Half an Hour,
Nov 05, 2015
My contributions to the Network Learning 'Hot Seat' addressing the question, "How do we analyse and support the networked interactions of thousands of people learning together?" View the whole discussion here.
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These are two very different questions and I'm not sure it's useful (or even appropriate) to ask them together.
With respect to the analysis of the networked interactions, it's not clear to me that we should even be doing this, at least, not in the sense suggested by the question. If someone had said "how do we analyze the conversations of university students one to another" or "how do we analyze the thousands of phone calls between people" we would quite rightly question the breach of confidence required to undertake such a task, beyond very gross calculations about the numbers of calls and conversations (and even then, we're treading on dangerous grounds). One of the differences between mass courses (at least the way I see them) and more traditional forms of online learning is that students discussions are not automatically located in the LMS not subject to ownership and use by the institution.
I'll leave discussion of the second point until later.
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The ideas of connectivism, communities of practice, etc., are derived from a network view of the world, and are rooted in ideas of network theory, 'small pieces loosely joined', the computational theory of connectionism, and the work of people like Francisco Varela, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Stephen Kosslyn and J.J. Gibson.
It has been occasionally suggested that MOOCs have their origin in the work of Ivan Illich. I'm sympathetic with his view, but his work has no influence on the development and design of either connectivism nor the MOOC. If people must credit someone writing specifically in the educational domain, then I would say I was far more influenced by John Holt's How Children Fail. But for me, the origins are from the scientific and philosophical domain, not from educational theorists or social scientists.
No it isn't. Wellman is interested in the formation and definition of community, and social network theory. This work is interesting, but is not the same as connectivism, which is a theory about knowledge and learning.
What you'll find in connectivism, but not in Wellman:
- 'to know' is to be organized in a certain way, as in a set of connections (such that 'to know x' is to recognize x)
- 'to learn' is to to grow, adapt and change that organizations, ie., to grow and shape connections
Contrast with Wellman, who when he talks about knowledge, talks in information-theoretic terms, such as 'knowledge transfer' or 'knowledge mobilization'. He depicts networks as conduits of knowledge, rather than as instances of knowledge.
Finally, though I am indeed the person who coined and described e-learning 2.0 (based on the earlier concept of web 2.0) I am not trying to "sell" it, or MOOCs, or connectivism. People can decide for themselves, based on the evidence, whether any of these concepts has any merit.
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I see MOOCs as "Closed Educational Resources" for the reason that they
are stand alone, unlike say SCORM packaged learning objects.
This may be true for xMOOCs. It is certainly not true for the cMOOCs George Siemens and I created. Indeed, you could attend one of our MOOCs from beginning to end without even visiting the platform, solely through the use of syndication technologies like RSS. Moreover, our MOOCs were not in one place, like an xMOOC, but were distributed across a web of connections linking students resources, OERs from multiple locations, groups and conferences, and more.
