The first 3 weeks of CCK08 evoked that song for me as I trawled through the blogs and lurked in the Moodle forums – skimming the posts, assimilating and accommodating, just immersing myself in the network in a passive kind of a way, feeling a tad guilty as I took precious time out of a busy RL day to follow some threads. Got a feel for it now and can hopefully start contributing back into the conversations.

I started out doubtful that ‘connectivism’ provides anything really new or useful for education theory – a theory of learning needs to explain a lot more than how code, electricity and screens can link learners together. But connectivism does seem to be pointing towards that something more … But after 3 weeks I’m still not clear about where is connectivism is pointing, or how it fits in with my own schema of what learning/teaching is.  For there can be no learning without teaching, and that is not the same as saying that a person called a ‘teacher’ is necessary for learning to take place… but that is another conversation….

Back to the song memory trace though. In relation to ‘connectivism’ – what kind of ‘-ism’ is it ? There is a proposition that ‘connectivism’ is some kind of advance on the cliched triptych of behaviourism-cognitivism-constructivism.  That ‘connectivism’ somehow ‘is unique in bringing together ideas of neuroscience, cognitive science, network theory, complex systems, and related disciplines.’  A thread in the Moodle forum suggests that ‘connectivism’ is ‘behaviourism redux’.  Catherine/Prokofy relentlessly exposes the ideological underpinnings of what she sees as ‘technocommunism’ and ‘digital maoism’.  Stephen goes to the philosophers and brings in ‘intentionalism’, ‘associationism’ and ‘realism’ – not to mention ‘connectionism’.  Plenty of criticism and dialogism as well. Now if only we had some kind of virtual prism to focus all these scattered feeds and posts into something coherent (ah but maybe that’s where the individual brain comes into play )

When it comes to the -isms, I’m an enactivist. That is, I believe that enactivism is the -ism that provides the most appropriate and useful theoretical context for the ways in which learning and teaching is developing in the networked world. I suggest that if ‘connectivism’ is ever going to have any theoretical legs to stand on, it needs to clearly delineate its affinities with and differences from enactivism.  As a way of starting this conversation I’ll revisit Brent Davis (a lot of enactivists seem to hang out in Canada ) and his wonderful genealogy called Inventions of Teaching.  I want to put the focus on teaching because it’s all too easy in ‘connectivism’ to forget that teaching is actually an integral part of learning.  I mean, when Stephen claims that the network has actually replaced the teacher – “content from elsewhere in the network will, if it is of value, make its way to you. That, indeed, is the value of working in a network” – I think it’s really important for those who see themselves as educators and make their living as teachers to question this somewhat dodgy ideology.

In Inventions of Teaching Davis sets out a comprehensive view of conceptions of teaching as they relate to the main currents of Western thought in “an attempt to make sense of the knots of belief and commonsense that have underpinned efforts at teaching over the past few millennia”.  The main aspects are summarised in this diagram (click on it for a larger version):

There is a lot of information condensed here and I recommend this text to anyone wanting to understand how teaching situates itself in relation to the key branches and bifurcations in Western thinking.  The point for this post is how ‘connectivism’ fits in – or not – to this way of seeing the variation in educational discourse on teaching.  So if we try and map the -isms onto this diagram it would look something like this:

On the face of it, ‘connectivism’ should be located on the Interobjectivity – Complexity Science/Ecology bifurcation – which is where I have situated enactivism.  There doesn’t really seem to be anywhere else – I don’t think that it is behaviourism in another guise – and although there might be some mystical elements and some quasi-religious dogma (Catherine ? ), I don’t believe that this is where George and Stephen are intending to go.  Or is it a completely new branch splintering off on its own somewhere ?

But to get onto this tree, ‘connectivism’ needs to define its conceptions of teaching.  And this is where ‘connectivism’ shoots itself in the foot (well, sort of).  If learning is merely the process of creating and traversing the connections in the network, where is the body of the learner, and where indeed is the teacher ? Does the body itself become some kind of Tron-like entity in the matrix of infinite connectivity ?  I’m not dismissing ‘connectivism’ per se, because I do think that we need to expand Davis’ genealogy by incorporating the insights and new approaches to teaching that are emerging from networked learning, and ‘connectivism’ may have something to offer here.   But let’s see if we can use the existing -isms before assuming that the latest neolog-ism is simply going to replace centuries of educational wisdom …

Stanley:
I don’t believe that ‘connectivism’ or ‘connected knowledge’ is some kind of ‘paradigm shift’ in education – but I’m not sceptical, rather more dubious that there is actually a theory of learning there. So I’m interested to see if there is anything really substantial in the concept that can contribute to the nitty-gritty challenges of teaching and learning – for example, I’m currently designing some new courses for our first-year students where there will be upwards of 1200 students in a course…

George:
First, I’m not a fan of paradigm shifts as expressed in popular literature. Kuhn detailed a paradigm shift as a once in a lifetime event (or, for that matter, several times in the history of a discipline). Now, it’s suggested these shifts happen several times a day .

in terms of nitty-gritty, the tools that fall under the banner of participatory technologies (or web2.0) are very practical in nature. Blogs, wikis, SecondLife, and other tools can be adopted with far less resistence than how I recall moving courses online in an LMS. In fact, I think we have an entire basis of practical applications (tools and approaches) in need of a theory. And to this end, i advance connectivism as a theory.

Stanley:
I do think that some of the claims made about connectivism and connective knowledge (eg. going ‘beyond behaviourism and constructivism’ ) are suggestive of a paradigm shift (not the daily kind ) – and I guess the numbers of participants on the course also suggest that there is something going on … ?

So I’m going to listen to your post on‘what is connectivism’ now and continue reflecting and questioning on my blog …

Off to a great start I reckon and looking forward to developing this in a bit more detail!

Educlunk, (n): e-learning software that is, well, clunky! e.g the Blackboard interface, Powerpoint, …

Edugunk, (n): digitised learning material that just clogs up bandwidth and learners’ minds. e.g. Powerpoint slides of lectures uploaded onto the web, long screeds of text in .pdf for learners to download and printout, …

additions welcome.

The writer is no stranger to universities having taught at the University of Cape Town for most of his academic career. If we have anything in common we are both ex-South African academics who now live in the Antipodes (Coetzee is in Adelaide) – but beyond that very minor coincidence I remain totally in awe of his writing.

Having dealt to postmodern literary theory in the previous ‘chapter’ (it’s not a conventional book at all in terms of structure) Coetzee laments the loss of the powers of the professoriate to the scrutiny of professsional managers, as the creeping managerialism of the 80s and 90s eroded ‘academic freedom’. He recalls Poland under Communist rule, where dissident academics held covert night classes on topics that were banned from the official curriculum decided by the State: “If the spirit of the university is to survive, something along those lines may have to come into being in countries where tertiary education has become wholly subordinate to business principles. In other words, the real university may have to move into people’s homes and grant degrees for which the sole backing will be the names of the scholars who sign the certificates.” (p31-32, emphasis added)

Maybe I should put that on the agenda for the next Academic Board meeting!

But seriously, isn’t the real university already in our homes ? Wiki-pedia/wiki-versity, Open knowledge/content, the whole internet itself. The ‘network way’, infinite connectivism, and the revival of Illich, PLEs and self-directed autonomous learning. But here in the line above is the kernel of the debate – what is a degree and who pays for it, legitimates and accredits it, awards it ?? The content of knowledge has been set free from its ivory container, but the official stamp of validation that you know it is still very much locked up in the degree-granting system (see Joseph Axelrod’s The University Teacher as Artist for an early take on this…).

So the problem is not in increasing the amount of open content and developing more complex social and connective software to link learners. The relentless iterating towards openness driven by networked educational technologies is now bumping up against the ‘technologies of power’ – in Foucault’s phrase – that lock students into pathways and control the degree-granting system. I spoke about this at e-Fest but as yet don’t see exactly how the institution – with the increasing dominance of corporate managerialism and ever-declining government funding – is going to meekly surrender the power of awarding qualifications to individual scholars. Perhaps it may happen that informal webs and extra-mural communities of practice will begin to gain some traction as learners grow increasingly frustrated with rigid curricula – in this Illichian vision the ‘degree’ is legitimated by the collective as the novice is inducted into disciplinary expertise. Open-source BAs and BScs …. ? Well why not – we have open-source pharmaceuticals, Moodle and Linux. But the sheer scale of the economic investment in the university is such that it will take a total dismantling of the system to achieve a ‘personal degree-gaining environment’….

The real university is in our homes, for free, but we still have to pay for the degree.

“Potter and Heath look to many counter-cultural perspectives such as ecological activists, culture-jammers, thugs, skateboarders, and anti-consumerists and draw similarities between all of them. They all perceive the rest of the world (the mainstream), as oppressed or brainwashed into conforming by a larger social force, and society’s rules (formal and otherwise) are thought to be suppressive of human nature for this reason. These parallels lead Potter and Heath to conclude that counter-cultural movements are not as unique as they appear.”

Yes, and the counter-teaching movement is also not as unique as it appears. I remember reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity as a student teacher in 1982 and getting all fired up (and then getting disillusioned when they later wrote Teaching as a Conserving Activity – but then later realising Bateson was right and learning, like evolution, is stochastic, and combines the random with the purposeful, imagination with rigour.)

As I argued at eFest – the real change needs to happens in our mental models, not in the visible structures of the hierarchy. The educational system is not simply going to disappear because of a new technology. It will be disrupted and transformed, but not subsumed by some meta-network that grants certification on reputation alone.

Or as Dave Snowden aptly put it: “One of the great challenges is going to be to allow a co-evolution of the capability of 2.0 tools with the needs to organisations. Those organisations are going to be managed, will need to make revenue and sell solutions and products. Governments have to handle significantly higher demands on resources, while those resources are themselves reducing. All of this requires transformation, but it will also require management.” And making a similar point in a different way “We need to think about the interface between social computing and traditional world of publishing and validation.”  And we need to think about the ways in which elearning 2.0 can creatively disrupt the ‘real university’ but keep baby and bathwater together.

“In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowlands, problems are messy and confusing and incapable of technical solution. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or to society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern.” (see eg. http://www.aishe.org/readings/2007-1/foreword.html). The Learnscope experience provided a window into how to apply 2.0 learning to immediate and pressing practical issues in vocational issues.

After feeling a bit lost I spotted Sparker and was immediately on a podcast – being interviewed about thoughts on using blogs and wikis in the training of fridge technicians…….

…. and after that I had a bit of a hiatus – for 6 months! – during which time I changed jobs and returned to a university. Now that I’ve got my head round the new job I decided to return to the swampy world of blog – so here goes. Hopefully more sustainable this time …

In a sense the summit connected with and continued the ongoing debate I’m participating in about the future of learning (and learning institutions). For a large cluster of speakers it was mainly business as usual with a lot of web (1.0) tacked on – seeing our learning institutions and systems as incorporating and assimilating ICT / e-learning but not being essentially changed or threatened by their potential transformative energy. A rough guide to the different positions is below:

I’m not going to go into all the details and there are podcasts available of all the presentations. It is a crude continuum and possibly needs another column for ‘reactionary’ (dunno if there were any real ‘reactionaries’ there but Leigh might have something to say about that ). Some random thoughts and impressions:

Robert Cailliau – well, he co-invented the web and raised some important questions about how best to use the awesome connectivity it generates, for solving the major global problems of global warming, poverty, etc. I was astounded though that he advocated the scientific method as the sole basis for any solution – dismissing religion as superstition and not mentioning art. Guess that’s the perspective from CERN but surely – as another nuclear physicist argued – the classic scientific method is what’s gotten us into this mess and what we really need is a more ecological way of thinking that includes the other ‘cultures’ of art and spirituality … ? Maybe it’s classic science integrated with the other modes – kinda like Leonardo da Vinci ….

Judyth Sachs mentioned that the University of Sydney spent about $4 million ! on e-learning last year – mostly ‘putting courses on to Web CT’. This is about the total allocation of the eCDF for one year across all NZ institutions… She does have Peter Goodyear on her faculty though so I hope that some of the money went on more innovative forms of using web technologies ….

I was looking forward to hearing George Siemens as I find his regular elearnspace digest very informative. As I’m still pondering the value of connectivism as a theory of learning I was hoping that I’d get a chance to meet him f2f and dialogue a bit. Unfortunately we didn’t connect – but I did get a better idea of his (very neatly packaged) theory. One thing I do wonder about is how connectivism relates to existing learning theories such as enactivism and emerging approaches in complexity science – and how connectivism is connected to debates about the future and structure of learning institutions. I will be engaging with this more as I unpack my ecological ideas here at Flexilearn over the next couple of months.

Geetha Naranayan was very scholarly and drew on many different sources for her vision of how ICT might change education. The one new concept for me in her presentation was the ‘slow knowledge’ movement – like slow food as an antidote to Macdonalds etc, a slow knowledge movement is emerging in reaction to the sheer pace and oversaturation of information fuelled by mass media. This went down well with many at the conference – if you’re in a traditional transmission mode of teaching then the idea of ‘slow school’ is quite appealing, given how many teachers and education managers must feel overwhelmed at the sheer pace of multimedia information streaming through multiple connected devices. While I’m all for the ‘slowness’ of letting ideas brew, grow, and mature – I’m thinking about speed as a relative concept – ie. for a contemporary learner immersed in a media stream of 100s of bits of info per second, perhaps this is a now a ‘normal’ speed? Many species simply perceive faster than others – eg. a hawk ‘slows down’ the speed of its prey through its evolved visual perception system as so it can strike more easily and accurately (John Bleibtreu- The Parable of the Beast). And what about ‘twitch speed‘ and Everything Bad is Good for You ? Slow schools may be a great retreat for the elite but somehow I don’t see them happening. School and learning will get Faster and perhaps we should look for ways to speed up teaching so that it can sync with what the learners are doing ?

Which brings me on to the radical transformation set and the subject of this post. I was a bit gutted that the conference organisers couldn’t get Seymour Papert on iChatAV to work properly. I encountered LOGO as a newbie schoolteacher in 1984 and the constructionist perspective has been a major influence on my own educational development – so was really looking forward to seeing and hearing Papert. There was enough audio though to confirm that the thrust of Papert’s thinking is still sharp as ever, and that the ‘children’s machine’ – now powerfully networked and multimedia enhanced – will enable Dewey’s vision of schools moving “away from authoritarian classrooms with abstract notions to environments in which learning is achieved through experimentation, practice and exposure to the real world” (Computers in the Classroom). But in Papert’s vision the classroom is still there, and the role of the teacher in a constructionist perspective is to provide and design learning environments where students can learn by doing, by becoming ‘bricoleurs’, “in such a way as to produce the most learning for the least teaching” (The Children’s Machine). So the teacher is not dead, but the instructionist model of teaching is gone, obsolete.

And so on to Leigh Blackall’s presentation. I think many in the audience didn’t quite get the idea behind ‘teaching is dead – long live learning’ – which Leigh framed in relation to Duchamp’s statement about ‘painting is dead – long live painting’. This drew attention to the process of ‘disruptive technology’ – where in art the invention of photography disrupted painting, or a particular idea of painting as art. I take this as implying that if painting is to survive and evolve as a form or medium, it must develop new styles, techniques, etc and be taken to new dimensions by artists. And so with teaching – teaching and teachers are not dead, but if they are to survive and evolve with the development of a radically new medium for the storage and rapid communication of massive amounts of information, then an equally new idea of teaching and the role of the teacher must now emerge. New forms of institutions as well. Or as McLuhan stated: “the sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new and invisible environment” (see William Irwin Thompson’s document for a school curriculum based on this and other notions of cultural evolution).

There is debate already about the death of teaching on FLNW and TALO groups, and various blogs, and Leigh came in for some flack about his naive understanding of the ‘realpolitik’ required for a de-schooled society. Perhaps if Leigh had phrased it as ‘teaching is dead, long live teaching’ the message might have been clearer? Or is it the inadequacy of English to encapsulate in one word the reciprocal process of learning/teaching – as for example in the Maori concept of ako ? For me, it’s about a new dialogical and ecological conception of the relationship between learners, teachers and the ‘subject’ of knowledge – which is a ‘networked’ way of thinking, except that following Bateson I would say that the unit of the educational process is not the individual learner (or teacher) but the ‘learner-subject-teacher’ relationship:

The internet and connected devices for the storage and communication of information can ‘flatten’ the learner-teacher relationship – but this idea existed long before the internet. What is now possible on a large scale is the extended realisation of this ecological idea of education – but the attainment still seems a way off. Leigh is clearly working within what I have termed the ecological postmodern frame (antecedents Illich etc) and as I suggested in the previous post, it’s not so much ‘realpolitik’ as attention to the capillaries of power – if serious change is going to occur. The question is where to start – can a change in practice lead to the desired epistemology for a new form of teaching/learning, or does the underlying change in thinking have to precede the new practice ? Perhaps the artists and new pedagogues will just do it anyway, and let the theoreticians argue about the niceties …

The next day I went down from the summit to the ‘lowlands’ of practice at NSW Learnscope 06 …