Connectivism & Connective Knowledge 2009 (CCK09) is still a ways off on the horizon, however I’ve begun to think about the ways I want to connect with the course, as well as aspects I think will be particularly beneficial to me. So I thought I might flesh them out here.
Among other reasons, this course is all about learning through connections and learning networks. It would make sense then to open the discussion to the network as well and begin to work together.
Blog
As I’ve mentioned before, I am a highly reflective learner. I prefer to think at length on paper before I engage in discussion and like to be able to watch patterns and recurring themes unfold over time. Blogs are particularly well suited to my learning style, and as such I expect this blog will continue to see the bulk of my attention for the course.
Discussion is nonetheless a critical component to learning as well, as it enables people to gain exposure to different perspectives, interpretations, information and experiences. It can also serve to help filter, interpret, and find meaning in at times complex situations or contexts.
Blog comments are one way this can be accomplished, and in CCK08 this proved to be a very valuable and stimulating source of learning. However blog comments are perhaps not as useful for large groups because they rely on a post to stimulate the discussion and resulting conversations can become spread across many disparate and distributed spaces. So having additional ways to connect, share, discuss and debate is important.
Twitter
For short discussions and sharing of information Twitter has proven quite a valuable tool. Use of the hashtag #CCK09 also enables aggregation, syndication and location of related updates at a later time.
However the 140 character limit and the fact Twitter ties updates to people and not threads poses a constraint that eventually calls for another solution.
Moodle, Facebook
There are a variety of options for more long-form, threaded discussions and these are just two of them.
Personally I don’t tend to like engaging in mass group discussions much – and am unlikely to use the course Moodle installation – so my preference is for a small group.
Given many people I know from CCK08 are on Facebook and interacting with one another already it would seem to make sense that we create a group there. This would enable us to share links and resources and engage in discussion using the native tool.
Ultimately you need people and consensus to establish a group discussion space so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this matter.
Google Reader
Given the distributed nature of the course there will be many, many different spaces where interaction is occurring, or information is being shared. So an RSS reader is critical.
My reader of choice is Google Reader, biut there are a myriad of comparable services that do the same thing.
I’ll be using my feed reader to subscribe to blogs, Twitter search results, video uploads and perhaps wiki updates.
Google Alerts
Feed Readers are fantastic for keeping up with the sites you know about, but in order to uncover unknown sources of information and discussion you need another approach.
Google Alerts is my preference there, and it’s a simple, yet fantastic tool. Basically you create a search criteria and a notification schedule and Google will send you an email outlining the sites that match the criteria at the frequency you specified in the alert.
Personally I create an alert that notifies me of all content created in the last 24 hours that has been tagged “CCK09.” I then go through the list and subscribe to any interesting sources in my feed reader.
YouTube
Video was not used extensively during CCK08, but it is nontheless an effective medium to convey information. Perhaps the most effective use of video that I saw during the last course was Wendy Drexler’s adaptation of the format made famous by the Common Craft show.
Podcasts & Vodcasts
I travel a whole lot during the week – 2.5 hours each direction to and from work – and have an enormous amount of time on my hands that can be spent reading, writing or studying. Gaining access to downloadable materials for me would be tremendously valuable, so I’m hoping these sorts of formats will be made available.
Skype, Elluminate, SecondLife
One of the challenging aspects of engaging in an online course of this scale and scope is the fact you never really get to meet with other students in person en masse. So it’s useful to find alternative means of bridging the geography.
Text-based mediums like IM and to a lesser degree Twitter do help establish a sense of social connectivity to a degree, but a tremendous sense of humanity is lost in the absence of voice and sight.
In this sense tools that support voice and especially camera-based conversations can add a great deal of depth to interactivity and enhance the connections that develop.
The issue in my case though, at least in CCK08, was with time zone differences. With many participants living in North America and Europe, many of the meetings were held late at night or early in the morning.
The facilitators of the course, George Siemens and Stephen Downes, really bent over backwards to hold multiple sessions – frequently late at night for them – which was fantastic. However many of the student-organised sessions fell in off-times.
Ultimately it’s just the nature of online communication, which I fully accept. Fortunately there are alternative opportunities available via asynchronous communication. However this does point to the importance of releasing videos that capture the human presence – if only to provide introductions to ourselves.
I don't do Facebook, so I will probably use the Moodle forum for that type of asynchronous group discussion. I'll be using blogs and Twitter a lot, along with Google Reader and Alerts. I set up a diigo group for those who use diigo or are interested in doing so, all welcome: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/cck0809 (there's a demo video here for those unfamiliar: http://www.diigo.com/index).
Oh bugger that's right I forgot. Glad I brought it up then. Diigo definitely works for me. I'm not so partial to Facebook that I'd risk losing your involvement – so I'm happy to go where ever. Diigo has a discussion forum too so that could work nicely. I haven't used it for discussion before, which is probably why I didn't think of it.
Is Moodle your preference for group discussion? I suppose I could give it a try and see how it goes.
Hopefully we'll get comments from the others here so we can determine what the consensus is.
I'll happily use the diigo discussion forum if the group grows to a decent size there – let's do some recruiting. I do enjoy the rough and tumble of the main moodle forum, though
Wonder if certain interesting contributors from cck08 will be back.
“Wonder if certain interesting contributors from cck08 will be back.”
Oh lord I hope not – I'm not the rough and tumble debating type. I can't hold my own in arguments like that – I just crumble and clam up. Academic debates are one thing, some aspects of the CCK08 Moodle felt more like Jerry Springer to me LOL
Recruiting is a good idea. Though if it comes to it I'll go where the discussion is.
Great to hear you're taking the course.
I'd like to consider myself recruited, though Diigo will be a new technology for me to learn since I use Delicious extensively. I replied inside FB to that idea, asking how you might flesh out a group, since I haven't been able to figure out how FB groups work at all (and I'm not the only one with that problem). Then I erased it when I saw this discussion happening here.
I'm also fine with arguing or ignoring the main Moodle forum, but I can't imagine participating even marginally without you two!
I saw your FB comment come through just a moment ago and was going to point you here – glad you've already found it!
As far as Diigo goes, one thing worth pointing out is they offer the option to replicate your bookmarks in Delicious, which is what I do. So anything you bookmark in Diigo is passed along to Delicious using the same tags. So you could conceivably use Diigo in the short-term during CCK09 and then switch back to Delicious afterwards without having lost any bookmarks.
If you have a Diigo account just go to https://secure.diigo.com/tools/save_to_others and you'll see three services included in the Save Elsewhere options – Delicious, Ma.gnolia, and Simpy.
To be honest I don't know much about Diigo groups, so I might have a play today or tomorrow to see what they can do. The platform doesn't matter so much to me as the people – I'm happy to go where ever you two are.
Given Ed's feeling towards Facebook, I think that pretty much rules out that option. I guess use of Diigo or not will depend on how many other people we can drum up support with.
If it's not enough are we assuming that we'll just head over to Moodle?
Like Ed, I don't do Facebook. I haven't used Moodle of Diigo, but I'm willing to give them a shot. Blogging and twitter I'm comfortable with, and I'm adding regular vodcasts to my online courses for the fall so that's an easy option for me (except that I'm still pretty uncomfortable seeing myself on video–guess I better get over that). I haven't tried Second Life recently, but when I did my office computer wouldn't run the software. I don't know how well it works with my new machine, but I'm willing to try.
I had much the same experiences as you when first experimenting with video. It's such an unnerving sensation to stare at yourself talking, and almost confronting in its ability to challenge the perspectives we have of ourselves. It does get easier as time goes by.
Michael Wesch has talked about this in a couple of his videos and has some very insightful thoughts on the matter. If I can manage to find the one I'm thinking of I'll be happy to post it in the comments here.
As far as SecondLife goes I've had similar experiences as well. It takes a fairly hefty system spec to use the software, and in fact at one stage none of the computers in our entire training room could use them. I think it comes down to the video card and amount of RAM you have mainly – but CPU speed and bandwidth almost certainly play a role as well.
To be honest I didn't use SL much during CCK08, largely because of the time zone factors I mentioned in the post. I was very interested in trying, but unfortunately most of the meetings fell during off-hours here.
I did manage to meet up with Lisa Lane at one stage and we had a chance to experiment, but that was really it. This is one thing I'm hoping to experiment a bit more with this time around, but that remains to be seen I guess.
For the moment at least why not join the Diigo group that Ed Webb created – http://groups.diigo.com/groups/cck0809. There's only 5 members at the moment but we're trying to drum up support. If we get enough people we may end up using it during the course – that ultimately depends on how much interest there is.
hallo
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I have been experimenting with the browser-based virtual environment Metaplace now. It is even embeddable in blogposts. It's only 2.5 D, not 3D, but access is very easy as are links with the rest of the web. In fact, one only needs an url to go to a virtual meeting place. I would like to organize some CCK09 gatherings there (first one tomorrow August 4 at 1 pm PDT): http://www.metaplace.com/mixedrealities
I'm certainly not the one to determine locales, since I have no idea how much time I'll have for CCK this time around. I think I'll keep using Delicious and copy into Diigo with the replicator (how Star Trek).
Hi Mike, I am sorry that I have just found that my tweet in Spanish was published as comment in your post.
I sent this tweet:
“@saandreoli I am bored to read theoretical posts about PLEs, like this one: http://bit.ly/r9jW4. They do not serve for any purpose. Our PLEs are real practical examples”
My tweet was about our PLEs for the CCK09 online course
You can find our PLEs for this course, and other real examples, in the Forum’s thread CCK09: CCK09 stuff – links, feeds, etc.
RE: @LisaMLane I saw your FB comment come through just a moment ago and was going to point you here – glad you’ve alrea… http://disq.us/1ew0
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Reading @mbogle on preparing for CCK09: http://bit.ly/34Usvp Well thought out…
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RE: @mbogle hallo http://disq.us/1h6t
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My CCK09 PLE | TechTicker http://ff.im/-5ZbVx
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My CCK09 PLE | TechTicker http://ff.im/-5ZlA8
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Here’s why PLE’s are a *terrible* idea — it means no standards for excellence, no universality, not notions of metrics that people can agree upon for what constitutes a curriculum and the basic knowledge a student should know to function in a civil society — all that sort of stuff, which is thrown out the window in the name of this fiercely extremist collectivist worldview that simply needs to be rejected by anyone who would like a real open society with real open inquiry with some kind of notion of objectivity and the scientific approach and the Socratic method of teaching.
It takes subjectivity and objectifies it by saying that everything is free and open — and it’s what Stephen Downes says it should be lol.
It just means whatever feel-good you assemble with goofy opensource madness — there’s heavy reliance on dispersing people across various wonky opensource platforms, generally with the goal of funnelling them into moderated blogs where people can be utterly free of criticism or even commentary of any sort. The moderator of the course then declares that he is curator the best practices blah blah and just picks whoever sucks up to him the most.
And here’s the kicker: while it seems as if it is "anything goes" and "open-ended" and "free" (it makes use of all the technocommunist cultural memes), in fact, it’s anything but. A few cadres set the agenda and the memes and spread them with aggressive ferocity among all the tribal members, and anyone who questions those self-appointed tribal members will find the aggressive majority aggressively stomping on them — and worse — accusing this dissenting minority of "trying to impose their views".
It’s the usual horrid collectivism in a more multi-drug resistant form, because it’s been wrapped in something called "education". It’s about indoctrination with agitprop, and not "education".
It was really abhorrent to see all these smug types with their PLE’s in the Connectivism class then singing all in one chorus with the same bad ideas.
Policy Level Implications? Hell, no. Keep this destructive stuff as far away as possible from real life where democratic and free deliberation, not "wiki government" run by a few cadres should be in effect to keep from being hopelessly bureaucratized and collectivized under a few "experts".
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And still I think personal learning environments are an important concept&practice. Education is not only the formalized instruction culminating in getting a degree. Learning is something one ideally does during a whole lifetime, the real test of learning are the insights one gets – can one make more sense of the world after some learning project? Did one learn new skills which are effective in one’s specific situation? Do we create learning environments for professions such as journalists enabling new-comers and old hands to gain new insights, to learn new skills, to spread core values? I don’t say we should abolish schools and unversities – but we should explore how we can network and organize learning in such a way that lifelong learning is facilitated.
This comment was originally posted on MixedRealities
@saandreoli Aburrido de posts teóricos sobre los PLEs, como éste: http://bit.ly/r9jW4 No sirven para nada. Nuestros PLEs sí son prácticos
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