take value from the things we do now
• We need to thinking long-term as a way to create more value in the things we do now in the future

I know this seems to be a bit of a fuzzy kind of idea but it’s one I hope to develop through my work and study.  For now at a practical level the important thing for me personally is that each day I am doing things that I believe contribute to the whole and that also provide value in and of themselves.

This usually means each day I spend some time working on products that are useful to others (videos, lesson plans, blogs), I spend some time reviewing what other people are doing and I spend some time documenting (through videos or blogs) the process I go through to achieve a product.

Each of these activities leads me in slightly different directions but they all end up contributing to each other.  Slowly I’m begining to get to the point where I can do much more in much less time and I like the things I work on a lot more.

If anyone has any really good resources for planning for constant value rather than achievement I’d love to read them.

I watched this video and the part that really struck me was open communication, freedom to share, decentralisation of authority, market as a conversation. These all have a really big impact on learning. The traditional roles of instructional designer and teacher are being challenged.

It seems like part of all this is learning to be online:

• Teaching different reading skills
• Finding entry points for students
• Introducing systems (from tagging conventions to software to groups of people)
• Telling students when they’ve missed something

The value to learning is real. Engagement. Real life skills. Real life relationships. Articulate students armed with measurable results.

The difficulty is it can be time-consuming and challenging. Perhaps the answers lie within and outside the learning communities. Peer assessment, public feedback, mentoring. These are the types of activities that I think could make for rich, dynamic experiences.